ceci n’est pas une pipe

November 23, 20102 Comments

More old pipes for the NaNoDrawMo project. These incredible old pipes and tanks are outside the music building on campus (or rather, the one next to the music building, called ‘Temporary Building 159’). I think it’s going to be demolished or redeveloped, so I’ve meant to sketch these rusty pipes for a long time.

Below, a very useful pipe outside Chemistry, and next to it, three rusty pipes which just stick out of the ground doing I’m not sure what. This is a very metal pipe month. These are exercises in observation though.

enter the dragon

November 20, 2010Leave a comment

The green pantomime dragon of Fifth Street. It’s pretty common to see (especially at this time of year) nice coats on these colourful water pipe things.

So the rain has come… but tomorrow we’ll still be sketchcrawling in Davis! Rare opportunity to draw Davis with puddles so must take it (positive spin!). Join us at the Amtrak station at 11:00, or catch up at some point down 2nd Street as the day goes on. I’ll be the one sketching fire hydrants. We’ll finish up at 3:30pm over at Davis Commons on 1st/E, outside (or, let’s face it, inside) Borders, to see what we’ve done. Let’s Draw Davis!

but you didn’t take a peek in their artillery room

November 19, 2010November 19, 20106 Comments

These metal pipes are starting to look more and more like armed robots. I hope they’re not! Otherwise, well, there’s a sci-fi zom-rom-com right there. I might write it, maybe for NaNoWriMo next year. These ones above, red team and white team, look more like they should be shooting lasers at X-Wing fighters than putting out fires.

Here’s another fire hydrant, which someone on Flickr commented that it looks like a traffic cop. It does, but I prefer traffic droid. This one is opposite the UCD fire station.

that ol’ man river, he must know something

November 16, 2010November 16, 20105 Comments

On Saturday afternoon I went down to old town Sacramento, sketched me some fire hydrants, but that ain’t all I sketched. After meeting with the SF Bay Urban Sketchers, who had just been to the new Crocker Art Gallery, we all stood by the Sacramento River and sketched the big golden yellow Tower Bridge. I have sketched this before (a sketch which made an appearance on Fox 40 News of all places last year), but it was a while ago, and I came to sketch this one with memories of sketching a similar (though less yellow) bridge in Portland in the summer. This is the River City, and an old-time sailboat passed by as I sketched, the golden Tower Bridge’s mid-section rising and dropping as she passed.

We strolled through Old Sac sketching a little more. Despite all the grand old cowboy era buildings, I like this little theatre and did a small sketch, drawn to those long diagonals and the long shadows.

This is also railroad land, and the railroad museum is just around the corner from here. I was just here a couple of days before with my wife and toddler son, and I promised him I would come back and draw a bridge and a train. I had liked the look of this little yellow diesel engine, so here it is.

A nice break from the fire hydrants…

say hello to my little friends

November 14, 2010November 14, 20102 Comments

I decided to go to old town Sacramento yesterday, and as you may gather, I sketched more fire hydrants. I also met with the SF Bay Urban Sketchers (Jana Bouc, Cathy McAuliffe et al) who happened to be visiting Sac that day and sketched with them a little while. The wetaher right now is gorgeous – sunny, a little breezy, but not cold, and perfect for sketching. Hopefully it will stay like this for next Suday’s Davis Sketchcrawl.

The hydrants in Sacramento are largely silvery grey, with a different colour top depending on the water pressure, or something. Iwas excited (yes really excited) to draw some different coloured hydrants, though of course it means that this set is no longer solely Davis based. Sacramento is close enough though. Below is an odd looking water pipe found by the underpass that connects old town to the downtown mall.

it’s getting hard to be someone but it all works out

November 13, 2010Leave a comment

I went down to Little Prague again, to carry on the spread I’d started before, with a dark Krusovice, nice beer to sketch with. Again I splattered the page with lots of little spots of paint, and then after drawing everything with the pigma sensei pen, I did a sepia wash. I was glad to get some people in this one. It’s such a sketchable place.

It was the ‘2nd Friday Art About’ earlier in the evening, though I missed many of the exhibits this time. And now it’s the weekend! The weather is cold and bright, which means scarves and sunglasses, a great time of year. Christmas shopping and afternoon sketching in store.

she may not look like much, but she’s got it where it counts, kid

November 11, 2010November 11, 20102 Comments

And this project is not even half way over… More fire hydrants, one from UC Davis, the other pair from Fifth Street. I don’t think there are any more designs in Davis, but I’ll keep looking. Of course, different designs will be drawn more than once, in different locations, and of course there are still a great deal of water and gas pipes still to sketch in this town. 23 down, 27 to go. I’m particluarly proud of that top one.

And I will, of course, get around to drawing some other subjects at some point too…

nanodrawmo 22 nanodrawmo 23

www.flickr.com/groups/nanodrawmo

and they were all yellow

November 9, 2010November 9, 20106 Comments

Six yellow dwarves, in six yellow caps. Please forgive my use of a Coldplay line in the title. Actually, no that’s not forgivable. It’s just that the line was obvious – they are all yellow, so very yellow after the white and blue hydrants of campus. These are all found in the City of Davis, and are all ‘dry’ hydrants apparently. Oh, they work, but, actually I’m not going to try to explain it. Davis Wiki can do a better job than I. I’ll tell you something though – I found an interesting website all about fire hydrants which at first amazed me in the range of interesting and unusual designs, and then made me jealous that I couldn’t see and sketch them all.

And then I felt a little like Arnold Rimmer and his collection of 20th century telegraph poles. Oh well, I’m getting to that age where I don’t care about geekery (like I ever really cared) and now fill sketchbooks with fire hydrants and water pipes. To me, though, this is urban sketching at its essence – sketching the urban furniture, the bits that make up the everyday in our towns and cities. Plus look at that one below left. that looks well cool, doesn’t it! And someone has drawn a heart on it, because they must love it so much, huh.

Anyway, back to them being dwarves. There are six of them, so one is missing obviously. I will call them Stumpy, Grubby, Captain, Constable, Eraser and Beretta. There, they are now christened, and maybe all fire hydrants should have names. Or maybe not.

So that is 20 of 50 for NaNoDrawMo… more to come!

is it a bird? is it a plane? no, it’s…a pipe

November 8, 2010November 8, 20103 Comments

More pipeage. This colourless specimen above is rather like an industrial era Oliphaunt. This could become a story book for children, ‘the Pipes of Davis’, rather like that book ‘the Toads of Davis’. Although, perhaps the more hippy side of our town might take a different meaning of the word ‘pipe’ and be disappointed to find it’s just all fire hydrants and gas pipes. I wouldn’t market it to the hippies, then. I’m not sure what the story would be about, though. Maybe they could all be super heroes that put out fires, perhaps the gas pipes are the wicked industrial villains who start them, and the super-mutant-ninja-hydrants all save the day.

Like these ones for example, they are outside the Center for Neuroscience. Well there’s a super-hero origin story just waiting to happen. All you need is a cape and a wicked laugh. I liked the look of these though, they were like a futuristic space-station or deep-ocean lair.

This bottom one, though, is small, rather like a simple droid or a techno-hobbit, found on the corner of 3rd and E Streets. I like this one. I sketched it late on Saturday afternoon, when shadows were getting long.

on a steel horse i ride

November 7, 20102 Comments

Continuing the hydrants, gauges and pipes theme – I will fill an entire sketchbook with these, by the way – for NaNoDrawMo, some of those big big pipes you see all over the place in Davis. They remind me of animals, some elephants, others, horses, others rhinos. Or metal camels.

I feel like a zoologist, but for metal pipes. All of them go into the ground and lead somewhere else. A map of the world by its pipes only would be an interesting map, rather like a drawing of a person only by their veins and arteries.