back from outer space

August 25, 2018August 29, 20185 Comments

After I got back from Portugal, I had a hectic week (few weeks really) trying to settle back in. Busy work, busy life, jet lag, waking up at 3am every day, and the insatiable urge to just KEEP ON SKETCHING. It’s hard to explain the urge to draw stuff all the time. It’s probably less hard to explain coming back from a place like Porto where everything is a sketch waiting to happen, to Davis, which as we have seen over the past decade or so is worthy of a few sketches itself, but Porto it ain’t. You can only beat the team you’re playing, as they say, and since coming back I have ramped up my sketching of Davis once more after a relatively uninspired and fallow period. I’ve sketched almost everything I’ve wanted to sketch, so it comes down to sketching some of the old favourites just to keep the pen working, so one evening I popped once more to my local pub De Vere’s, always a nice place to hang out, and flexed the old ink muscles. This sort of drawing is about observing lots of detail, tackling interior perspective, and having a nice cold beer while you’re at it (the weather was so hot this summer). What’s more, I drew the pub from the outside a few days before: see below.

And as you can see, I also drew a Davis fire hydrant. These finished off my Seawhite sketchbook so that it was completed in July.

Now, I have a few more London sketches (and accompanying stories) to post, and then a bunch of new Davis panoramas I’ve been doing, but in the meantime I think I’m going to go out on this fine Saturday and do some more. I also need to get on setting the dates for the next few Let’s Draw Davis sketchcrawls so stay tuned for those. My recent sketching travels has filled me with a new sketching-energy I want to share.

lazy monday afternoon

January 23, 2017Leave a comment

I needed to draw something in black and white for submission to an upcoming group show, and so I decided to draw something familiarly Davis. And then I abandoned my sketch of the Hunt-Boyer-Dresbach Mansion (always struggle with that one) and popped into De Vere’s Irish Pub on a President’s Day afternoon (back when we had a president I really liked) and sketched that familiar view instead. I finished off all the hatching and shading at home (just the one quick pint for me). there was Africa Cup of Nations football on the TV. Outside it was sunny, a break from the series of big winter storms we’ve been getting. I haven’t sketched in just black and white for a while (even the ones I draw in pen only are usually, well, very very very dark brown) and it was tempting to add just a tiny little bit of colour, maybe just a little bit of red on the Exit sign or a couple of green bottles, but I stuck to the straight monochrome. The show it’ll be in, “Black and White”, is at the Pence Gallery on D Street, Davis, for the whole of next month with a reception for the ArtAbout on Friday February 10th. This pub is a good place to hang out. I think I’ll go back again sometime.

it was overflowing gently, but it’s all elementary my friend

December 23, 20164 Comments

And here once more, De Vere’s Irish Pub in Davis. This was sketched after the party at the Manetti Shrem Museum of Art. I was so full of electric artistic energy that I just had to come to the pub and sketch away, and I wanted to use colour differently again, this time adding purple and yellow washes to a dark blue pen. Oh plus a white gel pen. I enjoyed sketching this a lot, and had some fun conversations with people, many of whom had also been at the museum that evening. By the way, totally unrelated, but have you seen Rogue One yet? Totally awesome huh.

de vere’s from left to right

August 13, 2016August 13, 20161 Comment

Actually, before we get back to Manchester, here is a sketch I did last weekend right here in Davis. Click on it for a closer view. This is De Vere’s Irish Pub on E Street, which eagle eyed observers will have noticed I have sketched before. I did some thinking about the old curvilinear perspective recently, and how I need to really get it into the sketches more. I do anyway, of course, but I haven’t been doing many where I get both the left and right vanishing point into the picture, so that’s what I did here. I needed to practice it again somewhere familiar, so it was back to the very middle of the bar, similar to the first time, back in 2011. I coloured the page first in a red and orange wash, for some reason, meaning I ended up with a peach coloured background. This took about two and a half hours, or three pints of Smithwicks. It was strange not to be sketching at a bar where every single other person was also sketching (like the Peveril of the Peak!). I had just been to see Suicide Squad, which was, well it was better than Batman v Superman, for sure. A terrible plotline with a lot of problems, but overall not an unwatchable movie, and both Will Smith as Deadshot and Margot Robbie as Harley Quinn were good. Jay Leno as the Joker was very different from the other Jokers, not awful but the jury is out for many, though I am well impressed at how different Jay Leno looks from his cuddly talk show persona. I do like the post-movie pub-sketch, with all the sketching ideas bubbling around my head from Manchester sometimes you just need to unwind and get them out. The first few days back my sketching was a bit of a choke but with this and others since I have kicked back into gear, and now I’m heading towards my sketchbook show at UC Davis this Fall, “Conversations with the City”. Details to come soon!

post-deadpool choco-taco

March 10, 20165 Comments

“Sudwerk Choco-Taco” is an actual beer that I actually had. It’s quite dark, darker than I usually like, but it was really nice, I would have it again. I like trying the different craft beers that we have out here, and in fact I’ve started recording the ones I have tried by using that ‘Untappd’ app on my iPod. Admittedly there are times when it can be hard to remember, so I make a point of writing them down, or in this case, drawing a picture of it. And of course, why draw the glass when you can draw the rest of the bar as well? This is another bar sketch of De Vere’s (I do one from time to time, last time was January 2015). I’ve been very busy lately, and so one Saturday night I went and watched Deadpool. By the way, Deadpool is awesome. Don’t take your kids!!!! It will make you laugh. After watching Deadpool, I popped by the Avid Reader to buy Star Wars Top Trumps cards, and then into De Vere’s to read Deadpool comics and do some bar-sketching. The bar-sketching thing sometimes comes down to me needing to sit somewhere and draw a complicated but structured scene. I used a brown-black uni-ball signo um-151 (“say my name!” I hear this pen yelling to me, “say my whole name!”) and also a light grey Tombow marker to mix it up a bit. There’s also some Pigma Graphic pen in there for the thick lines. I had a couple of other beers, a Smithwicks red, which was very nice, and the Aggie Dry Hop lager by Sudwerk, which is alright.

I was also celebrating, from 5000 miles away, my older brother’s birthday; he turned 50 on that day. This is a year for milestone birthdays. Wish I could have been there celebrating with him – happy birthday Perks!

I have some more bar sketches yet to post, ones from New York City. In the meantime if you’d like to see some more, this Flickr set “Pubs, Cafes etc” has loads of mine, from pubs around the world.

take the time to make some sense

February 18, 201517 Comments

De Vere’s Irish Pub, Davis. Click to see bigger.

On the last day of January (this is how long it’s taking me to find a few minutes to scan sketches in these days…) I decided I needed to add to my bar panorama sketch series, and went down to De Vere’s Irish Pub in downtown Davis to practice from a different angle. I sat in that corner at the end of the bar, nicely tucked out of the way, and sketched the evening away. Andy Murray was on the TV above me, losing in the Australian Open final, and the place was pretty busy. I started on the left with the close angle of behind the bar itself, making sure I sketched the ‘Late Night Eats’ menu before it got moved. It’s good to have something like that if you are sketching a bar, as it places you in both time and space. There’s a little tip. For the budding bar-sketcher, here are some in-progress photos; I used a brown-black uni-ball signo um-151 pen size 0.38 (the best), in a Seawhite of Brighton sketchbook (not the best, but not bad).

Next I sketched the bar itself. I used a few pencil lines to try and figure out the perspective lines, but it’s not scientifically exact, more of an ‘as good as’. The thing about perspective is that your direct moves about a lot and so you usually have several perspectives going at once. I added a couple of the barstaff; whenever I sketch bars I often leave them out because, to be fair, they move around a lot. It helps to include them however, to break up the repetition of a long stretch. Plus it’s always good when sketching people working to show them hard at work. I sketched the behind-bar are and the taps next, and those little black straw things that appear in almost every bar sketch in the history of the world, for some reason. You can see how the bar angles towards me at the far right corner, but I didn’t have room to show my part of the bar.

And here’s the finished sketch. By this point I had had about four pints ($3 pints of Sudwerk Dry Hop Lager if you must know), and had included the throngs of people at the bar. People are generally generic, but look kinda like the real people that were there. There was a man wearing one of those triangular/conical hats, looking as though he worked in a paddy field (no jokes about paddy fields and Irish pubs please), so I drew him twice. Although I left drawing the people to last, this actually opens up into being the focus of the bar, with the elongated triangular space in which they are positioned becoming wider and more interesting as the eye is drawn rightwards. There, see if you can talk about panoramic composition after four pints of beer. To be fair if someone had asked me (and I think they may have done) my answers would have been nonsense; to be fair, they are nonsense even before four pints of beer. I’m happy with the results though, and I decided not to add paint, so you can feel it in all its hastily scratched-in glory. De Vere’s is a good pub to draw panoramas of. Cheers!

night cap

May 5, 20144 Comments

Have you seen Captain America: The Winter Soldier yet? Spoiler alert – it’s great. I’ve seen it twice. I’m quite a fan of Cap. I like my heroes to be heroic, and you can’t get more heroic than Steve Rogers. After the movie, I popped into De Vere’s for a couple of pints and to do some more bar sketching. I had spent the previous few days sketching manically at the UC Academic Advising Conference (sketches to be posted next) and well, I can’t really stop sketching. I wanted to sketch a different angle than usual and include a lot more people, but they all kept moving about, so in the end I turned and asked the group next to me if I could sketch them. Most of them had beards which is always a nice thing when sketching.

in restless dreams i walked alone

January 14, 20146 Comments

My spare time is spent sketching the streets of Davis, over and over again. Last Saturday it was actually a little bit cloudy (that is basically our winter, right there) and so in the afternoon I biked down to E Street to continue the Panoramarathon. Yes, the panoramarathon that’s my word, I try to say it a lot, with different stresses every time, I keep wanting to say Panathinaikos or Parasaurolophus, but I’m getting the hang of it. I stood opposite De Vere’s Irish Pub (you’ve seen the inside of that on my sketchblog before) and Bizarro World comics. There are two places I am glad are right next to each other. I love to go to the comic shop, maybe pick something up and pop into De Vere’s for a pint to read it. This time I just picked up a 2014 Marvel Comics calendar. This year I have decided to read a lot more comics, in both paper form and digitally; I have downloaded a couple of good graphic novels on sale on Comixology, and I am considering a subscription to Marvel Unlimited to catch up on years of old comics in digital form. I have been buying more paper comics too, they are works of art and it’s nice to buy stuff at comic shops, I’m grateful they exist. A comics education to come for me this year.

Here are a couple of closer views from each side of the panorama:

I sketched with my headphones on, listening to a history podcast (“In Our Time” with Melvyn Bragg – if you want to hear Mr. Bragg rushing historians through their subjects and getting annoyed with them because they’re not saying exactly how many Vikings fought at Stamford Bridge and then chiding them for taking too long, this is your podcast). As I sketched, a young man with a guitar on his back came up to me, and gestured as if to say something. I took off my headphones and he said, “Are you pretending to be an artist?”

You what? “Are you pretending to be funny?” I replied straight away, and he walked off. What the hell? Strange thing to come up and say to someone. Anyway next day I was in Newsbeat, buying a Snickers bar, when someone behind me said, “Oh wow Snickers, that is good shit that, I survived up the top of a mountain eating only Snickers.” I examined the chocolate bar and said, “yeah, I’ve never heard of Snickers before, thanks.” Then I realised, I think it was the same guy, perhaps he goes around downtown Davis saying stupid things? Like I go round drawing stuff, maybe that’s his thing, a ‘say-stupid-things-crawl’? Or maybe it was two different people, or I imagined it and just need to get more sleep. All things are possible.

So this right here is in the very heart of downtown Davis, E St between 2nd and 3rd. The next panorama I will post is on the other side of this block and mirrors it in some ways. Panoramarathon (or ‘Panoramasnickers’ as it will soon be known) continues…

sketching on a summer’s evening

August 29, 20133 Comments

This month’s Let’s Draw Davis sketchcrawl was a bit different, in that it was on a Wednesday evening, a hot summer evening. We met at Central Park for the Wednesday Farmer’s Market, “Picnic-in-the-Park”. There were a LOT of people out, and downtown Davis was bustling. I spent a good time sketching the panorama aboveThere weren’t many of us sketching, met some new faces, one who joined us was Terry Banderas (below in the red shirt), a local northern CA artist whose ink and watercolour sketches inspired me a lot when I was first doing these types of sketches and posting them online (and continues to do so), so it was great to finally meet him and chat with him. My son sketched with me for a while too, sketching hot-lava-breathing dragons (as you do) before hitting the bouncy houses with all the other local five-year-olds.

I was sketching in the Seawhite sketchbook, which I’m still getting used to. It’s not really the one for the paint that I’m used to laying on, but it’s nice to draw on. The sketchcrawl ended at De Vere’s Irish Pub; it was Davis Beer Week so it seemed appropriate. Here is yet another sketch of De Vere’s (and not my best). I tried a couple of beers, from 21st Amendment in San Francisco (and they weren’t cheap), “Amber Waves” and “Hell or High Watermelon”. Not bad!

i look at the world and i notice it’s turning

May 3, 2013May 3, 20139 Comments

De Vere’s Irish Pub, Davis. Click on the image to see it larger and in more detail. It was the end of the week (the weekend usually is), and an evening out at the comic shop followed by some beer and sketching was in order. This is a nice pub. I like drawing pub panoramas in my Moleskine, and this one took only two and a half beers (it’s always something-and-a-half; I like to spend that last half pint looking at the sketch, pencil case away). I have drawn curvilinearly in here before, but now it is time to pull back and see more of the room. I didn’t speak to anyone, just got on with the sketching. It wasn’t very busy on this particular Saturday evening, and it was warm outside. This is an exceptionally warm Spring. We have had some terrible winds, but warm winds, and the weather has been pushing the 90s (actually this week it’s been pushing the mid-90s, it’s like Britpop).