suspicious coffee

May 4, 2010May 5, 20102 Comments

I’m no coffee drinker as you know. Nonetheless I was shocked to learn that one of the popular coffee kiosks on the UC Davis campus burned to the ground in suspicious circumstances last week. There is nothing left but a taped-off charred mess, and a lot of law students going without their coffee.

I got outside today in an attempt to draw it, you know, sketch-reportage. As you can tell, I had to keep it quick. My nose and eyes are struggling to fight the pollen these days, as allergy season hits its zenith in the Central Valley.

As if this fire wasn’t suspicious enough, I saw on the news that a suspect package, apparently containing a ‘device’, was left on campus near another coffee kiosk by Olsen Hall. After recent events of hate-motivated vandalism and picnic-day ruckuses, suddenly leafy UC Davis is becoming a suspicious place.

think about a new destination

April 29, 2010April 29, 2010Leave a comment

Drew the UC Davis Bike Barn building…again. Well it has one of those looks, cant help but be turned into a drawing. The way one side of the roof is longer than the other, the shadow beneath the eaves, the unsketchable army of bikes in the foreground. I still have that brown paper cut up from envelopes.

I forgot to mention: Davis is now home to the newly opened (last weekend in fact) U.S. Bicycling Hall of Fame. That’s right, the actual hall of fame for bike-riders. I wonder if they have a special section for those ones who cycle up on the inside of buses as people are trying to get off, those cyclists deserve a medal, yeah. And the ones who go around texting or yapping into their cellphone with their ipod in their other ear.

Hang on, I’m starting to sound like a certain Tory politician on the eve of the election. “Last week I met a 70-year old nurse who told me he couldn’t get on the bus because all the unemployed eastern european immigrant asylum seekers were cycling around with their ipods and their mobile phones taking our jobs and claiming our benefits…” Oh, the UK General Election is only a week away now, and with ‘bigot-gate’ or whatever it’s being called, we’re already having our Joe the Plumber moment, or will if the Murdoch press has its way. I really hope the media leaves that poor pensioner alone, but have a feeling she’ll be used to the fullest extent by The Scum newspaper over the next week.

lock stock

April 24, 20104 Comments

The pollen count is high, very high, but I braved a trip to the outside world today and cycled downtown to draw Davis Lock and Safe on 3rd st. It’s a different sort of look for Davis than the usual buildings I draw, but every bit as interesting, and right by the railroad tracks; I have wanted to sketch this place for a while (I always say that).

the great outdoors

April 23, 2010April 23, 2010Leave a comment

Going outdoors is an adventure for me these days; it is high pollen season, and means itchy eyes and runny noses. I did some of this outside and the rest inside. Outdoor Adventures, the other half of the oft-drawn Bike Barn, at the oft-drawn Silo complex of UC Davis. The clouds really were plentiful and fast-moving. They are making the most of the Californian spring, before migrating north or south or wherever they go for the summer. They don’t let clouds into the central valley during the summer, just in case they lower the temperatures below a hundred for a few minutes. I’m not looking forward to the Davis summer heat. It will be my fifth unbearably hot valley summer. You’d think I would learn.

if you go down to the campus today

April 17, 20102 Comments

Today was the 96th annual UC Davis Picnic Day, the largest university open house event in the United States. That means thousands of people, lots of events like dachshund derbies and cockroach races, food, music, and animals. Admittedly I’m not a massive fan (see the bit in the last sentence about thousands of people) but braved it, because I thought my two-year-old would like the fire trucks and the horses. I wasn’t wrong; he loved it, had a great time, and so did we. I drew one of the shiny old fire trucks (I intended to draw more things, but don’t really like drawing crowds). As I write, the Battle of the Marching Bands is still raging down by the lake.

the bridges of yolo county

April 16, 2010April 16, 20103 Comments

Putah Creek, running through the long UC Davis Arboretum, has a lot of bridges. Well, it has to, otherwise getting to the other side would be a very long walk. Some bridges ar wooden, like the one in the background, and even covered in foliage like some Monet painting, while others a big and concrete, which might not sound too picturesque but in this case I quite like it. I’ve drawn this bridge before.

It’s April in Davis, California. Tomorrow, the annual Picnic Day takes place, the largest university open house event in the country. It’s Davis’s day to show off. There will be thousands of people there. This year I might even do some drawing.

the sun bends light

April 11, 20104 Comments

And so we continue, post 1001, another curvilinear sketch of a UC Davis building: the Walter Buehler Alumni and Visitors Center. It’s right opposite this building, which I drew a couple of weeks ago.

“I am an alumni,” is a phrase I hear all too often here. “No you aren’t,” I reply, “you’re an alumnus.” It is incredible how many highly educated people don’t actually know this, or think it matters. Maybe it doesn’t, maybe the language is changing and we should let it change, even stop using all latin-based singular words. But if you’re tring to get across that you actually are one, “I am an alumni” makes you sound like you aren’t. You wouldn’t say, that is a mice, I am a men, I just ate a bananas.

Anyway that’s quite enough prescriptive grammar for a Sunday morning. Besides, I’ve always been far more David Crystal than Lynne Truss. I’ve just had to suffer Spurs losing an FA Cup semi-final in extra-time, which isn’t fun. I want to point out that I drew this with a uniball vision micro pen, I’ve used them for years but almost always draw with my pigma microns or copics, because of better ink and finer lines. However, the nibs on those always run down quickly in my watercolour moleskines, which is frustrating, but the nibs on these pens last for way longer, an the ink is pretty black and does not bleed; just something to consider in future pen choices.

a learning curve

April 7, 2010May 27, 20101 Comment

I had a pen in my bag I’d bought in London, a uni-pin fineliner I got in the big Paperchase on Tottenham Court Road, and wanted to run it down. I have wanted to draw the Shields Library on campus for a while but never found myself a good angle. I have also wanted to mess about with curvilinear perspectives for quite some time but have not done so. Until now; I sat at lunchtime in the shade among the bicycles opposite the library and started drawing. I’ve made it look like a baseball stadium or something. It is a very big library, and very well stocked. It was my destination of choice when I first moved here, way before I started working on campus, when I was just coming off from my Master’s back in the UK, where I had gotten quite used to spending hours locked away in the polished silence of the Maughan Library on Chancery Lane, or the high-up dustiness of Senate House. As a medievalist and germanic philologist I enjoyed the privelige of being in those quiet parts of the library that nobody went to, because usually nobody else was studying what I was studying (similarly I had little problem with borrowing books). I’ve not dusted off those books in some time.

I showed this to my two-year-old, and he was immediately impressed that I’d drawn a picture of a bicycle. He’s one for the small details (bit like me).

droit au but

March 30, 2010March 30, 20102 Comments

Target, in Davis. A controversial place in this town. It has only been open for about six months, but a few years ago it required a very narrow win in a city-wide vote for building to be approved. Target played hard-sell, appealing to the underwear buying public, college students and suburban moms alike, as well as sugaring the pill for Davis’s famed environmentalists by building the greenest Target building ever built (or something), but they faced some fierce opposition – Davis, with it’s anti-big-box tendencies, is not a town to mess about with. Downtown independent businesses banded together and fought the proposal, fearing (justifiably, given the story in so many other American towns) that the arrival of large big-box stores on the edge of town would destroy this small city’s downtown, and with it, its character. There were arguments, oh boy there were arguments, bitter bloody spit-in-the-street-and-call-you-elitists arguments. The underwear argument for one. The fact that there was already a new Target opening up the road in Woodland so another one was unnecessary. The whole creating new jobs thing (with the counter-argument that if it forced other stores out of business it would take away jobs too, and then the town is dependent on its big box store for employment, and if said store goes the way of Woolworths…) And then it was back to the underwear argument again (just where can you buy socks in Davis?).

But in the end, Target prevailed; with their national wealth behind them they had been able to spend sixteen times what the downtown stores had been able to muster up. And so here in 2010, here it is, green Target. And despite my love of and support for independent stores, I do go there when I have to, because it’s there. But personally, I don’t buy socks. I wait for Christmas.

the sky’s the limit

March 23, 2010March 22, 20103 Comments

This is Maurice J. Gallagher Hall, one of the newest shiniest new shiny buildings at UC Davis. It’s home to the Graduate School of Management.

I don’t often draw such modernity. I was interested in giving it a go, a study in perspective, and decided that I’d leave the big blue sky blank. The sky is literally the limit. I’m not into management speak. I never give people a heads up, aka an FYI, vis a vis the big picture all on the same page. Sometimes I sketch small pictures on the same page though.