with my famous purple heart on

August 6, 2008August 6, 20082 Comments

It was one of those lunchtimes that merited the purple micron’s reappearance – I don’t use him nearly enough. Everything looks more sunny with the purple. These are random doors on campus (guess where folks!) with no significance at all other than they were there and i had not yet drawn them. There are lots of things here I’ve not yet drawn, but it all looks the same at the end of the day anyway. Don’t ask about the border. There were ants crawling all around me and threatening to get into my paintbox, and I was listening to the lost world of david devant. You should too. Two days to the Olympics folks! One World, One Dream (One-party state…)

But even better: two weeks until the footy, oh man, summer’s long…

out along the bay

August 4, 20085 Comments

SF weekend, part 6: the journey home. Looking at my sketchbook there were some very green UC Davis drawings, followed by some very blue and yellow delta region from the train sketches, followed by some colourful bright blue, yellow, red, green ones from day one in the city.

Then there were the muted, foggy ones, in browns and greys and dull greens. the journey home saw a slight bit of fog clearing, giving us the colour schemes of above. I never noticed all of this until later.

There’s Coit Tower, and the Bay Bridge, sketched as I waited for the amtrak bus to emeryville (I wonder how many google searches for that bus will now end up here?), plus san pablo bay, and some guy reading on the train. and the business card to the previously mentioned awesome zine shop in the mission I stopped in.

To illustrate those very differently coloured days, here are a couple of photos of my sketchbook:

extraneous details you can’t live without

August 2, 2008August 2, 20082 Comments

SF trip, part 5: I got off the bus at the Castro, the city’s gay quarter, and pottered around bookstores and past sidewalk cafes, before placing stool on kerb and drawing, of all things, this rusty truck above. “You drew a car?” my wife exclaimed later when she saw it. It’s true, I do avoid drawing vehicles, but this one was so interesting, and I was inspired by other vehicular drawings I’d seen online. Time was pressing, so I had a (fairly unsatisfying) late lunch at the Bagdad Cafe before walking down 16th and finally back to the Mission. Last (and only) time I’d been was November, and I wanted to go back, if anything for a burrito, but mostly to sketch.

I sat myself on the slopes of Mission Dolores Park, listening to loud latino radio blasted across the fields where local lads played football (not a jumper for a goalpost in site, though), and art students nursed hangovers with beer, being all social and shit. The fog hung low over the city behind, obscuring many of the tall buildings downtown. A guy sat to my left tapped away furiously on his mac book while his dog asked passing strangers to play with him; further back, another group of people looked equally dangerous and uninterested; not far off, a bearded hippy wrote something negative about yoga. And I got my paint set out and sketched on the slope.

I wandered about on Valencia, looking in more bookstores and record boutiques, as well as the odd gallery, before a trip down Mission and into Central America, ending up at last at Needles and Pens to look through their vast array of indie zines (and purchase one or two). By this point I was ridiculously tired, and I had neglected to write down the train time back to Davis, so I forewent the burrito and hopped on the 14 bus.

I did draw the picture below, on a postcard, which I have subsequently mailed to a friend in the UK, who I think would have enjoyed going out sketching in San Francisco. I always do.

all on a misty morning

August 1, 2008August 1, 2008Leave a comment

SF trip, part 4: After a fairly good sleep, I got up on sunday morning and found the nearest place on Polk that sold enormously sticky custard-filled pastries, and came across a little shop called “You Say Tomato”, which specializes in British (and Irish) foods. And to my delight, they had a can of Lilt!

Yes, Lilt, the pineapple and grapefruit fizzy drink, you can’t get it over here and it’s the perfect sunday morning (when you think you might get a hangover) beverage. They had other stuff, Tizer, Irn-Bru, and I purposely didn’t take too much of a look around in case I was waylaid by loads of cadbury’s chocolates, but I saw a man carrying five or six cans of Heinz Baked Beans: pretty obvious he was British. I found an interesting corner and drew the picture above while drinking my Lilt, carefully removing all of the cars to give the impression that SF has more parking than it really does.

Unlike the day before, Sunday was pretty cool and very foggy, which was a welcome change. I got on the bus and was changing at fillmore, in the bit with all the cute little shops and cafes, when I saw this movie theatre below, and decided to draw that too, in extremely muted sepia tinted colours. And I never did get that hangover.

“i am a lady and i like to do ladies’ things”

July 29, 2008July 29, 20081 Comment

Part 2 of my SF weekend: I wanted to go and draw things in San Francisco that I hadn’t drawn before, and I’d never been to Alamo Square, but had seen it on so many postcards.

I spent a while up there, enjoying the incredible view and finally drawing some of the painted ladies, those big, um, (victorian, edwardian, i don’t know) houses. I’d taken a bus over to Fillmore, stopping by Japantown on the way, and walking down through the historic jazz part of town to get there. As it was my second drawing there I decided to add colour later, so the black and white version is below. Incredible sunshine, but (even with reapplying sunscreen and travelling in shadows as much as possible) I got a bit burnt. Bugger; always seems to happen to me in San Francisco, but never in oven-hot Davis. Took the 22 out to sketch the bridge after this (go back to part 1).

These are the unpainted ladies.

no fears, no worries, just a golden country

July 28, 20083 Comments

I spent the weekend in San Francisco, joining the dots, travelling on buses, walking through to my soles and drawing. I noticed that time travels extremely fast when you cannot decide where to go; this was my first SF sketching trip of 2008 and I wanted to make the most of it, while covering some new ground, making discoveries. I discovered that the Nob Hill hotel is staffed by nobs, for one thing. Above: a very famous bridge. This time I walked beneath it and around to the rocky Pacific coastline, what an incredible sight. Below: first drawings of the day, courtesy of the amtrak train. There’s my muni bus transfer, there; a kind driver gave me one that lasted all day. I travelled by bus everywhere in the city for less than a quid. Ever had that in London? Didn’t think so. More to come.

just the same as all the rest

July 22, 2008July 22, 20084 Comments

It’s summer, there is no thai soup, and that means I sketch more at lunchtimes. Lately of course the weather has been too hot and smoky, but now it’s a bit cooler, and so it’s outside to draw all the same stuff I always draw at work. This is the Outdoor Adventures building: seems like I’m drawing something new, but looks the same as all those bike barn drawings i did (see right) – because it’s the other side of the same building. It’s currently Summer Sessions on campus, so there are more students around than you’d expect in a break. It’s a mixture of strangely quiet and too busy.

hold the front page

July 21, 2008July 22, 2008Leave a comment

I hate the first page of a new sketchbook; never know what to draw, for some reason. So on opening my third watercolour moleskine I just drew what was right in front of me, on my desk. There’s a glass, almost completely empty (or very slightly full, depending on your worldview, ooh link that to bush’s take on the economy). There’s the Beatles crossing Abbey Road (trivia question for you – are they going towards or away from the studios?). There’s Magneto, master of magnetism, rendered (in cruel irony) in plastic. Scissors I bought six years ago in Aix. A couple of microns, plus a copic. The pc screen (watching “south park” online). A Spurs badge – I’ve had this since I was ten, bought at a game at the Lane in ’86 when we beat Man City – it’s known as the “lucky spurs badge”, and is a famous relic (my mate Tel will tell you, should you see him). I wish it would still work, we seem to be selling most of the team. There’s Greedo, having reeked revenge on Han Solo, but with Cyclops behind him about to shoot first (I just had an image of Cyclops shooting Greedo under the table and wow, it was not pretty). And a half-hidden Vader behind him in the shadows. And there’s a couple of post-it notes with stuff about milk supply and stuff on them.

Now that’s out of the way (and you’re thinking I’m a geek, well maybe I am, or just untidy), I can move on with the sketchbook. Back to trees and buildings. It’s a little cooler here in Davis now, and not as smoky.

your architects were madmen, your builders sane but drunk

July 16, 2008July 16, 20087 Comments

Which is the odd one out? Oh I love that game in “Have I got News For You”.

Answers on a postcard, in the meantime I will concoct a convoluted answer.

Images of London, for a project. Do not adjust your tv sets, this is black and white. No, I haven’t lost my coloured paints.

outside the temple

June 30, 2008Leave a comment

An ink attack on the page by the Copic pen, fresh from drawing every single line in fleet street, on night two of ‘sleep-training’ (it went very well too). I wanted to draw more bare trees again, but this time with buildings behind them, so I went back to a photo from London back when I lived there, and was studying nearby this place: Temple Church, off Fleet Street, former HQ of the Knight’s Templar, now a busy destination for tourists bugging the priest about the (inappropriately titled) Da Vinci Code, and medieval students looking for William Marshall (guess which of these two groups I fell into).