the rest is April

June 24, 2025June 24, 20253 Comments

As I’ve said, I am a bit behind in my posting, though not in my sketching, and it’s another one of those times when I have a backlog of regular day-to-day sketches of Davis to post but not really a lot of stories to tell about them. I am sketching more than ever it seems, as I do when I need to think about something else; yay for anxious and uncertain and turbulent political times, I guess. I’m hiding in my sketchbook. Anyway, as a way to catch up, here are a bunch of sketches from around Davis in April. It’s already past mid-June in the real world, and if April thought things were bad, wait until they get to June. At least Spurs have won a trophy and sacked a manager in that time. Ok, let’s dive in. The building above is on 5th Street, and the bench outside commemorates where young Officer Natalie Corona was tragically shot several years ago, right here. I’ll always think of that awful thing happening when I pass by here. I stood over the street in the shade of a tree to sketch, headphones on. A woman passing by on the other side called over to ask something, I couldn’t hear over the traffic and whatever podcast I was listening to, football or history or something. Turned out she was asking where the train station was. I couldn’t tell why she had to yell it across a busy street and not ask one of the people passing by on that side, but I pointed in the vague direction of where the station is and put my headphones back on.

Here’s another from downtown, this time on the corner of 2nd and D, across from the First National Bank. I don’t know if this was the actual first national bank, seems like a wild claim to me, but I was drawn to the spots of yellow. These are days when I just need to draw something. I get out, eat lunch, have to draw. Helps me focus. I always go on about why I draw. I brew it down to the simple because I like drawing, which is good enough for me and good enough for you. Do I always like what I’m drawing? Probably not, but I like the act of drawing. I am up early right now and going for a run soon. It will probably be slow and not very interesting, running around the same circuit of streets and paths as always, nothing new to see, and not breaking any records or even really pushing myself, but its exercise, and when I do the interesting runs I need to have done the boring ones. It’s all exercising the muscles, practicing pacing myself, seeing what I can do in a certain amount of time and being alright with it. I track my running, but I track my drawing too. I don’t really push myself too hard to do anything out of the ordinary and I probably should, but while I’m thinking about doing that I’ll just go out drawing the world and see what happens. I tend to end up drawing places I’ve drawn many times before, but I’ve been living in this small town for 20 years now so I’m really just tracking the changes. I’m sure Cezanne felt like that as he was sitting under a tree in Aix-en-Provence painting Mont St. Victoire yet again. But I never drew that corner before, so it’s a new place ticked off the list.

Here is another sketch of the newly reimagined G Street, a couple of the big useful yellow chairs that have been placed in random spots on the side of the now pedestrianized road. I have never sat in one of these types of big chair other than for one of those photos where you go “look at me, I’m really small” and pull a face. It was warm out while I sketched this and being mid-April my nose was probably running, but I can’t remember all the details now. I am not really in love with G Street. It may be a while before it figures out what it really is. My favourite place on G Street was a couple of blocks up, the Regal Cinema with the stadium seating, but it has closed now because cinemas are closing. We still have the Regal on F Street which is slightly bigger but I don’t like as much, and we have the Varsity on 2nd which is great for the arthouse and quirky movies, you probably won’t see ‘Quick Angry Car Chase IX’ there (or whatever action films are called), though we have seen some really good films there. But I miss the other cinema on G Street because it was a couple of blocks less to cycle from my house, and one of my favourite restaurants Thai Nakorn was next door, also now closed.

On to more a familiar street for me, E Street, and Bizarro World Comics next to Chipotle. I stood in the little alley next to the Bull’n’Mouth (formerly De Vere’s; I feel I have to keep saying that in the same way we would say “X, formerly Twitter” but it’s not really a comparable comparison at all, and I don’t say “Bizarro World, formerly Bogey’s Books”, but that’s because Bizarro World used to be on 5th Street and moved here after Bogey’s went bye-bye). Anyway, that’s where I stood. I have bought comics from them over the years, though not recently since I’m not reading as many now. I have never rented movies from them, but if that’s still a thing, good on them. We were talking about that last night, how when I first moved to Davis we would rent movies and shows on DVD or even Video from Blockbuster (which was where Panera is now; I stopped calling it “Panera, formerly Blockbuster” right away because Panera sells big sandwiches that you don’t have to return nor rewind). Then Netflix came along and it was brilliant, getting our DVDs in the mail from our wishlist, mailing them back when we want, getting another, and you don’t even have to rewind DVDs, this is the future. Blockbuster went the way of MySpace (but we didn’t throw away our Blockbuster cards, did we? No we still hold on to them just in case, don’t we). Then Netflix was like, you don’t need DVDs, you can just stream stuff! Wow, mind blown. And they had all the movies, and all new shows they would make themselves and binge all at once, and we finally had broadband internet capable of handling that, what a time to be alive. Then bit by bit other streaming services came along, and Netflix seemed not to have quite as many movies you wanted to watch, but that’s ok because this other one had so many, and then this other had, and then this other one, and now there are so many different streaming services which you have to pay for, and none of them seem to have the movies you want to watch now so you still end up having to look for it on Amazon Prime (which you pay for) and then pay a rental fee to rent that movie so you can watch it that night. Just like when we’d go down the video store, except instead of watching trailers for other movies at the start of the video, you get to watch a couple of minutes of the same tedious adverts. What a time to be alive, eh.

And further down E Street, another building I have sketched before a few times. I like the triangle bits, they remind me of Darth Vader’s mouth. They also remind me of those houses you see a lot in north west London, in the rows of suburbia that spread for miles, leafy Middlesex (I mean, “north-west Greater London, formerly called Middlesex”). If I ever leave Davis I’ll probably miss drawing this building. If I ever leave Davis I will probably get the urge to come back to draw whatever new buildings get built. I get that with London, the need to come back and record what’s still there and what is new. This gets me back to the whole ‘why I draw’ thing again. I draw to record the changes, so I can look back over two or three drawings I have done of the same place years apart and saw, oh yeah, looks a bit different. I have drawn many hundreds of drawings of Davis, thousands really (let’s say millions) and so I have this record of two decades in this place, scenes of my everyday life. Nothing special, not an unusual life, not an unusual town, just a place like any other. Things happen, most of the time they don’t. Things change slowly, sometimes a bit more quickly. That’s one of the reasons I draw. Mostly though it’s just a side-effect, I draw because I have to. Even when I try to take a break from it, I can’t really. I will still scribble on my notepad, or draw cartoons on my iPad, or design football shirts on the back of scrap bits of paper or envelopes lying on my desk.

That same evening, I popped into the aforementioned Bull’n’Mouth pub (formerly De Vere’s) and sketched the colourful bar area. “Is It Beer You’re Looking For?” it reads, above a large selection of not-beers. I did have a couple of beers; I find it harder these days to actually finish a beer, most of the ones now are way too hoppy, or make my stomach feel funny, or I just don’t like the taste. I drink a beer slowly when I sketch anyway. It’s a nice pub still, I probably liked it more as De Vere’s but that’s because of the Irish theme, which they don’t do any more. I used to like having a pint of Smithwicks here, but they don’t serve it now. Other than that, it still looks mostly the same. I like their cosy little library area.

And finally, on the last day of April we find ourselves once again at the comic shop next door, Bizarro World as seen from across the street. A building with a tree in front of it, the typical Davis sketch. I wander about in my spare moments, looking for something new to draw, but I’m so predictable. A building with a tree in front is like comfort food for a suburban urban sketcher. Now I am thinking forward, it’s already June but it will soon be July, and then August, and then I will be in Poland for the 2025 Urban Sketching Symposium, held in the city of Poznań, my first Symposium since 2019. I’m actually feeling nervous, not scared exactly, but apprehensive. The Symposia are so big now, I worry about feeling lost. I do know some people who are going, but it’s been a long time and I feel a bit outside of everything these days, the whole urban sketching community, like I’m a little bit from a previous world. I’ve become very shy since the pandemic, the thought of being lost among all those sketchers… I get overwhelmed and just wander off on my own. I’m sure it will be ok. When I’m around a whole world of people also sketching, I remember that it’s not just me, I’m not alone in my sketching obsession. And so instead of worrying, I’ll just keep sketching. That was April, another April in the bag.

friday evening down at the bull and mouth

July 2, 2024July 2, 2024Leave a comment

The day before I was flying to London, I had a very long day at work, trying to get as much done before travelling as I could. I would be doing a lot of work while in London too, but those would be in the hours before everyone got up, the 4am (sometimes 3am) wake-ups when the house was quiet and the wifi might work a little better. But that Friday was long, and I was feeling a bit stressed. This was my first trip back in a year and it really felt like a long year, a long time since seeing everyone. Anyway, I stopped at a moment I felt ok with, and realized it was already 8:30pm, so I went downtown to have dinner at Chipotle (that was , and popped into Bull’n’Mouth (the former De Vere’s) for a pint and a sketch, to wind down. It’s funny, I don’t know if it de-stressed me that much really, but it’s good to sketch, focus the eyes, breathe. I like drawing all the bottle shapes, though I don’t ever drink any of the things in them, never liked spirits. The beer was ok, I find I don’t really enjoys many beers as much these days; they didn’t have the Smithwicks I’d been hoping for, I guess. I drew fast. It wasn’t very busy in there, for a Friday evening at the tail end of the quarter. I finished up and went home to bed, or rather to repack my bags yet again, which I would do again in the morning. What to bring! I feel like I’ve packed lighter over the years and tried to carry less and less, yet my bag always feels like it’s really full.

playing with pure pink

February 6, 2024Leave a comment

After the downtown sketchcrawl, I wandered about the shops, and then popped into the Bull’n’Mouth (formerly De Vere’s) for a beer before heading home. I’d really wanted to get another sketch in, and I haven’t really used that ‘pure pink’ pen that much, so I sat by the beer taps and drew those in dark brown, using the pink for the background. It’s one of my uni-ball signo um-151 pens, I have loads of different colours, most of which I only use for the occasional few lines of another sketch. I really liked how the pink and dark brown worked together for the depth. This is always a good sketching subject, the shapes and different areas of light and shade. It didn’t take too long, and I cycled home before it was dark. I had done that big detailed panorama on 1str Street, and this, and a few people sketches, so that was a good day of drawing.

i turned my face away, and dreamed about you

December 16, 2023Leave a comment

After a busy week, and after we’d just had our annual Holiday Party at work (my belly filled up with hot chocolate), I popped downtown to have a festive pint in honour of the dearly departed Shane MacGowan, as it was his funeral that day in Dublin. I never drink Guinness, but I felt I should have some Guinness to mark his memory (MacGowan being famously fussy about what he drank), and I don’t like whisky. I went to the Bull’n’Mouth, the bar that was formerly De Vere’s Irish Pub. It’s not Irish any more, but the bar itself is, having been brought over from Ireland in 2011. I found that spot I like in the corner and wrote out some Christmas cards to friends in England before sketching the bar. There were quite a few people out that night; one of my work colleagues who’d been at the party was performing a brief gig with his band and his red Rickenbacker in the plaza across the street, I had just missed it. One of the professors from work, who’d also just been at the party, was having dinner in Bull’n’Mouth with his family and a group of students from his summer course in Cork, it was nice to bump into them. My wife and son were out at an orchestra concert at the High School, so I had a couple of slow beers and got on with the sketch. I overheard a man nearby at the bar ask a woman how to spell “fascist” which was an interesting chat-up line, I probably heard out of context. I was thinking of Shane MacGowan’s funeral, and caught some of it on YouTube. Singing and dancing and music and a priest holding up a box of Barry’s Tea, that’s a great funeral. I loved Shane MacGowan. When a famous person dies and they’ve meant a lot to you, even if only at certain times in your life, it can definitely touch you, and with MacGowan it was that whole thing of being London Irish in the late 80s, all the music and people and that was like our voice right there. And not just London Irish of course, the Pogues weren’t just from London, but all over Britain where Irish people had come and settled. It wasn’t always that great in the 80s for Irish communities in England, but voices like Shane MacGowan’s definitely made it ok to be who we were, at least that’s how I felt when I was a 13 year old listening to this hundred-mile-an-hour band with folk instruments and a drunken frontman from London with missing teeth and a Tipperary-twisted singing voice singing songs about my London, Soho and White City and being down by the Thames. So I have definitely been feeling sad about his death, and he was unapologetic about who he was, and his huge flaws, and I always admired that. His funeral showed how much he was really loved, and the impact he had. Would that any of us get a send-off like that. Slainte, Shane!

bull’n’mouth

October 16, 2023October 16, 2023Leave a comment

I went downtown on Saturday afternoon a couple of weeks ago; I had a big drawing to do on short notice, and had to scout out a few locations to preliminary sketch for it. Of course this was the day we finally decided to have some rain, after another seemingly endless hot spell, finally some cooling down. So while it was raining, I decided to pop into the Bull & Mouth, the pub which is formerly the location of De Vere’s Irish pub on E street. I had not been into Bull & Mouth (it might be ‘Bull’n’Mouth’, I’m not sure) since it’s opening; De Vere’s originally closed at the start of the pandemic, as so many places did, before a fresh paint job outside in the summer of 2021 followed by a slow reopening later that year; I went back in once then for dinner with my wife, and that turned out to be the last time because it closed down again shortly thereafter, this time for good. The spot has been closed ever since, until this summer when the new Bull & Mouth took over the space. I had not been in yet, so I took this opportunity to finally check it out. I was pleased to see that it still looked a lot like De Vere’s, but with a few added TV screens (thankfully not overbearing), a lot of different wall decorations, long displays of beer cans above our heads, and the wording on the long black strip above the bar now referencing something about bulls rather than what it said before. The fantastic old wooden bar was brought over from Ireland when De Vere’s first opened in 2011, I remember going in there that first week and drawing a panorama while in the middle of the busy place. On this rainy Saturday afternoon, it was not too busy but there were a few people at the bar and I took a seat and ordered a beer. The guy behind the bar recognized me, “it’s been a while!”, it certainly had, about four years since I’d been in there for a beer and a sketch (dinner with my wife in 2021 not included). It didn’t feel that different from De Vere’s. I don’t know what it’s like in the evenings (I don’t go out much in the evenings any more). I had to do a sketch of course; first I worked on my prep sketches a little for the other big drawing, I was still working out the composition of that one as it was of three Davis locations all in one (I’ll post that soon), and then decided to play with the Lamy Safari fountain pen, I had not used it for a bar interior like this. It worked well, moving quickly across the page, and I added a bit of a wash too, though it took the ink a little longer to dry I think in the slightly damper air of that rainy day. I had a couple of very nice beers, and then once the rain had stopped I went across the street for a milkshake (diet be damned) and walked home (there’s my exercise). The last day of September.

bull’n’mouth

July 28, 2023July 27, 2023Leave a comment

My first time out of the house after we got back from the UK, spending a week indoors sick, I felt pretty good on the Sunday afternoon so I cycled downtown to do a sketch. I drew on E Street, the view of the former De Vere’s Irish pub, the best place to sketch and have a pint, which closed shortly after reopening in 2021 after the pandemic-enforced closure. They had just repainted all the outside into a nice new red – I sketched it in June 2021 – but it didn’t last too long, and they decided not to renew their lease, and focus on other things. Big shame for Davis, but time moves along. We heard there was going to be another bar opening in its place called Bull’n’Mouth, but this was being said for so long with no sign of any new pub that I was starting to think it was a load of, well. Then as I passed by I saw that doors had finally opened on this new place, though on this Sunday afternoon it was closed. It seemed that the opening hours were still pretty limited, starting at 4pm, and not every day. I think they are starting to open for lunch now, I heard this week; I’ve not actually been in there yet. So I decided to draw it, with the new sign up. Didn’t colour it in, but it did me good to get out with my sketchbook, document more change in this town.

and i’ll sing in your ear again

June 5, 2021Leave a comment

Last Year when the pandemic hit, De Vere’s Irish Pub in Davis took the difficult decision to shutter up, focusing on its Sacramento site, temporarily until the pandemic eased. Well, in California at least we are at that point now where more and more people are getting vaccinated, and we are preparing to All Go Back To Normal*. Last weekend we were in Yosemite (sketches to come) where they are allowing people in with reservations only to stem the crowds, and after waiting nearly two hours in line to get in after a two hour plus drive from nearby Sonora, we parked several miles away from where our first hiking trail began due to lack of spaces, and waded through throngs of people on a steep narrow trail to look at a bit of a waterfall among large groups of people all trying to take photos of each other (and it’s fine for strangers to touch each others’ devices now). The Mist Trail is so-called because of the mists of sweat from the hundreds of other hikers, not from the waterfalls. It was a hot, hot day, we were tired, and we gave up and hiked back to the car. But more on that story next time. This was the first day of June, I was working on campus in the morning for a bit, the weather was ridiculously hot. I had to cycle downtown to pick up a drawing from the Pence (the Covent Garden drawing I had done for their ‘garden-themed’ show, it hadn’t sold). Anyway, as I pulled into D Street I noticed my bike tyre was getting low. When I came back out, it was completely flat, so I wheeled it over to Freewheeler on 2nd Street, and grabbed some lunch on E Street. I then noticed that De Vere’s across the street looked a little bit different. They were busy finishing off the shiny new paint job, going from black to red, a new look for the reopening which I was told would be happening this week. If you have followed my sketchblog over the past decade you will know how much I like this pub, I’ve drawn it many times. I really like their pub chips, served in gravy. So I did a drawing of it. I stood in the heat waiting for my bike to be fixed up, and when that was done I cycled home to work the rest of the day, finishing off the pen and colours later on. I’m well pleased for them to be reopening, I hope business is good, and can’t wait until I get back for some pub chips, a paint or two, and an actual interior sketch of a pub for the first time since before This Whole Thing. Last weekend in Sonora we did eat inside for the first time, at a pasta restaurant that was not busy (and going by the food wasn’t much of a pasta restaurant either), and yeah I’m still a bit anxious to go inside a pub, it’s been so long, but something about seeing these guys repainting and reopening made me feel pretty optimistic. It’s been, well not an easy week, news of other people I know losing family members in other countries to Covid, plus just being so far away from my family in England, my dad’s birthday was this week, it would have been nice to be over there but it’s still very hard travelling (on top of the restrictions and the quarantines and the expensive required non-NHS tests, I’m still not comfortable about being stuck in a plane with lots of people for eleven hours and then stuck in line at Heathrow for more hours). I’ve been generally feeling exhausted. But signs of optimism make me feel good, and when I’m up for it, knowing I can get some pub chips and a pint or two is pretty nice, maybe with a comic from Bizarro World next door, like I used to. I hope the reopening goes well.

the answer’s in the looking glass

January 22, 20204 Comments

Continuing in nonlinear fashion (until I pluck up the courage to write properly about my summer trip to the Low Countries), let’s stop in at De Vere’s for a pint or two. De Vere’s is my go-to pub for sketching – lots of places to sit, lots of perspective, nice atmosphere, friendly staff. I also really like Sophia’s but it’s smaller, and a bit less light to draw by (but it’s my favourite place for food in Davis). Little Prague used to be my sketchpub years ago when it was there (it closed six years ago), it had a long bar perfect for panoramas, lots of stuff all over the walls, and awesome tall Czech beers. De Vere’s however has Pub Chips, and that is a big win for me. Their Pub Chips have some thick gravy on them, and some melted cheese. Not quite as nice as proper northern Chips in Gravy, and possibly more similar to Canadian Poutine, either way they taste pretty nice. On this one Saturday night in September I found my favourite spot in the corner at the end of the bar and sketched away. I got into a nice conversation with a bloke from Ireland and his American partner. I lay the paint on very thick, and scribbled away with the pen very hard; I had fun with this sketch. This was one to attack the paper. I’ve drawn this place before, and I’ll draw it again, no need to be precious. I was celebrating; that evening I had sold another drawing at the Pence Gallery in the annual Art Auction, which is always a nice feeling. I really like drawing. Sometimes I get down on myself, start questioning if I’m good at anything, and then I remember I can draw fire hydrants pretty well, and while it’s not a useful skill, it’s a starting place. I can draw a bar too, in my own way, and it’s often fun as well.

Anyway, I drew De Vere’s again a couple of months later, when I wanted to try out sketching with the iPad. It was a quicker sketch (one beer, late afternoon, on the Nov 11 Veterans Day holiday), while I played with the new Apple Pencil. A good learning experience, also enjoyed alongside those lovely Pub Chips. Now one of the nice things about Procreate is that you can create nice videos showing every stroke you made, very helpful in showing how you put the sketch together. Here it is…

Previously, I had to show this by just taking photos of my sketchbook when I remember to. For that first sketch, I actually did, and even tweeted out the progress. Here are the photos, which helpfully show the beers too, which I’m sure you will agree is helpful to know. No sign of the Pub Chips though. Everything stops for those. Prost!

de veres sept 2019 in progress

Déanaimis Tarraingt Dáibhís

March 20, 20191 Comment

Last Sunday – St.Patrick’s Day – was the day of our most recent “Let’s Draw Davis” sketchcrawl. It was a shortish sketchcrawl, three hours downtown, ending up with a get-together to look at each other’s sketches. This time I included a ‘scavenger hunt’, which was optional, but I gave it a go. It was Ireland-themed, nine things, specific (“an animal sculpture”) or vague (“snakes!”). The weather was lovely, warm and sunny, and lots of people were out. I drew a group of cyclists (a couple of whom I chatted with), focusing on the one of course wearing green.

The animal sculpture was easy, as right there on First Street are two enormous animals, a giant dog made of records and a cat gateway thing, outside the Natsoulas Gallery. It’s not a specifically Irish thing, sculpting animals, but not all the list had to be. The dog is called “Roy” and is a tribute to the artist Roy De Forest, by John Natsoulas and others. Becuase I wanted to show some of the detail, the various coloured vinyl records that make it up, I sketched up close, covering the ‘something musical’ point. I used to have some coloured vinyl records, when I was a kid I would sometimes buy them because I liked the colour, not because the music was any good, and I’m guessing those who donated these probably felt the same. Speaking of not-good music, that awful violin player was downtown again, his screeching echoing down E street. I wasn’t drawing him, no way. Sketching the records was a little bit of a challenge as I don’t like drawing circles (it’s why I hate drawing bikes), but also the sun was beating down, so I added the colour once I got into some shade.

Below is fellow Davis sketcher Alison, who has been sketching Davis much longer than me and who I knew from the very earliest sketchcrawls. She found a great display of Irish books in the window of Logos Books on 2nd Street, so I sketched her sketching those (the bookshop was my ‘something to do with literature or poetry’), and then I drew one of the books myself, a children’s Irish legend book about St. Brigid’s Cloak. I don’t know enough of the Irish legends myself, despite my Irish family I never learned any of that stuff as a kid (my mum just played Wolfe Tones, Brendan Shine and Daniel O’Donnell a lot), in fact it was my son who told me the story of the Red Hand of Ulster back when he was a preschooler (gory storytime!), though I did like reading about the Fomorians and the Tuatha De Danann, Balor and the Evil Eye, that stuff. And I loved hearing the story of the Rock of Cashel and Devil’s Bit Mountain when I went there as a kid (Cashel is full of Scully gravestones actually, that always excited me). And I know about St. Patrick of course. There’s a whole wealth of story and mythology I need to read about.

“A green object in the street” for me was a street sign. It could have been anything, a tree, a bin, a bike, a bush. I also asked for something more than a hundred years old, and that required a bit of Davis knowledge. I said not to draw my jokes which are all about a hundred years old (including that one). I drew part of the Dresbach-Hunt-Boyer mansion, which dates from the 1870s.

Now ‘snakes’ was always going to be interpretative, as I don’t expect to see a lot of snakes slithering around. We do of course have snakes in Davis but they like to hide, and don’t often go downtown, especially on St. Patrick’s Day, for obvious reasons. I knew there was a green metal snake sculpture behind the Pence, however it is no longer there, so I ended up drawing some metal pipes, and calling it “snakes”, and there you go.

And the last one “DRINK!” is a reference to Father Jack’s favourite word. I had about twenty minutes before the end, so I popped into De Vere’s Irish pub (which was packed), remarkably found a seat at the bar with a great view of the Guinness toucan that had been perched up above the taps. I drew that and had a (quite marked-up) pint of Smithwicks in a plastic glass. I don’t really like drinking Guinness much myself, it’s alright but not really my tipple. And then it was time for the final meet-up with the rest of the group. we had a very good crowd this time around, and I can’t wait for the next one in April! We’ll announce when exactly that is very soon. I have some soccer game rearrangements that are still being figured out, but I’m really in sketching mode this year – I’m already months ahead of my 2018 sketch-count.

I never learned much Irish, except a few choice phrases, so the blog title today is a little bit of Google Translate finagling. I quite like bad translation though, there’s a certain comedic innocence to it. We used to play on that in our multi-lingual theatrical performances back at university. I did have a book when I was a teenager, ‘Teach Yourself Irish’, but it was a ridiculously dry edition and put the language out of reach. I could see how it connected to other European languages, but the orthography-to-pronunciation difference was too great for me to hear it in my head, so I just learned a few words and phrases, mostly ones other people had taught me (so I could say them). None of my family ever knew any Irish phrases other than Erin Go Bragh, Cead Mile Failte and Pogue Mahone, the last one being spelled the way the band did, not the spelling I was taught later by Irish people. None of the Irish people I knew as a kid (who were pretty much my nan’s generation) spoke any Irish words, so even as the historic language of my ancestors I never felt much of a connection to it. If they learned it, it was something they might have had to do at school decades before and forgot instantly, same as I remember very little about Chemistry class except a dislike of Bunsen Burners. I do remember when I was about 12 though being somewhere in rural Kerry, and suddenly everything was in Gaelic, the radio stations, the street signs, actually that was it, the only other things around were sheep and fog. It wasn’t until I was much older that I met someone who spoke it natively, as in at home, and whenever she used it to with us it was usually in song and not to be translated (she was clear about that). So, with the Irish language, it’s another thing that I might get around to learning a bit of now we live in the YouTube era, but might not be that high on the priority list living out in California. Anyway I hope all my Irish friends had a fun St. Patrick’s Day! I certainly did.

Hey, if you want to see other people’s sketches from the day (or post your own from the sketchcrawl, if you came along) you can go to the Let’s Draw Davis group page on the dreaded Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/383785982124525/

To find out when future sketchcrawls will be, our main FB page will show those: https://www.facebook.com/LetsDrawDavis/

a festive friday

December 24, 20181 Comment

It’s almost Christmas! I haven’t had much energy for sketching lately, but I really needed to get some drawing in. I went to see Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse (by the way, an awesome film, incredibly creative animation) and then popped into De Vere’s (not Into the Spi-De Vere’s), our local Irish Pub, for some Smithwicks and sketching. It was pretty busy with festive end-of-year partygoers. I sketched in dark green pen. It was really nice to get this sketch done, to get anything done. I’ve been finding it hard to be productive lately, everything seems to take me forever. Actually I have made a lot of things out of Perler Beads. This year I made my son’s advent calendar out of 14,000 of those beads; that was a lot of work. Anyway Christmas is almost here, so I wish you all the very best for the festive season, and hope you go and watch Spider-Verse, because it was pretty great.