Tag: davis

chipotle shoulder

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chipotle

Lunchtime downtown, sketched out in the heat (almost hit a century today). Had a burrito at Chipotle. That’s not my bike, by the way.

Have you noticed how everything these days is ‘chipotle’? Food marketers can’t get enough of it. I even saw some chocolate dessert thing somewhere that had chipotle in the title recently, presumably to entice ye who cannot get enough chipotle. I’m surprised automakers haven’t started using it to shift cars in these troubled times. “The new Chevrolet Chipotle, more fuel efficient than a Fajita and spicier than a Ford.”

rush hour

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frat boards and bikes

Another lunchtime sketch (with purple micron), very quiet on campus right now, and I sat outside the Silo drawing bicycles and fart-boards. Oops, mis-spelling there, I mean frat-boards of course (are they even called that?). They look like a gang. I imagine the frat boards marching animated across campus, independently, gathering to harass bikes. A lot of them seem to be advertising Rush, presumably not a celebration of Ian Rush, though it would be more interesting. Ian Rush, he was great, he drank milk so that he’d be good enough not to play for Accrington Stanley. Funny fact, my A-level history teacher, a Welsh guy, left his teaching job to go and tour with his band who were called, of all things, Ian Rush. They sang in Welsh, and presumably scored a lot too.

get me to the church on time

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davis community church

I remember drawing this building, Davis Community Church, three years ago, and thinking, I don’t like this drawing much. Its the colours. I finally got round to drawing it again, and while i prefer this I still don’t like the colours much. So I’ve decided it’s not me, it’s the building, it’s the wrong colour. I might write to them and ask them to paint it something else, pink or white or something. I edited out the homeless person who was ambling about the entrance with a trolley, mainly because she wouldn’t stand still but kept wandering off yelling something like ‘get out of my head’. I also edited out the big SUVs parked outside. While I was drawing another one pulled right up and parked in front of me, and out stepped JR Ewing, or his double.  I’m surprised I saw any of the church. I actually made most of it up.

if you can’t take the heat

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The weather over the weekend was a whopping 104 degrees. Stay inside sort of weather. People from Burnt Oak aren’t cut out for hundred degree heat. G and 2nd

Davisites are used to it though. Californians in general love the sunshine and the heat (I have to laugh when my wife complains that it is cold when it is 65 degrees at 8am), though Central Valley heat is not so loveable, and the heat has come early this year. So I was pleased today that the weather plummeted to a brisk 90 degrees. I braved the chilly weather and poked about downtown during my lunch hour, huddling up for long enough to draw the corner of G and 2nd Streets, in purple micron and wine copic muliliner, before cycling back.

cross over the river, where they feel safe and sound

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in the arboretumA sketch by Putah Creek, in the UC Davis Arboretum. I braved the heat and the allergy-inducing winds to sit and sketch this. Putah Creek is a great place to come in Summer if you want to catch West Nile Virus, from all the mosquitoes that hang out here. Speaking of hanging out, the bridges such as this one are home (or sign the sign says) to many bats, (who eat the mosquitoes). If you fancy catching rabies, I read somewhere it’s endemic in local bats. And then there’s the black widows. Don’t get me started.

Dangerous place, is Davis.  And it’s going to hit a hundred degrees this weekend.

some things you only see upon reflection

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Big mirrors behind the bar always make you think about the Bar at the Folies Bergeres (get to the Courtauld, man, or just listen to Mr Solo), but also maybe of the bar at the good mixer in camden, which doesn’t have a mirror but has two sides; it took me years to realise there was a second side and that was why my reflection was invisible. I’d always imagined it was a vampire thing; it is Camden after all. More like a beer thing.

g street pub

This however is the G Street pub in Davis. I don’t go there very often; I prefer little prague. But I stopped in on the way home for a beer primarily because i fancied sketching the long bar and mirror area. There was an ice hockey match on a big screen, reflected in said mirror, and it wasn’t busy (there was a guy who reminded me of kevin smith a little bit, or it might have been silent bob). To be honest I got a bit frustrated with it, I was trying something different, attacking the long page with microns 1 and 01, and decided to give it a wash, drink up, and go home. I was also frustrated with my eyesight trying to make out distant details, even though it wasn’t particularly dark it was still a strain. But when I scanned it in, I decided that  upon reflection I quite liked it after all, especially as a thumbnail.

tadpolitical

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a blue house by arboretumThe cycle path alongside the arboretum has a row of cool houses that look great for drawing, but I never found the time, until yesterday afternoon on the way home from work. You may well be wondering what that mound is. Yes, obviously it is the muddy middle of a cycle-roundabout. But it looks like it could be the top of a giant’s head, buried in the earth beneath Davis, waiting for his time to come again. I wouldn’t like a city to be built on my head. I was thinking about this while cycling home, noticing the new building being done further east (possibly where the contentious Target is being built?), taking over ‘waste’ land that is home to many hares and snakes and other wildlife. Snakes need somewhere to live too you know, you can’t just build and then evict them. The city thought about this of course when building a big road bridge right through an area where lots of toads (may have been frogs, some sort of amphibian) live. They decided that to help the toads get across the road (remember the game Frogger? Very influential in urban planning) they would build a tunnel under the road, the ‘toad tunnel’. Nice idea. But then all them snakes who now don’t have anywhere to live thought, hello, they built us a nice tunnel, that was nice of them, and it has a free constant supply of toads for us to eat too. So the city thought, ok we’ll put lights in the tunnel so the toads can see if there are any snakes lurking.  But the snakes just waited outside, grabbing them as they popped out. So the city decided to fool the snakes and build a little house – a post office, in fact – for the toads to go into the access the tunnel. Nice idea. Toads delighted. And then all the toads starting burning their backs on the lightbulbs in the tunnel, and the city just said, oh sod you then, we gave you a flipping post office, write and complain to your senator or something, we have better things to do than worry about a load of bloody frogs or whatever you are. Of course that lost them the amphibian vote (the tadpole-mom demographic), but, y’know, in local politics those are the risks you have to take.  

Maybe I’ll draw that toady post office some day, to prove I’m not making all this up. Except for the bit about the giant.

union rules

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MU

Moo. Sorry, I mean MU; cowtown is getting in my head. This the MU (Memorial Union), a kind of equivalent to our student unions in England, but notably without any naked drunk rugby players. I don’t know what it is memorising. And this is where I get my art materials, there in the UCD bookstore. All my microns, copics, what-not. I hang about in there looking at them, they must think I obsess (well I do). When I was a kid I would go into Tonibell’s (local burnt oak sweetshop, long gone) and stand there for about half an hour, trying to decide between a Mars or a Marathon. I haven’t changed, only now it’s between a purple Micron 005 or a cobalt Copic 03 (and sometimes between a Milky Way or a Snickers).

After drawing this (in high heat) I bumped into fellow cycling sketcher Pica, who had just bought art materials at this very store. I also bumped into a fellow Spurs fan from London, which was cool. Small world.

going nuclear

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crocker nuclear lab

It’s comforting to know there is a high energy nuclear lab right next door to where I work. The Crocker Lab has been around for years, flinging protons and electromagnetic particles and stuff around. Apparently there was an old hog barn here before it moved in. I wonder if they’ve ever had any superhero-type accidents, like maybe a pig got left behind and became the Incredible Hog or Dr. Hamhattan, nobody would believe it anyway, they’d think you were telling porkies. Still, looks like the sort of place it could happen. Actually no, it looks like a school sports hall or something.

It was a hot day today, mid-90s, so I went out and sketched under the shade of a tree, and imagined porcine super-villains concocting some scheme to produce atomic bangers, or something.

that’s no moon

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that's no moon

They call it the Death Star, but it’s too angular, and has no superlaser. It is home to some highly powerful people on campus however. I personally am not a fan of this building, Social Sciences & Humanities. Oh, it looks nice from afar, that huge angular, er, angle, which is supposed to represent the slope up to the Sierra Nevada mountains (yeah, hits it spot on, obvious really). But I have been lost many times in this gawd-forsaken labyrinth, up and down concrete passageways and open stairwells, and doors that no-through-doors. It is honestly like walking through an MC Escher painting. I find it an absolute Impossibility. Which, funny enough, is this week’s Illustration Friday topic, so this is my entry.

I sat outside at lunchtime (despite many sneezes, and the attack of lots of bugs – probably x-wing bugs) and drew this on the field in cobalt blue copic. The trees are still bright and spring-like.