mammal bones at the NHM-LA

April 6, 20241 Comment

I drew more than dinosaurs at the Los Angeles Natural History Museum. I explored as much of the place as I could (I was there all day after all, I wasn’t going anywhere) but when I saw the big mammoth, well, that was going in the sketchbook. I suppose technically it’s not a woolly mammoth because there’s no wool on the skeleton (and it was probably more of a hairy mammoth than woolly but I’m not going to, er, split hairs) (people kept saying “there’s a woolly mammoth!” but I wasn’t going to take them to tusk, etc and so on) (I was there a long time, my head ran through all the punning possibilities and decided none of them were worth it). I drew in fountain pen and was there quite a while; I considered adding some paint but it was a fairly white environment (ice age feeling I suppose) and I just couldn’t be bothered by the end. It was a magnificent display though, not every day you get to see mammoths. I have never visited the La Brea Tar Pits but I hear they have found some amazing skeletons of mammoths and other prehistoric creatures there, and still are; that’s a future visit right there.

Speaking of famous prehistoric mammals, there was the skull of a Sabretooth Tiger – sorry, ‘Sabretooth Cat’ as this one was more correctly called, they weren’t really tigers, the Smilodons – and I had to sketch that. The size of those incisors! I mean were they really necessary? I guess they were. What an impressive gob. I can see him hanging about outside the tube station shouting, yeah come on then you mug, getting into fights, all that. No wonder they went extinct, probably a bit too mouthy for their own good. There were excited kids looking at this while I sketched saying “wow, a sabretooth tiger!” without reading the sign that said it was a sabretooth cat and that you shouldn’t call it a tiger because science, but I wasn’t going to take them to tusk. Hang on I used that one already. It would be funny if we recreated one from its DNA and it learned to speak and said, “actually mate I’m ok being called a tiger, that’s fine.” Anyway tigers or cats, I like these a lot, but it f this is a cat I probably wouldn’t argue with it if it begged me to turn the bathroom taps on for it.

Next up, the Ground Sloth, every good Natural History Museum needs a Ground Sloth and I always draw them. This one was upstairs above the Mammoth and I loved the way it was standing, like an old end of the pier stand up comedian. I imagined him in a smoky Lancashire croak saying stuff like “I tell you, my missus, she says to me you’re so lazy you may as well be extinct, go and get a job, I says I’m a sloth! That is me job. I tell you she wears me down so much I’m a ground sloth” etc and so on. Catch him at your nearest Pontins (also going extinct). Now the one I drew from the London NHM (12 years ago) was actually a Megatherium which is a larger kind of ground sloth, living from the Pliocene to the Holocene, this one is a Nothrotheriops Shastensis (“that’s easy for you to say,” says the northern comic to much mirth), much smaller and living in the Pleistocene (“the missus tells me I can’t play with that stuff, it gets all stuck in the carpet” says the comedian, to a little confusion from his audience, forcing him to explain it, which didn’t go down well; “By gum you’re so slow, I thought I was the sloth!”). Perhaps though the Megatherium and the Nothrotheriops could form a double act, like all the old northern comedians used to do, Little and Large has already been taken by two other dinosaurs, so maybe ‘The Two Sloths’, ‘Megatherium and Wise’, ‘Good Sloth Bad Sloth’, I don’t know I’m a sketcher not a northern comic double act agent. They would have been long cancelled by now anyway.

Moving away from old bones and bad comedians, the gemstone and mineral section was pretty impressive. I sketched a few colourful ones with interesting names (the green one was surely Kryptonite) (I’ve always wondered about Kryptonite, did that planet explode because it relied too much on Kryptocurrency, was General Zod one of those Krypto-bros who don’t stop going on about it and was expelled to the Fandom Zone? So many questions). there was one room, a vault with tick walls and huge metal doors and security guards, that contained incredibly valuable gemstones of well over 100 carats each, it was like looking at the Infinity Stones. My son used to really like gems and minerals when he was younger and we’d spend more time in the geology sections of the NHM than the dinosaur sections, so I’ve drawn a few stones before, but this was a fascinating room to explore.

After going to draw the T-Rex having a chat with the Triceratops (see my previous post) I called time on the museum, and popped over to the California Science Center to have a very brief look before they closed. I drew this one plane, got a cold drink, and left as it was all closing up. All in all, a good day sketching old things. I wouldn’t have minded visiting the Leonardo Da Vinci exhibition at the Science Center, displaying models of many of his inventions, but another time maybe. I know I would boringly have been taking everyone to tusk for saying ‘Da Vinci’ instead of ‘Leonardo’, and they’d have been saying “you mean taken to ‘task’ surely” and I’d have been like “look it was a call back to a previous joke you weren’t there for, I’m not a sloth you know.” It was a long day, though of course, I wasn’t done sketching just yet. Check back soon for more LA…

Dinosaurs at the LA Natural History Museum

April 4, 2024April 4, 20242 Comments

Part of the reason for taking a weekend in Los Angeles before the conference in Riverside is that I just really wanted to draw dinosaurs. I’d never been to the LA Natural History Museum before, but we had visited the California Science Center next door about six years ago when we went to look at the space shuttle Endeavour, so coming here had been on my wish list for years. As you know I’m a massive fan of the Natural History Museum in London, the superb building in South Kensington I have been going to since before I could even draw, one of my favourite places in the world. Well Los Angeles has a pretty cool one too, which beautiful architecture, lots of engaging exhibits and an abundance of dinosaur displays. Unlike the NHM in London it isn’t free to get in, but since the California Science center next door is free I don’t mind that. My plan was that if I had time or ran out of dinosaurs I would go there to draw planes. One of the last displays I drew here was the one above, the Tyrannosaurus Rex in combat (or conversation?) with a Triceratops,

It is actually the ‘Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County‘, and opened at Exposition Park in 1913. After a chat with one of the docents in the rotunda as you enter, where they have a statue of the three muses in a beautiful naturally lit space, I found the dinosaurs and started drawing the one above, perhaps my favourite dinosaur, Stegosaurus. By the way I’m sure I’m not alone in that ever since Jurassic Park I have to stop myself pronouncing ‘dinosaur’ as ‘Daano-sow’ like the little DNA cartoon character does. Yes, Jurassic Park is one of my favourite films, and no, I really don’t like the latest ones. Anyway I have always loved Stegosaurus with its big mohawk of bony plates, a punk vegetarian with huge spikes on its tail. I drew with my brown inked fountain pen. There was an Allosaurus behind it that you can just about make out creeping into view. It was getting busy, but not too crowded, a good amount of people for a museum crowd. I’ve sometimes been at the South Ken museums when they are mobbed, especially the Science Museum on a weekday with the school groups. This was just right, I’d say. I got down there as early as I could, I had aimed for opening time but was delayed by the LA Metro. I had packed snacks so I could make it through the day, I was well prepared.

There were three ceratopsian skulls side by side in a display cabinet, huge things though surprisingly narrow, a Triceratops, a Styracosaurus and this one, an Einiosaurus found in Montana. I was less familiar with this one, probably because the books I was reading when I was learning dinosaurs had left it out due it not yet being discovered. I really loved its downward curving nose horn, like a massive can opener.

In the same hall was found Thomas the T-Rex, along with a couple of smaller specimens, one clearly a baby Rex. You have to love the Tyrannosaur, I don’t think any other prehistoric creature has had such a popular grip on the public imagination. At once the greatest villain and greatest hero, its massive head and jaw always outweighs the tiny little arms with two tiny fingers. I drew another T-Rex, Sue, at the Field Museum in Chicago last year. The big one here is called Thomas the T-Rex. This made me think of Thomas the Tank Engine, which always gets mis-named by Americans as ‘Thomas the Train’ (or even worse, ‘Thomas Train’, which I’m convince people only say to wind me up specifically). Thomas the T-Rex is not a cheeky little blue engine from the island of Sodor, but I wonder if there is a Gordon the Gallimimus or a Percy the Protoceratops or even a Fat Paleontologist character in this story. It’s been a few years since we were in Thomas-world. This was a tricky dynamic scene to sketch though, and I had to really observe where I was putting all those little bones. But this was why I was here! I’d been in this one room for a long time already, so I went to explore the rest of the museum. There was another hall full of big dinos, and I wasn’t sure I’d have time to draw them all (including a huge Ticeratops), but I couldn’t resist this T-Rex skull. As I drew, one of the staff complemented me on my drawing and asked if I was a paleo illustrator. No, I just love drawing dinosaurs! While I was drawing the scene at the top of this post, I did see another artist sat on the floor in an archway drawing the same skeletons. I didn’t go over to take a look, but it is always good to see another sketchbooker with the same idea.

There’s more to come, stayed tuned.

the scum and villainy cantina

April 3, 2024Leave a comment

I arrived in downtown Los Angeles after dark, checked into my very nice hotel and nearly decided not to head out to Hollywood because it was already past dinnertime. But how often am I down this way? Not very often. So I jumped on the Metro, which didn’t take that long. The LA Metro on a Friday evening is a fun place full of all sorts of characters, I wouldn’t go so far as to say it was a hive of scum and villainy but it was interesting. It didn’t take long to get to Hollywood. I really like the aesthetic design of the station at Hollywood and Vine with its palm trees and movie cameras. The Oscars were happening that weekend, and further up the street they were preparing the Red Carpet. I eventually found the Scum and Villainy Cantina, one of my favourite places. I first came here in 2017, when it was just a pop-up place not expected to be permanent, and had a great evening with my friend from London (it was his birthday) and my brother-in-law. I came back a year later with my wife and son (who was then 10) for early drinks on the way back to our hotel in Burbank. So I was really pleased to see that these years later it was still going strong. It feels like the Mos Eisley Cantina, but has expanded its theme from simply Star Wars into a more general level of popular geekdom, with staff costumed in various guises such as the one guy dressed as Super Mario. I was particularly excited to see the one bartender dressed as Hunter from the Bad Batch, one of my favourite current cartoons. Some of the beertaps were lightsabres, and there was a comics-accurate Magneto helmet behind the bar. I ordered a deliciously messy “Charizard Chicken Sandwich” (I recognized Charizard from son’s Pokémon days) and a Blue Milk, of course. It was busy but not overly crowded, and I found a seat at a table with a good view of the bar, because of course I was going to sketch it. This is a very welcoming place that prides itself on being “Your Friendly Neighborhood Geek Bar”. The light was interesting; I was still getting used to my new progressive-lensed glasses so this was a test, but when it came to actually using my paints it was a bit of shot in the dark, as the blacklight changed most of my watercolours into something else, green being impossible to see. I know my palette pretty well though so I did my best, and when I looked at the sketch in proper light I was pleased with the accuracy of my colouring in. There was a lot of pink light though. I had another cocktail called Twin Sunrise, which I sketched below. I had a good evening, and the bar staff were pleased with my sketch, and the cantina reposted it on Instagram; someone commented that it looked like Snape and Voldemort were having a drink in front of me! It was just a couple on a date; I draw people pretty generically when I sketch bars (hiding features where I can – people isn’t my strong point!) (yes, despite the fact that I wrote a book about drawing people), but now I’m wishing that I had actually drawn people as sci-fi and fantasy characters, added in a Wookiee and a Gelfling or two. Maybe you can imagine the hairy figure on the left is Hagrid, crouched over. My eyesight was struggling as it was!

I nearly came back again the next evening, a fun place to hang out this was, but I was pretty tired after drawing dinosaurs all day (which was my Saturday plan) so I didn’t come back up to Hollywood, especially on the night before the Oscars when I’m sure the LA Metro would have been full of celebrities and stars. I can’t wait for my next visit back though, to try more things. I bought a pin; I wanted a t-shirt but I’ll get one of those online. If you want to see their website (check out their drinks menu!), it’s at: https://scumandvillainycantina.com/. If you’re in LA, check them out!

pause at the airport

April 2, 2024Leave a comment

I’ve been travel-busy lately, so let’s start posting some sketches. I was at Sacramento airport, waiting for a delayed Friday early evening flight down to Los Angeles, where I’d be spending the weekend before a work trip to Riverside. As I had a bit of time I sat and had a pint at the airport bar, sketching the view opposite which included a newsstand sponsored by Sactown Magazine (see my previous post about my own appearance in Sactown). At this point the new edition featuring my sketches wasn’t on sale, but it was there on the way back a few days later along with the screen displaying pages. I don’t like airports (have I mentioned? Like a million times), but I don’t mind SMF, I’ve been through here enough times and it’s small, so it feels so familiar. Eventually I was able to board. My plan for Los Angeles was to do the following: (1) visit the Scum and Villainy Cantina in Hollywood, great place; (2) spend all Saturday drawing dinosaurs at the Natural History Museum; and (3) eat breakfast at the Original Pantry. I did all of those things (though the breakfast was more at lunchtime; a well-deserved lie-in!) and there’s sketches aplenty to come. After that, I was going to the UC-AMP Conference in Riverside and staying at the historic Mission Inn Hotel, and there are lots of sketches from there. As it is, cheers from the airport.

to rest my eyes in shades of green

March 20, 2024March 20, 2024Leave a comment

I sketched this in my small Fabriano sketchbook, I really like using that one, especially with pencil. I have a larger one I might start using at some point. This is that bridge in the Arboretum that I’ve drawn a few times before, but not for a few years. I was heading downtown at lunchtime and it was a day of intermittent sunshine and clouds, just as I like it, but I wanted to stop and draw. I can’t get enough drawing done can I. I like this sort of sketch as I am just working quickly and scribbling, which makes it fun. March came in after a long long February and is already sweeping by fast, It will be April before we know it. And then another Summer, and another Fall, and another year over, until everything stops working. Look at the world while you can. I am still getting used to these new progressive glasses I got, which for the first week or two made me feel super dizzy, but that’s worn off a bit now. The ground is still a bit blurry but I am noticing that less, I suppose. My sketchbook looks clearer when looking down at it in poor light, such as indoors, while giving me a clearer far sight view. But it’s strange, and makes me feel tired. Everything makes me feel a bit more tired nowadays. I hoped that I’d be running a lot more, but I’ve found it hard to motivate myself there. I’ve been sketching a lot. I’ve been creating a lot of snippets of music, a few chords and a tune taped into the Music Memos app on my phone, the app my now-old phone keeps telling me will go away and I should transfer over to Voice Memos, but I like to keep my guitar chords separate from my random voice notes, plus in Music Memos it can generate a bass line or a drum beat behind it. I have a lot of tunes in my head now though, floating around waiting for me to finish them off, but I prefer a sketchbook of unfinished music than an actual thing. It’s not technically good, in any way, I’m not doing like big complicated riffs, more just a few feelings set inside a few chord changes. It’s how I used to do things when I had my little tape recorder, just recording whatever came out, sometimes it might be interesting, a lot of time just random nothing, and all for my ears only.

chemistry latest, almost nearly there

March 7, 2024March 7, 2024Leave a comment

The latest chapter in the construction of the new extension on the UC Davis Chemistry Building, it’s nearly ready. I was going to hold off on sketching it until it was all done, but the light was nice as the sun was going down after work this week, with a properly active sky, I stood up on the ledge at Roessler Hall for a more elevated view. I hope I can get a look around inside once it’s done.

armadillo music

March 4, 2024Leave a comment

Another two-page spread, though I didn’t reach the edge of the right-hand page. I went downtown right after work that day and the light was so nice that I decided to do a sketch, and decided to draw Armadillo Music. You can’t really see the golden pre-sunset light because I didn’t colour in the sky or the trees or any of the shading but I did colour in the record store, and the reflection of old city hall in the window opposite. That said, I wasn’t that happy with how the coloured-in record store turned out, and my initial idea to just colour in a few elements would have been the better choice in this case, but you live and learn. I got a cold drink from Newsbeat and stood drawing as much as I could, but stopped short of drawing more parked cars, I’m so sick of drawing those, they all look exactly the same anyway. The record store by the way is Armadillo Music, one of those proper part-of-the-cultural-fabric spots in Davis. I don’t buy records any more, or even CDs, but the existence of good record shops is vastly more important culturally to any society than yet another chain coffee shop. I don’t go out as much these days, but I really should go down there on evenings when they have live music or other events, they serve beer and get good numbers in. The band of one of my work colleagues has played there a couple of times, but I always seem to be busy. It’s on my wish-list to go and sketch an event there though.

Armadillo’s old location was a couple of doors down F Street, and that’s where I first discovered it (back when I was still buying music), and in fact it’s where my first ever art show in Davis was held back in early 2011 (during the monthly ArtAbout), before even my solo show at the Pence. They were super nice in there, and really supportive of local artists and I’ll always appreciate the boost that show gave to my confidence. It was an exhibit of prints of my drawings, with the real sketchbooks displayed on the night, and there was also a live show by local musician Rita Hosking, who had just been touring in Britain and other places, she was pretty well-known, so there was a good crowd in the small store that evening. I had quite a few come to see me though, as well as a bunch of students from our grad program coming out to show their support. Here is a picture from that night:

Here’s the sketch I did of Rita Hosking and her band (it was January 2011 not 2010, I am useless with getting the year right when it’s January):

And here is a sketch I did of Armadillo back in 2013, the old location (opening a new sketchbook, so I decided to to put the big “DAVIS, CA” lettering there for some reason):

And finally, another one in 2017 of the current location, the only time I’ve drawn it:

positively tired on fourth street

March 3, 20242 Comments

More sketching downtown on the last weekend in February. This was done on 4th Street, and I guess I’ve drawn this panorama before several years ago, just from a little bit further down. This was done a few hours after I had run the Davis Stampede 5k, my third time doing that, so my legs felt a little bit cream-crackered after standing for a while with my sketchbook. I’m still well interested in all these winter trees, the shapes and the textures. My run went pretty well, considering I haven’t really had enough time to train since the food-and-drink-tastic Christmas break, with work being so busy and things just being a bit stressful, but I did alright and really enjoyed the run, though it was a few minutes slower than my last 5k. In fact since last weekend I’ve done another three 5k runs, and while I’ve still not cut out the junk food yet, I’m feeling like I can keep going to try and do the (gulp) 7k Lucky Run later this month. I’ve never run that distance before so I’m building myself up to it, and then I will work on getting to the 10k distance. Easy does it, I’m not going for marathons, but I am enjoying it while I can do it. Anyway, after getting as far as I could with this, most of the penwork except all those scribbles for the background trees and some of the colouring, I headed off to a local brewpub to rest those legs with a beer (the beer wasn’t very good though). I have quite a few panoramas in this sketchbook already, though I’m hoping to finish it this month and finally start landscape sketchbook #50.

the very hart of campus

March 2, 2024Leave a comment

Last weekend we held another meet-up of local sketchers as part of the monthly ‘Let’s Draw Davis’ sketchcrawls, this time in the very heart of the UC Davis campus, meeting up outside the immense Shields Library. I had worried it would be a pretty wet day, but in the end we had lovely sunshine. It was a short sketchcrawl at just two hours, enough for a couple of decent drawings for me; above, Hart Hall, one of my favourite buildings to draw at UC Davis, especially on a bright day like last Saturday. I was terrorised by a squirrel while drawing this (in so much as a squirrel can be a terrorist, it might be a bit of a reach to say that coming up to me occasionally saying “yeah come on then” in squirrel language amounts to terrorism, or just normal squirrel behaviour whenever someone sits next to their favourite tree). We share this campus with the squirrels, and as I know too well we are all competing for our little bit of space. I sympathized with the squirrel to be honest.

We had quite a turnout, a lot of students, local sketchers, sketchers from out of town. I drew my second in front of Shields Library, you can see one of Robert Arneson’s Eggheads there. Some sketchers are dotted around. It was a nicely bustling kind of Saturday afternoon on campus, not too busy but not quiet either. At the end we all gathered in a circle outside and did a show-and-tell of our sketches, some really nice diverse styles on show. I was however criticized in front of the whole group by one sketcher from out of town who complained to me that I’d chosen such an “inconvenient” location (“the middle of nowhere” they said) for a sketchcrawl, because it was far from the parking lot they’d parked at. It’s the heart of the campus, the main library, very much “the middle of somewhere”. I was a bit stunned. Oh well. Anyway the next Let’s Draw Davis sketchcrawl will be on March 23rd in the afternoon, this one will be downtown at Mishka’s cafe on 2nd street, easy enough to find. Though I will have just done the Lucky Run 7k race that morning, so I will probably be a little bit shattered, but still sketching.

a familiar sight, slightly different height

February 29, 2024February 29, 2024Leave a comment

Today is a Leap Day, isn’t it. It’s always exciting to have an extra day in February, but this February has felt longer than most other months so that extra day feels like a day too far. It’s a long winter quarter. I’m looking forward to my upcoming trip to L.A. to draw dinosaurs and not think about this campus for a couple of days. Leap Days are funny though. We all know someone who has a birthday on a Leap Day, there was a girl in my class as a kid who had that birthday every four years, to much amusement. I always thought it would be funny if instead of putting the extra day in February, it could be moved around a bit, so next Leap Year we would have a March 32nd, for example, or maybe for once we could start the New Year on the 0th of January. Imagine having that as your birthday. I always wondered too, what do dogs do? One of our years is supposedly worth seven dog’s years, so when do they calculate their birthdays, and do they get annoyed when people forget? Maybe that’s why they are always chasing postmen, they are looking for birthday cards. Such lofty thoughts go through our heads when looking out above the campus from the top of the stairwell at the Mathematical Sciences Building, my place of work since this very week in 2006. That was not a Leap Year, though the previous year was a personal Leap Year for me, when I made the Leap across the Atlantic and moved to America. I’ve been away from London a long time now. Anyway, as I finished work one day last week I saw that the sky was looking pretty dramatic, and the light was getting golden as the sun set, so I went up the stairwell a bit and painted the sky and the famous water tower, before drawing all the bits underneath. There’s the Earth and Physical Sciences Building on the right, and the rear of King Hall dead ahead just beyond the low Facilities Building. It’s a nice view, looking east.