Sketching Wren’s London

June 7, 2016June 7, 20161 Comment

While we’re talking about sketchcrawls..!

“SKETCHING WREN’S CITY”… Join us for a sketchcrawl in London, through the City of Sir Christopher Wren, architect of St. Paul’s Cathedral and so many other churches and buildings in the years following the Great Fire of London, 1666. Hey, that was 350 years ago!

Starting at 10:30am outside St.Paul’s Cathedral, and finishing up at 4:00pm at Wren’s Monument to the Great Fire, we will explore the city in groups or individually as you prefer, looking for the London built by Wren after the Great Fire.

This sketchcrawl is FREE and open to anyone of any age who likes to sketch. I will provide Pete-drawn maps and some handy info. All you need is something to draw with and something to draw on!

This sketchcrawl is a reversed re-run (or “re-Wren” if you will) (or “re-Pete”?) of the 2014 Sketching Wren’s City event, which was a lot of fun. I’ll post reminders closer to the event, and you can sign up for the sketchcrawl on Facebook if you like: https://www.facebook.com/events/265601303793686/

Tell your England sketching friends! This being the weekend before the International Urban Sketching Symposium in Manchester there will be a few sketching events around that time of year. The day before (July 23) there is a sketchcrawl with the London Urban Sketchers at Trafalgar Square – should be fun!

Hope to see you in London!

Let’s Draw Davis! July 9

June 7, 2016Leave a comment

“Let’s Draw Davis” is back! Join us for a sketchcrawl around downtown Davis on Saturday, July 9th.We’ll go from the Central Park near the Farmer’s Market and sketch in a group or individually as you prefer, heading downtown towards the E Street Plaza to look at each others sketchbooks.

DATE: Saturday July 9th, 2016

START: 10:30am, Central Park (at the picnic tables by the carousel)

FINISH: 3:30pm, E Street Plaza (by the fountain)

This sketchcrawl is FREE, and open to anybody at all, beginners or seasoned artists, anyone who wants to just get out and do a bit of drawing and meet others who like to do the same. All you need is something to draw with and something to draw on! (And maybe a hat, and sunscreen). And afterwards, if you like we can cool off in De Vere’s Irish Pub.

If you have any questions, leave a comment below!

Facebookers: Here’s the FB event for Let’s Draw Davis: https://www.facebook.com/events/581331518693535/

**I have been rather busy on weekends these past couple of years and had little time to organize these once monthly sketching meet-ups, but I felt that it’s time to start getting us sketchers together again! I plan to start organizing more in the Fall, likely on Sundays (those Saturdays belong to AYSO soccer these days…) so if you can’t make this one, stay tuned!

Pete

digital sketches from the UCAAC

June 6, 2016June 7, 20163 Comments

Here are a few different types of sketches from the recent UCAAC in Santa Barbara. I don’t know if they need to be presented in this odd tiled fashion that WordPress has but I quite like it; click on the images to get a bigger view. I’ve been trying to use my iPad Mini to sketch, using an app called Paper by 53. Digital sketching is a whole new ball game and I am very much learning as I go along. I have a little stylus, nothing fancy, it just has a soft rubbery nib. It’s not an expensive iPencil and this isn’t a top of the range iPad Air or a Surface Pro or any of that. There is a very slight lag in time when making my digital marks and working out what the different tools do, the few there are, is interesting. It’s different from the stuff I do in MS Paint, which is more pixel by pixel football shirts, and quite unusual compared to using actual paper and actual pens but it is relatively quick, coloring in using big blocks of colour is intensely fun, you can go back if you accidentally put a big thick turquoise line through the middle (yeah, touchscreens) and you don’t need to scan them. Hey, you DON’T NEED TO SCAN THEM! That is actually huge. Literally years of my life have been lost crouched over my scanner pressing sketchbooks against glass while a slowly moving light trundles underneath me. But I’m a digital beginner, and still exploring, tentatively. If you need any tips…well, there are more experienced digital sketchers out there, but I hope you like these. I’ll enjoy looking back on these early efforts in years to come. The big one is the keynote speaker of the conference, Lester P. Monts of the University of Michigan, who gave a very interesting talk about being a Global Citizen. I included the pre-coloured-in version of that sketch so you can see what it looked like before the colourful blocks were added. The other sketches, two are very quick ones of breakout sessions I attended, and then there is a quick sketch of a curvilinear grid with a sketch of the room I was in (I won’t say the session but it was less fun than some of the others, I was starting to think about going to the pool). The other sketch is one I did in the observation carriage of the Amtrak Coastal Starlight train I took from Davis to Santa Barbara. Fun times!

if there was a sequel would you love me as an equal

June 2, 20168 Comments

On the second day of the Long Weekend, in the morning while my son went to a birthday party, I cycled downtown for some pre-lunchtime sketching. Another panoramic two-page spread, as you do. I decided to return to First Street, which is a block away from the similarly named Second Street (I know, makes no sense). Here, outside the Natsoulas Gallery, a huge cat is being erected, covered in mosaic tiles, next to the already installed colourful dog on the corner. While sketching, a guy working on the structure came over and chatted with me about art (he draws stuff as well) (hello by the way if you’re reading this). This is turning into a most colourful corner. On the other page, the fraternity house of Theta Xi (no, sorry, no jokes about taxis today). This is a bit like a sequel (or a prequel, technically, being First Street) to the sketch from the day before. I should do a panorama of Third Street to keep it up, like. Maybe I will wait 30 years and then sell my sketchbook for billions to Disney and they can get J J Abrams to sketch it, but as much in the style of the Second Street sketch as possible, with a fire hydrant and a bit of lens flare, forgetting that First Street with its giant cats and midichlorians even exists. Or maybe not. It’s getting hotter, hotter, hotter. This weekend is going to be a scorcher. Time to get out of Davis…

why the panoramic face?

June 1, 20165 Comments

Long weekend here in America, which meant longer drawings. Ok, a horse with an injured tail walks into a bar. “Why the long weekend?” asks the barman. No, no it was a bank, he walks into a bank on a holiday. “Why the long weekend?” asks the bank clerk. Maybe not an injured tail, maybe his tail was all overgrown rendering it useless for whatever tails usually are for, hence not being as strong as his front end, for example. So a horse with a less strong, very hairy tail walks into a bank, while on holiday, and the bank clerk says to him, he goes “why the long weekend?” Maybe there’s nothing wrong with his tail at all, maybe he had just been in a race, and had originally been one of the front-runners (that’s a horse racing term) but towards the end he had started to tail off (that’s another one), finally just ambling over the line, not even trotting, just going really slowly, like he had no energy, maybe he was already thinking of his holidays on the beach, before finally he walked into a bar, I mean a bank, and the bank clerk who had been watching the race on the TV, he asks him “why the long, weak end?”. Or maybe, maybe the horse is Bryan Singer and the race is X-Men Apocalypse and I am the bank clerk and maybe I asked exactly that question after seeing that very movie, which I in fact did, not long after finishing this drawing that you see here. (You see I was going somewhere with all of that, I wasn’t just ambling on, or trotting). This is Second Street (though in my opinion, it’s first), Davis. I sat on the corner of F Street (which in my opinion is more of a B+) and drew this familiar scene. In the middle there, the Varsity Theatre, historic centre of the Davis downtown, right opposite the Avid Reader bookstore. I sat drawing for a couple of hours, drawing furiosuly with my uni-ball signo UM-151 brown-black pen, and doing some of the water color on site and the rest at home; pizza dinner awaited me. And then, X-Men. While it was not a bad film (it was not quite Batman v Superman level of “what-the”, there was no “Clark Kent gets into the bath with his shoes on” moment), and it had some good moments and good call-backs to the previous films, it really suffered in its storytelling. I know that sounds ironic given that I spent five minutes trying to tell a joke about a horse at the start of this post but my budget is a little lower. I just felt the narrative started to fall apart somewhere around the middle of the film. It doesn’t stand up to the other X-films. A few good bits – well X-Men The Last Stand had good bits too but overall gets a terrible rap (deservedly if we’re honest). Even “X-Men Origins – Wolverine” was a good idea, though Logan’s (spoiler alert) cameo in this is (spoiler spoiler spoiler) totally unnecessary, inconsequential and utterly shoehorned into the film (you might say it spoiled the movie). Still, Magneto saying “Who the fuck are you?” to Apocalypse was fun. Everyone knows I love Magneto. As I say though, the ending of the film was long and weak, and since it could be said (not by me, but I’m about to say it so I suppose it is by me) that Fox is flogging a dead horse, then that brings us nicely back to “Why did the chicken cross the road? To stop the rights going back to Marvel.”

Hope you had a nice Memorial Day weekend.

building the pitzer, part six

May 30, 20162 Comments

It’s nearly done, the Pitzer Center, the new Music Recital Hall on the UC Davis campus. I’ve sketched this spot since it was the Boiler Building, and watched that old campus character get knocked into the dust, with this finally rising to take its place. It’s nearly done.

Here is the front entrance area, now fully glazed. This is what will greet visitors to campus for years to come. I’m looking forward to finally seeing performances there myself.

Below, a panorama using pencil. I was thinking about Florian Afflerbach that day, he would have enjoyed to sketch this building. It’s through him that I gained the interest in sketching buildings like this, and using them to really study perspective.

Here are the previous chapters: PART FIVE (Feb 2016), PART FOUR (Oct 2015), PART THREE (Aug 2015), PART TWO (Aug 2015), PART ONE (July 2015).

walker way

May 29, 20162 Comments

This is the back of Walker Hall, which will be redeveloped into the Graduate and Professional Student Center at UC Davis. The basic “E” shape of this building will remian and the front will be pretty much as it is now, but the interior and much of the rear will be radically altered. I am therefore planning to sketch it a few more times before the winds of change blow in. It’s not really used for much these days so a change is on the cards – another one. I remember when there were other walls in front of these, with cacti all along them, and then when they redeveloped this stretch of campus they opened this up into the walkway you see now. This will in fact be opened up further creating a corridor all the way down to the entrance Shields Library (visible in the distance there). Walker Hall was named in 1959 after H. B. Walker, who was chair of the Agricultural Engineering department. One of the things they will have in this new center are rooms that can be named after people (faculty, I presume). More information about the new center can be found on the UC Davis Graduate Studies website. I drew this one lunchtime this week, while listening to the History of Rome podcast.

get your rocks on

May 27, 2016May 27, 20161 Comment

When I first started working at UC Davis, my building was on “California Avenue”. There were a few buildings opposite, one of which was a wooden building in the same style as many others on campus (such as The Barn). I’d only just started obsessing about sketching buildings in Davis and said, yeah, I will sketch that some day. I never did, and then it was knocked down, and they started construction on a new building, one that the Geology Department would move into from their previous home in the Physics building. California Avenue is now “Crocker Lane”. Geology is now “Earth and Planetary Sciences”. Pete is now “40”. So, this week I finally got around to doing a sketch of the Earth and Planetary Sciences, aka “EPS”, building. It’s a nice modern building, and has an interesting collection of rocks planted around the outside. My son (who loves geology) enjoys going out and looking at them when he comes to visit my office. This is literally the School of Rock.

elsie’s

May 26, 20163 Comments

On the last night in Santa Barbara I went to look for a bar that I had heard about called Elsie’s. It looked like the sort of place I could sketch, and I wasn’t wrong – license plates all over the walls, a bike covered in lights above a pool table (alright I couldn’t sketch that, too difficult), good music, chilled out atmosphere, my sort of place. They even serve breakfast cereal, and Pop Tarts. Pop Tarts! And beer! It’s like I made this place up. All they need now is Ramen Noodles. I’m classy I know. Hey, earlier in the evening I ate pan-seared duck breast over a hibiscus flower reduction so don’t tell me I’m no foodie. I tried some interesting beer here too, something by Rincon Brewery, and “Beerito” by Oskar Blues (yes “Beerito”, as I say, I’m totally classy). This place was so much fun to sketch.

state street, that great street

May 25, 20162 Comments

More from Santa Barbara, earlier this month. May is going by fast, isn’t it. April did too, and March, and don’t even talk about February. These are my 40s now and time waits for no man. January by comparison was slow and languid, as I was in my leisurely carefree 30s. I’m only joking. So, that Day Of Sketching Stuff (“DOSS”? Hmmm) yielded more results, the sketch above, drawn from the window seat of the Santa Barbara Brewing Co, where I finished the day with a cold beer I can’t really remember much about, it was that unmemorable. These are my 40s etc. I just wanted a seat to look out at State Street and sketch that Santa Barbara daylight once more. My legs were so tired, and for some reason I quite inexplicably took an even longer way back to the hotel than usual. I discovered the short cut on the next day, it was called a “cab”.

The next day, after a day of Conferencing, I went back up State Street to sketch some more before dinner. And a lovely dinner it was too; the previous night I had eaten with fellow adviser types at a seafood place on the pier, and while the company was great, I couldn’t finish the food, it was a bit much. Some sort of seafood medley. I decided I would eat something fancier the next night, and I found a little place called Le Petit Valentien, where (dining alone; I was the only other person in the restaurant, on a slow Tuesday evening) which made the most delicious food, and I had roast duck, followed by creme brulee. There was a mirror opposite so I didn’t feel too lonely. The staff were very friendly as well. That was my rest after sketching these two scenes, above and below. This is El Paseo, a historic passage just off of State Street. I stood on State sketching the entrance above while people wandered by. I walked through, past a couple of restaurants a little bit fancier than what I was really after, and as the light started fading I sketched this courtyard. That round building is funny isn’t it, it has a goatee. You don’t often see buildings with facial hair but this one thinks it’s the 90s and might be wearing a t-shirt with a serious sounding band on it. And that’s all for now folks, but more Santa Barbara sketches to come. I’d post them all in one go but I just can’t find the narrative that strings them all together. Besides where better to leave this post than on a house that has a massive goatee?