Another one in copic and sepia…this is my mother-in-law’s house in Santa Rosa. It’s in the historic Luther Burbank district. He invented lots of plants.
As you can see, I’m still doing the whole tree in front of the frame thing. It’s becoming my thing.
Ok. Thing is, I wanted to draw the new apartment in a kind of tryptich (or is it triptych?), and so I did, in three sepia blocks, each of which I’m showing separately here, along with the whole thing, and for bad measure, a photo of me holding the book (while watching ‘spaced’).
And this is also my entry for Illustration Friday this week (theme: ‘similar’). Our new apartment is very similar to our last one – it’s on the same complex, has all the same fixtures and fitting, but for one big thing – everything is reversed. It’s like walking into a mirror, but I like it inside this mirror, I much prefer it. even if there are more bugs (such as a centipede crawling up through the plughole – do I not like that!)
I was inspired because this week I got back my sketchbook from August’s Art House Co-Op Sketchbook Project, the theme of which was “How to Save The World”. My little book, which you can browse here, was filled with drawings of our own little world, the apartment where we spent all our time. I was saving the place I lived in, in the sense of recording it, so that in years to come I might look at it and say, yes I lived there, I remember that. Now we’ve moved I can do that already. And I can compare drawings of the new apartment to the old. The kitchen (above) is the other way round from how it is in this picture, for example. Even the hot and cold taps are reversed, not that you can tell, but I still get it wrong.
The first frame shows the baby monitor. Baby was sleeping soundly. That is, not making much of a sound. The second frame shows Mr Salt, the saltpot, and his lover Mrs Pepperpot. Mr Salt has very big trousers. He is either grossly deformed or carries a lot in is pockets (perhaps he too is an urban sketcher?). 
I think Mr. Salt is Dutch, but he comes from England. He is also into the lost practise of trepanning. You can also see the Christmas Tree, put up last weekend, hopefully out of the reach of little mischievous hands (I don’t mean those of Mr Salt, whose hands are stuck to his trousers). The final frame, looking over at the CD tower and the music players and the calendar of new york city, has a bottle of the local Sudwerk beer in it. This is purely decorative. I was actually drinking a cup of tea, but thought a beer bottle would look better. I pulled it from the recycling. I like Sudwerk, the Märzen variety, it’s a nice German style amber beer brewed just down the road from bei uns. One of the things I really like about living out here in the American West are the micro-brews – not as big a thing on the East coast. Back in London, we have the pubs alright, but I way prefer the beers out here. You can see also a Micron Pigma pen on the table; you can’t get those in England either (or at least, I couldn’t). Incidentally, I drew this in a copic multiliner 0.1.
So this is home. Not quite the same as the old apartment, but very similar.
Part three of a series. Presumably this means I will have to make more. This is the outside of a very famous station. Well it’s not that famous but many thousands of people have heard of it, maybe millions. More people over the course of seventy years have heard of it than, say, Jordan and Peter Andre. And they’re pretty famous for not doing anything particularly noteworthy. I suppose you could say this station has spent it’s entire life on the line. The Northern Line. Anyway here it is in line and wash.
No, this isn’t the magical forest where things from London just pop up between the trees, it’s the MU bus terminal at UC Davis, which has magpied a few British things to make them feel more like Londoners. Also at this terminal – it’s the only place in California where it rains, there are gangs of tabloid hoodies waiting to scowl at you from a distance, and there’s bloody Boris Johnson with his pointless competition for pointless new routemasters. Authentic. Actually no, you can keep those things, we’ll just take the phonebox, the lamp-post and the bus. Cheers.
Hanging on the Telephone… do you remember when Saddam was executed, and there were those guys filming it on their mobiles? I wonder if that song was running through their minds for a soundtrack?
On that note… Happy Thanksgiving!
Part two in a series. This is the old convent up on Orange Hill Road, Burnt Oak, the one that provided the nuns for the adjacent St. James’ school. Opposite there was another school, Orange Hill. I went to neither. Both are now gone. My old school though, in Edgware, is also now gone, demolished, an old comprehensive replaced with a futuristic brutal looking academy. I’ll bet the bogs still fit heads down them though.
This is not Our House and it’s not in the middle of R Street, it’s the Hunt Boyer House and it’s on the corner of E Street, and 2nd, Davis. There used to be this absolutely whopping tree behind it, and I mean enormous, but they cut it down as it was leaning a bit too far to the right (never a popular thing in this town). Mind you, from the other side it looked like the tree was leaning too far to the left. Oh well, I suppose many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our own point of view. Perhaps instead of cutting it down we should have bailed it out.
I finally sat down and started a new series, much in the vein of the ‘you see, davis’ set, but this one being situated in the town where i was born (and hence called as such). actually burnt oak isn’t really a town, it’s a suburb, a part of london still lost in the middlesex postcode, long after middlesex has been wiped off the map (i suspect this is what ahmedinedjad really meant by that phrase). This is also my entry for illustration friday this week, the theme being ‘opinion’. I am glad that my opinions change over the years, that even though i am very opinionated I can still change my point of view. Or maybe my mind is just drifting along and ultimately doesn’t care about any opinion either way. Maybe we will never find out. For example, I hate arsenal, but actually felt sorry for them this week. Oh who am I kidding. Anyway i think it was muhammed ali who said, the person who thinks the same at 50 as they did at 20 has wasted 30 years of their life. Or something like that. I’ll find out when i’m 50 i guess, when i’ll probably think that was all bollocks.
The final bit of urban sketching done in New York (I also took a lot of photos for reference drawing later, but you can’t beat being there on the streets tasting the air). Here I am just off Washington Square, looking up Fifth, indeniably NYC in November. I never went up the Empire State. Always thought it would be better to go
up the Rockefeller anyway, because at least from there you can see the Empire State – I love seeing that building. I also adore the Chrysler – it’s one of those buildings that when you first see, you cannot stop taking photos of it. It could be the most beautiful modern building in the world (and I say modern meaning in the past 100 years). I sketched it from the steps of the New York Public Library, itself a fantastic old building (but not one with baby changing facilities, I might add).
One of the things I love about New York is that you always feel a little like you’re on the set of Ghostbusters. Things are so familiar. And not just Ghostbusters, but any of the million or so other movies or shows that have been set here. Not a feeling you get strolling down Edgware High Street.
I still hadn’t eaten, which is not a good thing (and surely an impossibility in the big apple), and as I previously mentioned, I wanted something ‘New York’. But then I happened across a little Belgian place, the BXL Cafe in narrow 43rd Street, which called me in to taste some Maredsous beer and some absolutely amazing moules frites (better than I have had even in 
Belgium, I might add). I drew the place (right) in copic and faber-castell brush pens; trying something different for a change. Overheard some Scottish women talking about shopping for their kids, sounded like they had saved up a long while for this trip, and I felt sorry for them because the pound has absolutely plummeted this past couple of months. I overheard a lot of British people in New York – more than I did New Yorkers – the place is choc full of them. Probably why I felt at home.
Came back down again the next day, with my wife and baby, to go to Central Park and see the amazing fall colours. We ended up getting a little lost on the Subway, which is enormous fun with a stroller by the way, and sitting in a cafe off Sixth trying to feed the baby (while overhearing, of course, English people). And I finally had cannoli, something definitely New York, and it was good. New York is good. Can’t wait to go back.
New York City, continued… I moved up Manhattan to the West Village area, hoping for some lovely old bricks and some leafy autumnal streets, and yep, that’s what I got. I think I had in mind the excellent work of Nina Johansson when choosing what to draw here (though I’m a lot scruffier). 
I sat and had a beer called magic hat outside a cool, dark little pub called the slaughtered lamb, on west 4th. A great spot to watch the world go by, and other such cliches. Oh, and to watch taxi cabs nearly have crashes, that was fun as well. I love the yellow cabs in New York – better than our London black cabs (yes, better, that’s right). Not that I ever take either. I always wonder though, is that cab the Cash Cab? My wife wondered the same thing too; we love that show. I gave up on the magic hat after about two thirds of a pint, because a big red-eyed bug had decided to come in for a swim. I photographed the work in progress, for fun. I then wandered 
over to Washington Square, admiring the trees and the bundled-up chess players. I sat and quickly drew a guitarist, as you do around here, and took in the scarf-wearing intellectual atmosphere around NYU. I wanted to go there a few years ago, to study drama perhaps, but the fees are so big. I just love the area I think. I was looking forward to this neighbourhood most of all, and I was enjoying the sunny cold and the leaves, but I realised I hadn’t eaten anything that day, so pressed on up town. And, hot dogs aside (I don’t eat them), I decided that I really wanted something that tasted of New York.
After getting my new glasses earlier this week, I decided to spend ten minutes doing a very quick drawing. I kinda lost the ‘very-quick-drawing’ thing for a bit there, in favour of the ‘very-detailed-never-time-to-finish’ style of sketching, so it was nice to give myself ten minutes to do something quick. First thing I see. With a failing micron .03 pen too. This is the corner of B and 2nd (and no, there is no apostrophe in that bakers square sign). And it actually took eight minutes.
petescully 