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!

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.

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.

my train of thought

February 24, 2024Leave a comment

Last weekend I took an afternoon at the California State Railroad Museum. There was a big rainstorm coming in and I thought that’s a good place to spend a rainy day. It ended up not raining until the evening, but I still got to draw a lot of trains so that was nice. I also got the day before some new glasses, these ‘progressive’ lenses, that are better for up-close at the bottom (ie, when looking down at my sketchbook) and better for distance up to, however they are also blurry looking down at the floor or in my peripheral vision. It takes getting used to and it’s making me a bit dizzy. Anyway I wanted to try out drawing in a lower light environment like this. It was frustrating at first, and I tried to switch back to my other glasses, but my up-close was not as good in low light. anyway I soldiered on, I had engines to draw. The one above I drew in the brown fountain pen ink, it’s one of the first big locomotive engines you see in the museum. Seeing these remind me of the plastic train set toys I had as a kid, that looked nothing like any train I’d seen in England, but I imagined them barreling across the vast American West. They can be a bit complicated to draw, stretching the observation skills a bit, but my strain was really in the new glasses as much as anything. (Also I’ve never liked drawing wheels).

I walked about looking at it all, the history of the West before me. I’m really into trains and always dream of making a long train journey, like the California Zephyr (which stops in Davis as well as Sacramento) heading out towards Chicago. I read Murder on the Orient Express recently and became obsessed with those really high-end trains as well, looking at videos online of the super expensive train routes to exotic places. Silly. I do love a train journey though. We used to come to this museum quite a lot when my son was very young, a toddler, and look around before making a beeline for the section with all the toy trains, that was the best bit. We got rid of his old wooden train tracks and trains and bridges a long time ago, I used to love setting those up myself. Those were fun moments. He was really into Thomas the Tank Engine, as were most kids weren’t they (and it used to bug me when people over here would say “Thomas Train” like seriously, do you even watch it?). Ringo didn’t do the voices over here, and the Fat Controller was called “Sir Topham Hat” in America, which is probably a bit nicer. For the panorama sketch above, I sat on a bench in the main atrium and drew the scene as best I could, I was already getting quite tired. There were families with their young kids excited about the big engines, and on their way to play with all the toy trains, that was us a long time ago.

Th train engine I drew was this one, the Virginia and Truckee No. 18 “The Dayton”. I am not much of a trainspotter and cannot remember all the models and information. It’s an impressive engine this though. When I was a kid there was this trope that kids wanted to be a train driver (by the 1980s I think that was the sort of thing your grandparents would say), but I always wanted to be a train passenger, it’s a more reachable ambition. There was also (and still is maybe) the image of the trainspotter in their anorak, people still use the word ‘anorak’ to describe anyone sufficiently geeky to be uncool, with their thermos and their thick glasses. I mean, I’ve always been in the anorak camp myself, I wander about with a sketchbook drawing whatever, and I love to draw things like trains because they represent the human spirit of discovery and ingenuity, curiosity and story. Imagine if we had gone straight from the world of wagons to freeways and not had that great idea of train travel in between? The world is better for the train.

trees before the super bowl

February 21, 2024February 20, 20242 Comments

I really like drawing two-page panoramas, as you have probably realized, but the format of my blog is not super conducive to looking at them. It shrinks them to around 600 pixels across, making it a bit too small. You can click on the image of course and see it in full widescreen glory on my Flickr page, and without all the fairly tedious accompanying text. I feel the need to write a few things down here, very self-indulgently and only occasionally caring about ending sentences, but over there I’m like Silent Bob. I could change the format of my blog, but I really like this format, it works for me when I’m reading through it. I’ve looked at other layouts, but they’re all a bit bloated, not for me guv. For me it’s still 2007 in terms of blog formats. That time went by fast. I wish my eyes still looked like they did in 2007. I’m glad Spurs don’t play like they did in 2007. Anyway, back to the drawing. This is in old North Davis, corner of 7th and B, on a bright Sunday after my birthday (whatever that is) I got out on the bike for a bit and sat at a table outside a school and draw the scene above. It was the trees that drew me in, especially the two on each side, which were textured on these dark orange-brown leaves wrapped around their trunks. I was fascinated by those textures, and I loved the shapes of the bare trees behind. It’s what I appreciate about this time of year, right before the blossom and the buds. I sat there quite a while, until it was time to head home and watch some of the Super Bowl. It was already halfway done by the time I got home, but I didn’t really watch it, until late in the game, and that’s only because it was the San Francisco 49ers and they are my wife’s family’s team. We watched it with the Spongebob commentary and graphics, because it was a bit more fun. It was annoying how often they cut to Taylor Swift, who is the most famous singer in the history of the world at the moment (I have as yet been unable to convince my family that she is a descendant of Jonathan Swift, and was named after former England manager Graham Taylor, which is why she has songs called “Do I Not Like That” and “Can We Not Knock It”). We had listened to a whole one of her albums in the car ride back from Truckee, and I swiftly fell asleep. I’ve got nothing against Swift though, she is alright, seems like a good person. I just didn’t want the team her current boyfriend (I think he’s called Chelsea or Millwall or something) plays for to win though, because we were cheering for the 49ers. Actually I didn’t really mind. People watch the Super Bowl for the adverts anyway, that’s what they say. Tottenham have as good a chance of winning the Super Bowl as the Premier League. More maybe, since they play NFL games at our amazing stadium in N17 (which I learned is the most northerly stadium ever to host an NFL game). I was disappointed at the end though, even though it was one of the most exciting and thrilling ends to a game in history, when the Subaru advert just pipped the Geico commercial at the last minute to take the W, as they say here. Sports are funny, you win Bowls, Cups, even Wooden Spoons, you could end up with a whole kitchen set. Chance would be a fine thing, following Tottenham.

making all his nowhere plans

February 16, 2024Leave a comment

The start to 2024 has been long and stressful, and full of tiredness and wishing to be far away somewhere with a sketchbook and my headphones on, nowhere that I have to be. But you need the busy times to keep you busy, I could just do with a lot fewer headaches from the rest of the world. My way of handling it is and has always been to go into my sketchbook and draw things, I’ve said before I think it is a way of getting a little control of a small bit of the world by putting it onto some paper. Anyway on this one weekend day of rest, not a lot going on, I went downtown, had a milkshake, and chose a stretch of street I don’t think I’d drawn before, along D Street. It was sunny, and I’m drawn to those big leafless trees at this time of year, with the lovely bark textures. I listen to podcasts when sketching, probably something about the Beatles. I noticed a police car going up and down the street a few times, I don’t think he was looking at me sketching but you always get a bit paranoid. It was a nice day, a lot of people about downtown, pretty much as every other day. All these days blend into one don’t they. Another two-page panorama sketch, another for the book of landscape Davis sketches that I want to make some day. If I ever get there. I remember at a talk I gave years ago a lot of people saying they’d like to see a book just of my Davis sketches, but I still haven’t done it. I just never have the time to figure it out. So I keep drawing instead, and working. I spend a lot of energy trying to solve problems, come up with plans and schemes, try to unlock solutions, but I can never really figure out my own ones. So I keep drawing.

first street, ten years later

February 5, 2024February 5, 2024Leave a comment

Last week, we held our monthly ‘Let’s Draw Davis!’ sketchcrawl down at Davis Commons. It was an overcast day, not rainy as it had been, but not sunny. Colours had to be a nit muted, not as bold. We had a good group of sketchers there of all ages, it was nice to see so many people out with their sketchbooks. I decided that I wanted to revisit a scene that I had drawn exactly ten years ago (ten years and a few days, that is), looking across 1st Street towards where the Natsoulas Gallery and the frat houses are. You can click on the image for a closer view. It has changed a fair bit in that decade (haven’t we all). I stood in pretty much the exact same spot as in 2014, though I think I must have been seated back then. The Natsoulaas has seen some big changes – the large cat outside, as well as the big colourful dog (just offscreen here), where before there was a big colourful man figure. The big frat house next door is still there, but is part of the TKE (Tau Kappa Epsilon) fraternity now. The building to the left of the pole (which I have used as the middle of the page both times) is new, and home to the ΘΞ fraternity (Theta Xi, or ‘The Taxi’ as I’d always say). They used to be in the building TKE is in now, plus a couple of other smaller houses next door, which have been knocked down. Well in my 2014 panorama, they were still there, as you can see below. It was much sunnier in January 2014 too. There were more trees then, but that teensy tree just to the left of the street signs is now a lot taller. Anyway, I was just interested in seeing the change after a decade. I was ten years younger, belly a bit thinner, hair a bit redder, eyes a bit younger, plus a whole load of other physical or personality things I’m not going into now. I’m still drawing in my sketchbook, I don’t know if I’ve realistically improved much but I’m still going. Stop worrying, keep on sketching. The sketchbook is a place to record not so much a place, as a point in time.

I also recorded some people too. While eating lunch (a huge chicken sandwich at a newish eating place I had never seen before) I sketch some people with my brown ink fountain pen. Not a sketchcrawl unless there are a few people sketched. I spent most of my sketchcrawl working on the panorama piece. At the end we all got together and did our usual show and tell. Someone asked if we could put all our sketchbooks on the floor, like they do on other sketchcrawls, but I don’t like that, because the best way to see peoples’ work is not standing nearly six foot above it looking down onto a damp sidewalk. (I also don’t like the feeling of comparison when doing that, always makes me feel a bit shy). I know, I’m a bit of an outsider here not going along with the whole “throwdown” thing, it’s become a tradition now, and people like to get that shot to share on Facebook, but we always like to take a group photo at the end where you see the sketcher with their sketchbook. The thing I always loved with the original Worldwide Sketchcrawls, especially the ones in San Francisco when Enrico Casarosa was doing them, was that at the end you would mingle with other sketchers and look through each others books (because more than likely you would have multiple sketches that you had done, not just one particular page) and just chat with everyone. We’ve kind of evolved into a group show and tell almost by accident, but anyone that doesn’t feel comfortable sharing their sketches doesn’t have to. On my very first worldwide sketchcrawl in 2005 (when my fellow Davis sketchers Alison and Allan were there) I was too shy to even go to the final meet-up. Anyway, we will be holding more Davis sketchcrawls in 2024, dates coming soon.

Walker Hall, ten years later

January 25, 2024January 25, 2024Leave a comment

I have been getting the ‘on this day ten years ago I drew this’ bug, because it’s a decade since my worryingly over-productive January 2024 set of drawings around Davis (I mean, January was always my busiest month at work, yet I had the energy to produce a lot of two-page drawings that month). It’s always a good moment to reflect on the changes. This week my then-six-year-old son became a sixteen-year-old son, which scares me to think how fast that’s happened. I’m working in the same department, just in a very different job, but I’m still plugging away with drawing campus on my lunchtimes. I’ve published two books since then, had a successful retrospective sketchbook show, been interviewed by the chancellor of the university, done a lot of travelling, and there’s been a pandemic in the middle. The world has been an ‘Interesting Times’ sort of place in the past decade, give me the decade before that any day. But looking at just one spot and tracking the changes, this view of Walker Hall above, the new modern Graduate Center in the historic refurbished building, is a good example. Regular followers will have seen my sketches of this building as it was slowly turned into the center that we see today, and many of my in-progress sketches are still on display in the lobby there, which is a massive honour (as a former grad coordinator I always maintained good relations with Grad Studies, and it was the previous Dean Jeff Gibeling who gave me the idea to draw the progress of the construction when it was first announced a decade or so ago in a meeting). I think I may have already known the future plans when I drew the panorama below, or maybe that was a little afterwards, but this view was always one I wanted to draw like this, and of all the panoramas I drew in January 2014 this one was my favourite. Now it has captures a moment in time that has passed. I liked the big diagonal shadow against the windows, and trying to convey the large E-shaped building using curvilinear perspective. It was drawn in the old Seawhite of Brighton book I was using then, while the newer one above was drawn in the watercolour Moleskine (side note, in recently comparing older scans to newer ones, I’ve decided I don’t like my current Epson scanner at all, I cannot seem to capture the right amount of clarity no matter how much I mess with the settings, unlike with my older (now long-departed) HP scanner. I’ve rescanned some older drawings recently and they don’t even compare with the older scans, regardless of 300dpi or 72 dpi. It’s subtle when they are small but I really notice it now. Time for a new scanner.) Anyway, this one above might put a final bookend to my Walker Hall series of sketches. It’s been a fun journey, but the building’s finished now and it should look like this for its foreseeable future. You can see them all in this Flickr folder.

make me understand or i’ll forget

January 23, 2024Leave a comment

First two-page panorama of 2024, click on the image to go to my Flickr page and see it bigger. In fact you can see all of my two-page (or more-page) panorama drawings in one album there, currently 218 of them and counting. Cast my mind back ten years ago, I decided to go a little bit overboard with the two-page panorama sketching, I called it ‘Panoramarathon’, sometimes I called it ‘Januarama’ or whatever because they were mostly in January 2014, when I was for some reason ridiculously productive. I’ve been looking back at some of those and even doing ‘ten years later’ versions, I’ll post that later. I have drawn the scene above more than once or twice over the years, usually from slightly different angles. This one shows the Heitman ‘Hog Barn’ on the left as always, with a bit of the South Silo, the Bike Barn occluded by trees, those standing stone thingies, that big leaning tree and on the right, the newest bit, that Chemistry Building wing whose construction I’ve been following in my sketches for the past four years. One change from sketches made over a decade ago is there used to be another big tree to the left of the big one there, it had a more interesting shape to draw, but was unfortunately in the way of the path they wanted to make so off it went to the big carpentry shop in the sky. I like all the colours. I know I draw these scenes over and over, Davis is not that big and I always say I’m bored of drawing everything again, but if I lived in London or New York I’d probably get bored of that too wouldn’t I. I like drawing the changes, as we’ve established. But it is January and all I do think about is going somewhere very far away with my sketchbook and no hurry or schedule, especially when there’s a lot on your mind you just want to plough it into a book that you’re filling, that’s where I put all my ‘stuff’, my sketchbooks.