Last Saturday the sketchers of Davis got together for another sketchcrawl at the lovely Arboretum. Eight of us there were, and some lovely sketches were made. I didn’t do a great deal, just a couple of pages, but it was a pleasant afternoon. I wanted to draw pages of foliage, but didn’t get very far. Above is fellow sketcher Carrie, sketching at the Arboretum Terrace. In the bottom left corner, a turtle sat basking in the sunshine by the creek. Below, sketchcrawl regulars Marlene and Cynthia draw bridges, and so do I. Nice place, the Arboretum. Peaceful.
Tag: drawing
little piece of prague
Little Prague Czech restaurant and bar on G St, Davis. I like this pub. They have nice Czech beer. I’ve drawn the inside of this bar many times over the years (it’s rather sketchworthy). You can see a couple of my Little Prague sketches in An Illustrated Journey (or of course here on my blog). The outside is nice to sketch as well. I spent the morning watching Oz, The Great and Powerful (lots of fun!) and spent the rest of the afternoon looking for a downtown spot to sketch. I have drawn this exterior view before but these lovely pre-Spring trees are too irresistible. I most of it stood out on the street, but had to get home for dinner, so finished off the colour later on.
eleven’s end
This is the last drawing inside the sketchbook I call “Moleskine #11“. It is in the back inside cover, and shows some of the physical souvenirs from this particular grapho-temporal voyage. I took to numbering my Moleskines early on, though to be fair this isn’t really #11, if you include all the other types of Moleskine sketchbook, diary, notebook etc I have. This is my eleventh Watercolour Moleskine. Well, of this 8×5 size. What I’m saying is, this is the eleventh in a series of same-size sketchbooks. These sketchbooks tend to be my ‘alpha’ books – all of the others are for certain things, side projects, or when I want to try something else for a while. For a good chronology though (and I want my biographical record to be chronologically correct), the trip from Moley #1 is one worth exploring. I’ve definitely improved a lot, and developed my way of drawing, my type of urban sketching. Choices are different, preferences evolved, but still it’s all a learning process. What I like most is that I don’t really know what it will look like by Moleskine 15. What will I be into then? Along the same lines of course, but it will be different, sometimes subtly, sometimes massively. Or will there even be one? I considered stopping at nine, a nice round Nazgul-like number. Therefore stopping at 11 is not a good idea, no no no that would never do. So I am on #12. Twelve is perfect. Twelve is the best number we have. In English it’s the last number before we start saying ‘teen’. Sesame Street’s best numerical songs were about the number twelve (come on, you know they were). The European Union loved being at twelve so much that it kept twelve stars on the flag, even though the number of members increased. Eleven is pretty cool too though. I grew up in a number 11 house. Alors, Moleskine #12 has already begun, but you won’t get to see that just yet.
Here are the first eleven though, from 2007-2013. An illustrated journey indeed…
And in this Flickr set, you can see the whole of Watercolour Moleskine #11.
an illustrated illustrated journey
As mentioned in a previous post, I have recently had the immense honour of being included as a featured artist in Danny Gregory’s latest book, “An Illustrated Journey“. And here it is! I got my copy recently, and have been poring over each beautiful page, inspired by not only the pictures but the words of the great keepers of sketchbooks inside. So much to read, but every time I do, I just want to get up and draw stuff. So I drew the book itself, on the last regular page of my watercolour Moleskine…
Here is a sneak preview of some of my pages. To see the rest, you’ll need to get the book!
Many thanks once more to Danny Gregory for including me in this book. You can get it from your local bookstore (which I recommend), or you can order it from Amazon here.
I hope you enjoy it!
let’s draw springtime in davis
Join us for another sketchcrawl in Davis, California! It’s Spring, the blossom is out, and it’s time to head back to the UC Davis Arboretum (http://arboretum.ucdavis.edu/). We’ll meet at 11:00am at the Arboretum Terrace, which is a little garden area next to Whole Foods, at Davis Commons (the corner of 1st st and Richards). From there we will go to the Arboretum proper, either in a group or individually as you prefer, and sketch all afternoon, meeting up again at 3:00pm at the Wyatt Deck, on the south side of Lake Spafford.
This sketchcrawl is free and open to anyone with an interest in sketching. Feel free to spread the word! All you need is something to draw with and something to draw on.
Hope to see you there!
roses are red
Roses! More flower drawing. These were for my wife’s birthday, over a week ago (they are lasting pretty well), and I drew them with brown uniball signo pen in the Stillman and Birn ‘Beta’ book. I have been saving that book for a while but finally cracked it open, and it’s very nice, lovely thick paper. I watched the movie ‘Brave’ with my son while drawing these, that’s a good film.
the great dane
Another football drawing, this one is Michael Laudrup, the Danish manager of Welsh team Swansea City. I love Laudrup. He is forever-young, good-looking-but-man’s-man, right attitude, and in his first year at Swansea he has led them to their first major trophy ever. Swansea City as a club are great too, and it’s great to see a Welsh side gaining so much respect in the Premier League. Laudrup was a great player in his day too, as was younger brother Brian, but Michael was The Man. Total man-crush of course (he’s competing with AVB and Mancini), so he had to get drawn on a Chinese envelope in brown pen. I’m enjoying this series. And I have a lot of these envelopes this year…
and if the flowers are in bloom, i’ll lose myself to you
Some pretty flowers, which were for my wife’s birthday last weekend. It’s fun drawing flowers because they are so completely different to the sort of thing I normally draw. I sat down and watched Lost In Translation while drawing these. I haven’t seen that film in years; it reminded me of watching it with my wife at the Phoenix independent cinema in North Finchley back in 2003, I think it was. Kind of made me want to go to Tokyo, actually (and North Finchley, funnily enough). Drawn in dark green uni-ball signo um-151 pen (nice effect, huh) and coloured with watercolour. Almost to the end of this watercolour Moleskine now, you can see the rest of the skecthbook on my Flickr site…
all gone quiet over there
Monsieur Arsene Wenger. Long-time manager of Arsenal, my club’s arch-rivals. Since he arrived at Arsenal in 1996 from Japan, that club (who, for those unfamiliar with English football club geography, are a South London team from Woolwich residing in North London temporarily for the past century or so, a few miles south of native North London team Tottenham Hotspur, my team) went into terminal incline, winning big trophy after big trophy as if some day winning trophies would go out of fashion. Meanwhile, Spurs remained fashionably trophy-free, except for a couple of league cups, the ‘thinking man’s trophy’, and beat Arsenal hands down in the ‘number of managers’ league table. Now Tottenham are flying high as the top London club (check the league table, Chelsea, it does not lie), third in the table, while Arsenal are languishing in a lowly fifth, with only the prospect of a second-leg Champions League tie against Bayern Munich to keep them entertained. “Champions League”, haha – you don’t even have to be a Champion to be in it. It’s like a game at a kid’s party where you tell the kid who came last that “they’re a winner too”. With a fashionably hip seven years without a trophy, and an attitude at the club that 4th place is the same as getting a trophy for the cabinet, Arsene is riding high, being talked about more than ever, and his players are so good that other competing clubs are lining up to buy them.
I actually feel sorry for Arsene Wenger. Despite about fifteen years of living in an undeniably massive Arsenal-shaped shadow, until just a few years ago, I cant deny that he is one of the game’s true legends. He changed Arsenal from being boring-boring 1-0 merchants to one of the most exciting teams in the world. When they did that invincible season, nearly a decade ago, and Thierry Henry was in my mind the best player in the world, it was pretty hard to argue with that. With no trophies for the past seven years, even many Arsenal fans are calling for Monsieur Wenger to call it ‘un jour’. His methods were a revolution in their time, but their time has passed. Ferguson, on the other hand, continues to win, win, win. Arsenal are not competing in the age of the Billionaires, the Chelsea-City nouveaux-riches, but despite banking their money on every turn they are increasingly being seen as the Weakest Link (but then, compare them with how Liverpool have fallen). and as Spurs rise and rise, I should be laughing at them as I go, but I’m finding myself feeling sorry for them. They are not the lottery-winners of your Chelseas and your Citys (and your, um, QPRs), and I do believe that in the long run acting sensibly with football money will pay off, but well, selling your best players to your rivals, that’s just silly. When games go badly on the pitch for Arsenal it is amplified; Wenger was accused of not taking the FA Cup seriously when they were knocked out by lowly opposition, and he angrily retorted that he has won that competition four times, arguing “name me one manager who has won it more” (the answer is Alex Ferguson, by the way, if not counting dead managers in which case there are three others). Last Sunday, Spurs beat Arsenal 2-1 in a big derby game, but if it had gone the other way, we’d have only been a point apart. At a similar time last year they beat us 5-2, and we were something like ten points ahead – and Arsenal ended up catching us, beating us to third place. That is the measure of Wenger, he can still pull it off. I’m sure he would prefer to leave on a high, finish his Arsenal career with one last big trophy, but if he doesn’t (and as devoutly Tottenham and anti-Arsenal as I am, the romantic in me kind of hopes that he does), I hope he isn’t forced out by the impatient salmon-sandwich bunch at the Emirates. If he should go, they’ll soon realize that their club will have lost their greatest figure since Herbert Chapman.
Drawn on a Chinese envelope in uni-ball sign um-151 (brown and red) with white gel pen.
le monde entier est un théâtre
This is the Mondavi Center at UC Davis. It is a large performance space and venue, an impressive building on campus that often hosts superb world-class artists and musicians. While I have never been to a performance there, I have been to sketch a rehearsal there, for last year’s Dance Dance Davis event.I’ve sketched the outside before, from a similar angle to this, but this one was drawn last week after a meeting at the Buehler Alumni Center next door. I had my large Canson pad with me, so this was going to be a larger one, at about 7″x9″. I drew most of it on site and finished the colour at home. I was for the most part surrounded by a huge crowd of schoolkids who were on some sort of trip to the Mondavi and were waiting around for their school bus to bring them lunch. I like the Mondavi.
