skyscrapers and the golden gate bridge

August 14, 20192 Comments

Perspective, detail. I like those things. I arrived early in San Francisco, and found a spot on the Embarcadero looking up Mission Street. I remember wanting to sketch this view years ago when I used to wait for the Amtrak bus here, the only that no longer stops there, but I am glad I waited a few years as there are way more buildings to sketch in the background now. I went to the Ferry Building, but the place which sells the nice bomboneri and cannoli I like so much was no longer there, sadly. So I got a travel book to read on the train at Book Passage. Reading doesn’t make me fat, though it weighs down my bag a bit. Actually the book I got that day, a collection of travel stories, I also took to Europe with me and read some while on the rails, but I left it on a bookshelf in a hotel in Brussels for someone else to enjoy. I was being weighed down, so had to get rid of some unneeded items. The stories I kept in my head, however I don’t really remember that many of them now, except for one, about a couple staying at a hotel in Tierra del Fuego or somewhere, and the electricity all went out, so they took that opportunity to engage in a little bit of what used to be called ‘how’s your father’ back in the 50s, only to be embarrassingly interrupted by another family coming into the wrong room. That’s all I remember. There was another story about a music writer travelling to Prague who got taken for a ride by a local who had an automatic gun, but let’s get back to my own less-interesting stories of travel shall we. I stood at this spot in San Francisco and drew this picture, and then went somewhere else. There, that’s the whole story.

I ended up at Golden Gate Bridge. I haven’t been there in ages, not to sketch anyway. It was a nice day, a bit windy, much cooler than Davis. There is something about standing somewhere so iconic and impressive, you feel really lucky to have this within reach. I remember when Magneto used it to get his villainous brotherhood from the north bay over to Alcatraz, all because his friend Juggernaut said he couldn’t swim. I mean a boat would probably have been easier but the Master of Magnetism does like grand gestures. Shame he lost his powers before he could help rebuild. I do like X-Men: The Last Stand, despite the clumsy script. But “Charles always wanted to build bridges!” is a classic cheesy line, even for him. He just couldn’t think of a suitable line for a boat. “Charles would be ferry impressed!” Enough X-Men chat. Actually I am reminded of when, in the comics, Magneto (him again) used his powers to prevent an earthquake in the city, and also when he sat up on Mt Tamalpais nearby and went deep into his powers to project them into space and rescue Kitty Pryde from the big planet-bullet thing, oh comics. Anyway, the Golden Gate Bridge. I included Fort Point down below because that is where I was headed. I have never been to Fort Point before, a building that predates the bridge itself. It was built at the height of the Gold Rush, to protect the Bay and as a formidable naval defense for the young United States. I enjoyed it in there, I didn’t sketch any of the cannons but I liked wandering about and peering through the small windows in the thick brick walls, and catching glimpses of the bridge. It was a lovely day, lots of sunshine, but super windy. I sketched up on the roof there, before climbing down the steep narrow staircase that made me feel a bit nervous. I got down, and then took a nice long walk along Crissy Field. More to come…

sketch the day away

August 13, 2019August 13, 20195 Comments

But before we get to the European trip, I still have some other sketches to post, other stories to tell. Galaxy’s Edge in June, San Francisco in July, and a whole bunch of sketches at an Indigo Girls concert that I probably won’t post for some time yet. I sometimes think that the blur of life is not a story worth telling, or maybe one not worth listening to, but I suppose that the reason I like to sketch is because everything is worth taking an interest in. Sometimes I’m not sure this makes a lot of sense. I like to draw to keep my habit of drawing sharp, to push myself further in my sketching, but mostly because I just like to draw things that I see. It is ok not to draw. It is ok not to feel the need to sketch experiences, just because we have the ability to do so. But drawing illustrates the world I live in. It gives me a chance to spend time looking, really looking, observing and understanding, even with my poor eyesight and distracted mind. I look at other people’s work and I get inspired to keep going, to do more, to expand my skill set and keep sketching, but it’s hard not to compare, to feel like I need to ‘catch up’, to get frustrated at my own deficiencies and inefficiencies, and forget what actually makes my own sketching unique to me. I go through phases where I’m highly uninspired by my own work, maybe it’s the paper, maybe it’s the materials, maybe I need to mix it all up again, maybe I am drawing myself into a corner. Other times I feel like I knock it out of the park inning after inning while blowing bubble gum. A few times I am so pleased with a sketch that I hear Hermione Granger’s voice in my head saying, “you’re a great wizard Harry.” Other times I get so frustrated with a sketch that I hear Severus Snape saying “ten points from Gryffindor”. Sometimes I just get bored drawing Davis; sorry Davis. If it makes you feel better I am sure I would get bored drawing London too, even London, if I lived back there. Sometimes I get bored of drawing, for about five minutes or so. What’s it for, all this sketching? Because I like sketching, that is always the answer. It’s not for a book, it’s not for a workshop or a demo, it’s not in the hope of selling it, it’s not for anyone else. I show it here because I think it’s important to share our sketches and inspire each other, as I always learned from seeing the sketches of others online, and seeing their progressions too, seeing how they learned. That is how Urban Sketchers started, and why one of the core tenets was sharing your work for others to see. We learn from each other. That’s why I like to run sketchcrawls as non-judgemental spaces, places to come and draw and encourage each other, just enjoy the art of location drawing. We pick up all sorts of things from seeing others work. My love of slightly shaky lines for example comes from something I saw Martha McEvoy doing on a sketchcrawl in Berkeley in like, 2007, and I just liked the style. Of course in the above sketch it’s partly because the train is moving but that then seeps into the sketch, as opposed to taking something away. The experiences you feel are part of the result. So anyway where am I going with all of this? Yes, why we sketch, or why I sketch. We humans are complicated beings and for me, sketching is mostly about finding my calm place. Sometimes I beat myself up about going somewhere and worrying about sketching too much, like I need a certain number of sketches before I can feel satisfied. Like as if I need to show people afterwards that look, I got five good sketches so it was worth expending the day, whereas actually I could have just spent a bit less time sketching and more time looking through the corners of that old bookstore. It’s good to find a balance. Often when I travel with my family I find the balance by getting up early and sketching before they wake up, or sketching when they are resting, or even after they have gone to bed I will go out and night-time sketch. Anyway, there are days, like on the 6th of July this year, when I get up super early and feel the need to catch a 6:25 train out of Davis and down to San Francisco for a day of exploring and sketching. So that’s what I did. Am I bored of sketching on the Amtrak train yet? Evidently not, so there’s the sketch, with a little bit of story to go with it. It’s not story in which anything happens, there’s no great anecdote or a hilarious yarn about a ticket inspector’s wig falling off and being stolen by a chihuahua, but nevertheless it’s words on a page. I have more sketches from the day to come, and I covered a lot of ground that day, but I’ll save all that for another post.

windows of colour

July 16, 2019July 15, 20193 Comments

Ahead of the Amsterdam Urban Sketching Symposium, I decided I needed to deal with my paintbox. I rearranged the colours, took some out, added some in, refreshed them all, and this is my paletter this summer. These are all Winsor and Newton watercolour paints, mostly Cotman but with one or two Artist’s ones in there too. I like using this, the deluxe sketchers box, it fits into my hand or attached to the other page of the sketchbook with a rubber band pretty well. I needed to make a guide to the colours in case I forget, so that’s what this is. This could be a new advent calendar, 24 colours, actually that is not a bad idea. I have some new brushes I just bought as well, bigger than I usually use, so that I can paint on bigger paper for some of the workshops I am taking. I got some 11×14 Fabriano paper, which is not I must say really urban sketching material, being really big an not able to fit into a small bag. However I’m keen try something new, and the big pad of paper just about fits into my gym bag (but it only barely fits into my new suitcase, which is small). This paint set however is very small and compact, and fits a lot of stuff in there, the way I like it.

indian motorcycle at fisherman’s wharf

July 15, 2019July 15, 20192 Comments

I was in San Francisco a couple of times recently, one with the family (to watch Hamilton) and one by myself (to sketch loads of stuff). On the first one, we stayed over in Fisherman’s Wharf (not always my favourite part of town, but there is lots to see). I only managed one sketch, as I spent a lot of my time playing X-Men vs Street Fighter at the Musee Mecanique. I love that place. Also, it was cold! We were escaping the heat of Davis, but the city was pretty chilly. I drew this one sketch of a very elaborate looking motorcycle parked near Ghirardelli Square. “Indian Motorcycles” is the manafacturer. I was going to colour ir in, but it was cold and I was getting tired standing there. I try to be more conscious of my body saying “time to rest Pete!” these days. Yet I am still keeping up being more active, with the gym and exercising thing. We did go to Ghirardelli’s that evening, and I had this enormous chocolatey sundae thing called a ‘treasure island’ which amazingly did not derail my diet. See, you can diet and still eat massive chocolate indulgences every now and then. This was after I had pizza and beer for dinner. The pizza-beer-chocolate sundae and arcade-games diet – hey, it’s working. Now, the only other sketch I did that weekend was while waiting for ages at SFO for my Global Entry interview. Global Entry is like a fast-pass when I come back into the country. However I had to wait quite a while for my turn, so we missed out on going to Alcatraz. At least Hamilton was really good, very entertaining.

“P’atwin means people”

July 14, 2019July 15, 2019Leave a comment

This is a nice spot in the UC Davis Arboretum, it is the Native American Contemplative Garden. This garden honors the Patwin people. Davis and the surrounding areas are part of the original Patwin land. The garden was designed by Bill Wright, a Patwin Elder, along with his family and students in the UC Davis Native American Studies department, among others. At the end of the winding stonework and path is a small column of rock inscribed with the names of Patwin people who lived on this land and were removed the missions between 1817 and 1836. Around the garden are stones with some Patwin words inscribed on them, such as “Ye’te we” (“Dream”) and “Mi muho” (“You sing”). “P’atwin means people”, as it says on one of the stones. I had never sketched here before, so I came along to sit in the shade and try to imagine California’s past, before the Europeans came along.

Gradieu

July 11, 2019July 11, 20191 Comment

A couple of weekends ago, at the end of the month of June, the Davis Graduate – known popularly as ‘The Grad’ – closed its doors for the last time. The Grad had been a Davis staple for decades. I mean, actual decades – it opened in 1972, meaning it is older than me. It’s a popular night-out dancing spot, and lots of people came here to watch sports in the daytime on one of the 467 TV screens (ok not that many but as you can see above, they have them all over the place, big and small). I remember coming here years ago early on a Saturday morning, before we had the Premier League in our cable package, and watching Spurs lose against Sunderland back in the bad old days when that would happen a lot, and you would get a little portable speaker to put on your table and just look toward whichever screen had your game on, while others watched Hockey, Golf, Curling or something even more obscure like West Ham. I have to be honest, I never really liked coming to the Grad, partly because every time I’d come to watch Spurs we would lose to some terrible team, but also because I could never feel that comfortable with those big wooden tables and benches and the screens all around, the food orders being called out over the microphone, the long line for the bar, and the lack of windows – when you walk back outside into the hot Davis brightness it’s a jarring feeling. On the few occasions we came here to watch World Cup or Euro matches, there was usually a big and noisy crowd, and the space always just felt awkward. So I never really came here that much, and I never came in the evenings when they would have their dance nights, because if I felt awkward when there was just sports and drink, adding dancing into the mix was never going to make it more appealing to me. However, I knew how much people loved the place, and when I first came to Davis people would always tell me I should go to the Grad, even people at other bars would say the same. I know someone who DJed there who has many fond memories, and I dare say that students over the years have as many great memories of the Grad as my old QMW cohort has of the Drapers Arms on the Queen Mary campus in Mile End (who am I kidding, we don’t remember anything…). I did sketch here a couple of times over the years, the last time being on a Sunday afternoon in 2013, when I draw a 1.3 page spread of the bar, while Marseille played Monaco on a screen next to Judge Judy. So on the very last Saturday of the Grad I came back, and sketched the scene above. My feelings about the Grad had not changed much, I still felt a bit awkward and closed-in, I had only the one drink because the line at the bar seemed really long (I didn’t mind that, I’m still on a diet), but there were lots of people there of all ages enjoying themselves and conversing. Lots of baseball caps. People playing pool away to my right, people eating burgers and fries, people drinking cold beer. I did sketch the outside one lunchtime a couple of weeks before, after I had heard that the Grad would be closing down. I stood in the shade of a tree on a very hot day, and this place was awkward to sketch even from the outside. Although I never went there very often, I am sad that the Grad is closing. This whole University Mall area will be redeveloped, a little bit of the old character of Davis will be lost, another drinking spot confined to the history books.

Here’s a good article in the UC Davis magazine with some old photos and memories from former students: https://magazine.ucdavis.edu/the-graduate-closes/

ARC de Triomphe

July 4, 20194 Comments

I have a lot of sketches to scan, but I’ve been a bit scanning-shy lately. I did a load of sketches in one evening at the Mondavi Center, which will take me ages to scan. But, I’m back. Anyway, this is the ARC, the main activities and recreation center at UC Davis. I was never an ARC member (gym? what is that?) until just recently, when I decided I needed to lose some weight so that I could fit into some of my less baggy football shirts. I set myself a target, 20 pounds in three months, with today being the target date. I had a plan to make changes to my diet, not overdoing it but keeping more track of it, drinking more water, not snacking during the day, not skipping meals. I also decided to walk more, which has been amazing. I used to walk loads, back when I lived in England, I loved walking. I ride my bike here in Davis, but because of the heat I usually say, ah no walking for me, too hot. The past few months I have been walking to work (and back) and now I think nothing of it. I’ve been going on long evening walks around the North Davis Green Belt, seeing all the other walkers and joggers, tut-tutting at the dog owners who don’t understand the Davis Leash Laws and think they don’t apply to them, listening to podcasts about 1990s football and formula 1, taking photos of the sky. I also started going to the gym, which was never ever a thing for me. The first time I went in I didn’t want to appear like a total newbie so I’m like, ah yes, the elliptical, yes, oh I know this, yep, definitely, yes I know it’s not working properly thanks, I’m actually just testing it for a minute before getting on this exercise bike, yes thanks I know the seat is too high I like it like that, I do know how to change it I just don’t want to. I’m more used to it now. I use the same three or four exercise machines, I haven’t touched the weights or anything like that yet, I might need to go to one of those beginner’s orientations. I like to listen to podcasts or even watch stuff on Netflix, I’m feeling quite comfortable about it now. I have my new gym bag. I even got, which was a very fancy step for me, an Apple Watch. Normally I use a Lego Watch so this is quite an upgrade. The Apple Watch tracks all my walks and runs and everything. It even tells me off if I have been sitting down too long or if it thinks I need to breathe. I actually love it. I’ve been hitting all my steps targets, and tracking my weight and calories, which has been fun, as I like to keep stats. Anyway today, July 4, I hit the target I was aiming for, right on time. I even had to buy new shorts. Happy birthday USA!

nike mercurial cleats

June 19, 2019June 19, 2019Leave a comment

Continuing with the soccer theme, and the long-running story of drawing every single one of my son’s shoes since birth (it’s an interesting tale), this is my son’s current football boot (aka soccer cleat in the US), the Nike Mercurial. He likes his Nike shoes. I wear a lot of Adidas shoes personally, I like their fit, he really likes the feel of the Nikes. He plays a lot of soccer, his AYSO Select season just finished recently with the Davis World Cup and he is now doing various soccer camps this summer. I’ll be back coaching in the Fall season, I’m looking forward to all the practices and planning. Anyway, sketching your footwear is a good way to record your life. I recommend it, for those of you who are in the ‘I’m not sure what to draw’ mood (I get in that mood a lot these days). You spend a lot of your life in shoes, they literally carry your weight and all your experiences. Your soul in your soles. As my mum always said, make sure you buy a good bed and good shoes, ‘cos if you’re not in one you’re in the other.

it wasn’t to be, this time

June 18, 2019June 18, 20191 Comment

It felt like a World Cup game. I don’t want to talk about it. I’m just glad we got there, we really shouldn’t have even made it out of the groups. That quarter final against City with the late VAR screen ‘no goal’, that dramatic late goal at Ajax after being three down on aggregate, the fact we didn’t have a home stadium until late in the season, the fact we never bought a single player in a year and a half, it’s a whopping great achievement getting to the Champions League final, our first ever one, my beloved Tottenham Hotspur. It was a wild ride. The final itself was killed off by a dubious penalty decision in the first 30 seconds. Liverpool sat back and soaked us up easily, but both teams looked like they hadn’t played for three weeks. I had all of my Tottenham shirts, which number a good many, hung up around the house like a museum of football kits. I made a couple of banners of all the old home kits, we played the old Spurs music and watched old Spurs videos all morning. I never thought we’d actually win it, years of watching real World Cup games has taught me enough of that, but Liverpool have won it enough times. It would have felt better to lose to a non-English team really. Oh well. We can say that Poch should have done this or Harry should have done that, but at the end of the day it’s a football game and one wins, one loses, and there you go. That’s life. I had always said that if Spurs win the Champions League I would put on all of my Tottenham shirts at once and run around Davis singing Chas and Dave. Well the weather was in the high 90s so at least I didn’t have to do that.

I had a walk downtown that evening though, minus all the shirts, minus the Chas or the Dave. I just needed to sketch and have a pint, and hopefully it would be somewhere that wasn’t showing a replay of the final. I stopped into Uncle Vito’s, who were showing golf, and sketched the above before walking home. Oh well. At least Arsenal lost their final too (unfortunately it was to Chelsea), but that means no North London Supercup. Some other time maybe.

hart warming

June 13, 20191 Comment

It is that time of year again when I draw Hart Hall again. This was sketched last week, stood in the shade of the Shields Library at UC Davis, the weather is getting more Davisesque and roasting my brain away. I was supposed to go to a meeting today in this building, but I was in a different meeting instead so I forgot. The meeting I was in was far more important though, and didn’t require walking through hot heat. I want to go out and draw more at the moment but the heatful weather is giving me reservations. If I were in another hotted up place like Seville or Rome I would have no compunction about sketching the hot city but when it’s over a hundred in Davis my brain says No, Don’t Bother, You’ve Sketched It Before. The initial flurry of sketchtivity this year has tailed off a bit, and my busy weekends have meant a lack of sketchcrawl organizationing. There will be some upcoming monthlies I promise you, though the one I had planned in San Francisco will not take place for a while longer yet, maybe in the late Falling Summer or the early Autumnal Fall. I’ve been planning a themed sketchical history tour in North Beach, I’ve been drawing the map and everything, but alas life finds a way, so I am putting it on the backbencher for now. I’ve also been planning a Sacramento Sketching crawl as well, mostly because I want to sketch there again but also because it is fun to meet other sketchers there. It is always hotter in Sacramento than Davis though, I find. I did go to the new Star Wars land at Disneyland last weekend though, that was fun, I will post the couple of quick sketches I did there at some point. Anyway, this is Hart Hall, which is not despite the name named after my old drama teacher at school, whose name was Mr Hart. I don’t think Mr Hart thought too highly of me, if I’m honest, I don’t think he thought I was altogether serious about the dramatic arts. He may have had a point, given that I wrote and performed two musicals at school with songs like “Don’t F**k with me, I’m Robin Hood” and “Get Lost, Dracula”. To be fair, they were obviously genius. I remember him getting very cross with me and my friend Terry once though for coming up with very serious characters in class, but giving them silly names like Freddy Ready and Todd Cod. I mean, what is wrong with Todd Cod? If I ever meet someone called Todd Cod I am going to be so pleased. I did work with a guy once whose last name was Reddy but I can’t remember his first name and it definitely wasn’t Freddy. I have met people over the years with much sillier names. I won’t name names here, but they definitely existed.