long and winding rogue

November 4, 20122 Comments

Rogue Ales, in Portland’s Pearl District.

The last time I was in Portland, I made a very short trip to Rogue for a very little amount of sketching, but this time I wanted to come and really take it in a bit more. After spending most of the evening sketching, eating lovely food cart food, mooching around Powell’s and calling home, I plodded along to Rogue, found a spot at the bar, ordered a ‘Good Chit’ blonde ale, and started sketching. I spoke to several friendly people while I was there, all artists, all beer experts. This was a theme I would find pretty common in Portlanders. I like the Rogue beers, I have sketched at the Rogue in San Francisco before. I counted the beertaps individually before sketching them, and measured in my head how it would all squeeze on. Sure it’s a little wonky but I enjoyed drawing this. One guy said to me, on observing me get off my chair and rearrange my jacket and bags all orderly and neatly, “you do everything the same way you draw!” I mention this because people have said this sort of thing before, I must be very neat, very organized. Well, I can’t say I’m completely disorganized, but neat… well, you should see my desk. My mind is usually less a drawer full of folded socks and more a tumble-dryer full of ping-pong balls, ideas and thoughts zipping all over the place. In Portland however I was there to relax, and relax I did. When the sketch was done, I walked down to the MAX light rail and went back to the hotel. Nice and neat.

pyrohydrantophilia in portland

November 2, 20129 Comments

Let’s get these out of the way now, shall we? There are lots of different hydrant designs in Portland, most of which are orange, many of which are weather-beaten and full of personality, if you see personality in such things as I do. They don’t tell good jokes or anything, but personality goes a long way, and they do help put out fires.

The top one was drawn after meeting with the Portland Urban Sketchers in Old Town, while the second one was drawn on my first evening in PDX, downtown. Someone in Portland did ask me if I really was obsessed with fire hydrants as my sketchbooks suggest, to which I was like, hello, like. As i’ve said before, we don’t get them in Britain so they’re still fascinatingly ‘foreign’ to me and remind me of Richard Scarry books I used to read when I was a kid. More than that, they are ever-present civic symbols, and really are different from place to place. When people ask me, oh what do you draw, I say “I draw fire hydrants”, it gives me something more to say than “oh, you know, this and that, stuff”. It’s only really a small percentage of what I draw (most of what I really draw you don’t see, it’s scribbled cartoons of Magneto on any piece of paper on my desk) but I like them. In 2010 I did ‘NaNoDrawMo‘ and drew “fifty fire hydrants and other metal pipes that come out of the ground“, and promised myself after that crazy experience I’d never draw another. Yeah, that didn’t last long…

I think I might make a comic filled with fire hydrants who tell bad jokes. They stand there all day like a doorman or security guard thinking of jokes, and all of them are really bad. As you know I won’t be short of material on bad jokes or fire hydrants so it’s the perfect combination for me, should take me about five minutes to write. Perhaps I could invent a superhero who can see and hear through all the fire hydrants in the city, and when he/she sees crime can travel through the hydrant system and transform into Hydranto and beat the bad guys, put out fires, rescue kitties etc. Speaking of comics, I went to Floating World Comics on Monday, at the corner of 4th and Couch (pronounced cooch, by the way, it was named by Officer Crabtree from ‘Allo ‘Allo). This comic shop came highly recommended by my comics-making urban-sketching friend (cheers Kalina!) and I was not disappointed – more zines than I have ever seen anywhere outside of ZineFest, lovely little independent hand-made comics, some of which I’d bought before in SF, but many many local PDX titles. Plus so many regualr comics, graphic novels of every kind; it was beautiful. I ended up getting a couple of small comics, “Jetpack Shark” and another called something like “Everyone in the world can fart except me”, which is a sad, sad tale. Also picked up one of the DC relaunched titles, the ‘new 52’, Superman #0. I have been getting a ‘comics-udaction’ these past few years by my comics-appreciating friend Roshan so hopefully one day he can go there too. I got there just before it opened, so I drew the fire hydrant outside, as the street dried out from the previous day’s rain.

So anyway, if you are a pyrohydrantophile (new word of the year award, please, cheers?) and want to see some more of these guardians of the galaxy, go to my Flickr set “Hydrants and Pipes“. But I’m not really that much of a pyrohydrantophile. I don’t even know how they really work.

you gotta go away, so you can come back

November 1, 201212 Comments

Everybody needs a weekend away every now and then. This past weekend, I flew up to Portland, Oregon, a city I had first visited two years ago for the first Urban Sketching Symposium. I wanted to come back and see some places I had previously missed, catch up with some local urban sketchers I know, eat from food carts, sample local beer, and spend time by the river. I like it down by the river. This was the first sketch I did after arriving at the hotel and light-railing it downtown, a big boat on the Willamette. The bridge in the background is the Burnside Bridge; those spiky towers belong to the Convention Center. As I sketched, cyclists cycled by, joggers jogged on, and gaggles of geese giggled at my goggles.

You can expect the next week or so of posts to be about my trip to Portland, either in a linear or nonlinear or scrawled comic or urban dance form. I got rained on rather a lot, but that was ok, it’s Portland rain which is sweeter than other rain, and contains beer and voodoo donuts.

get to portland

October 23, 2012October 23, 20122 Comments

This weekend I am going to be in Portland! The one in Oregon, not the one with the Lighthouse and the Bill and the Fear of Rabbits. Just a weekend away sketching, food-carts, micro-brews, book/comic-shops, sketching. And bridges, I must sketch bridges. And old signs. I was last there for the first Urban Sketching Symposium in 2010 and loved it, but didn’t get to explore as much as I would have liked. I never even had a single Voodoo Donut. So I will be remedying all of that, and I don’t care how much it rains (after this long hot dry Davis summer, a bit of rain would be welcome*)

So, any sketching/local-beer/food-cart/comic-shop tips would be welcome!

Also, if you are Portland-based and fancy meeting me for some sketching I will be meeting the some of the Portland Urban Sketchers this Saturday Oct 27 for some sketching around the Saturday Market in the morning, and then perhaps some bridges and river (or some food carts or some old town) in the afternoon. We will meet at 10:00am at Floyd’s Coffee, on NE Crouch St. I am looking forward to it. They have a great group of sketchers in Portland, and were one of the original ‘regional’ Urban Sketchers blogs to be set up.

Also, on Sunday evening I’ll be going to Dr.Sketchy’s Anti-Art-School event on SE Morrison, at 7:00pm. I’ve never been to one of these before so it will be intriguing. Details about that can be found on their Facebook page. There will apparently be pirates to draw. Something different to fire hydrants and bridges!

PDX here I come! If you see me, say hello.

*that said it finally started raining in Davis yesterday after many months, and there was a tornado warning!

sketching to a close

August 17, 2010August 9, 20182 Comments

The final afternoon of the Urban Sketching Symposium… I for one was utterly exhausted, but still excited, and eager to keep sketching. I didn’t join the field sketching session I’d signed up for (mostly because I was messing about having fun taking photos of Gerard’s sketchbook laid out in the street), and stayed relatively close to the PNCA. I popped into Oblation Papers & Press, and bought myself an extremely nice sketchbook/notebook (because I needed yet another one), bound with a cover making it look like a French paperback. They are all produced on site, with top quality paper. And so, back to the sketching. I passed this one building, an old former warehouse, many times, and so decided to capture it in three drawings, vignette style, but without the borders I usually use. Because I was sat across the street, with trees in my way, I used those as my border. Ah, it was an experiment, sometimes I like it, sometimes I don’t. It was a lot of fun drawing the building itself though, with its faded paintwork and old empty water tower stand. There is a lot of character in buildings like these.

Right outside it, an object I know my two-year-old son would love. I presume it to be some sort of bike rack, or street art, or something I don’t know, but it is shaped like a car and has a steering wheel at two-year-old height. It was similar to the ones shaped like the Fremont Bridge that are also dotted about. I was told by some of the Portland sketchers that it’s city law for any new development to have part of their budget dedicated to placing public art around any new building. That, my friends, is immeasurably cool.

The clock was ticking. This was, in fact, Worldwide Sketchcrawl Day #28, so hundreds of people (probably more) around the world were also out drawing their cities. The Symposiums sketchers, however, were being magnetically drawn back to the source, the PNCA (Pacific Northwest College of Art), where the Symposium was being held. I think everybody was capturing the building as their last sketch of this experience. I joked to Mike Daikabura that this was like the red-light district of sketching, urban sketchers on every corner (and you had to get in early for the best spot!). My last drawing, of the PNCA, is the one at the top of this post.

Okay, time’s up, pen’s down! On to the closing reception, to have a look at everybody’s sketchbooks. In fact, you can see photos and drawings from the Symposium in the “Urban Sketchers PDX 2010” Flickr group.

Symposium blog: http://pdx2010.urbansketchers.org/

saturday, what a day

August 16, 2010August 9, 20182 Comments

Day three of the Urban Sketching Symposium, and the morning session was studying Urban Architecture with Professor Frank Ching. I wasn’t very familiar with Frank and his work until the Symposium roster was announced, but he is an excellent teacher and has a long list of widely-read published work. I was excited to take his field sketching session, and we all strolled down to the Portland Saturday Market.

frank ching explains architectural sketching

It wasn’t too busy there yet, we found a good sketching spot by the fountain, and the urban sketchers dispersed to find interesting vantage points. I actually liked the spot where I was standing, beside the fountain, though it was right in the middle of the people traffic. Now normally I hide, I slink off the walls and try to be invisible – but this time, I decided, no, I’m going to stay right here, and camped my little stool down on that very spot. I even drew big, in the large Urban Sketchers Canson sketchbook we got free at the symposium, all in the spirit of trying something different. It was quite the experience; as more people added to the market’s throng, people would stop and see what I was doing, even take photos (that happened a fair few times, too), all while respecting my viewpoint. I liked this sketching in crowds thing – now I never thought I’d ever say that. The Symposium I think has given me a little more confidence to do such things.

there were a lot of pirates out that day

I ate some lunch from one of the food carts (a delicious but messy East African chicken wrap, if you’re interested), and sketched the large ‘Made in Oregon’ sign that is perched up on top of a nearby building. they really love the shape of their state, Oregonians. I bought a number of postcards recently in Medfiord all shaped like the state, it fits perfectly into a mailbox (unlike California, which fits perfectly into a Christmas stocking). And then I ran back to the PNCA for Frank’s lecture on ‘perspective for sketchers’, and got quite lost on the way.

i managed to sketch frank giving his lecture

I’m glad I didn’t miss it entirely – it was such a fun lecture. Frank gave us some great principles for sketching and constructing our urban drawings, including advice on what to focus on if you have limited time (such as leave details till last, quite the opposite of how I drew the Steel Bridge, for example, but very much how I drew the Saturday Market). This was one of the real values to coming to the Symposium: to learn new, or at least different, ways of approaching your sketches. I like to try different things, in order to incorporate them into my overall sketching voice, which I like to think is pretty distinct.

However, the most fun part (and possibly the best moment of the Symposium) was at the end, when Frank asked if we had any questions. I’ve been really interested in perspective lately, and have attempted to dabble in curvilinear perspective (partly inspired by the work of the man I was sitting next to, Gerard Michel), so I asked if he had any advice on that form. At this point, he passed the mantle over to Gerard, who as luck had it, had a flash drive with him full of his incredible curvilinear drawings, as well as diagrams explaining it. He gave an impromptu and highly animated talk (in French and some English) demonstrating the theory and how to approach it. I’m glad I asked! I’m eager to try it some more. You can see Gerard’s curvilinear work on his flickr site. Prepare to be utterly amazed.

Interview with Prof. Frank Ching on the Symposium website.

Symposium blog: http://pdx2010.urbansketchers.org/

portland’s urban composition

August 14, 2010August 9, 20182 Comments

Yes, I know; sometimes, taking the mick is just too easy.

The afternoon of Day Two was a sketching trip to colourful Pioneer Square, with Gabi’s Urban Composition group. The Sun was casting golden light across the city, as it lowered behind the downtown buildings. There were people out with signs, protesting this and decrying that, most of them against the various wars going on at this period in history. This peculiar pair, however, were slightly separate to most; make what you will of their placard. I can’t say that I agreed with the bearded boiler-suited sandal-wearer’s slightly dubious and sinister assertions. Everyone’s entitled to their views. So I wrote the lettering with a different blue felt-tip pen, which has the appropriate (and highly amusing) name of ‘Le Pen’. I did show them the sketch though, and they liked it too, even asking for a photocopy. Sometimes, taking the mick is just too easy, so I’ll leave it up to you.

I also sketched a fellow sketcher, Kalina (aka Geminica), one of the Portland urban sketchers, aka the ‘girl in the red hat’. She was sketching the action in Pioneer Square, as a huge screen ws erected to show a classic movie out in the open (I think it was like Three Amigos or Muppets Take Manhattan or something). Here’s a post by another Portland sketcher, Alanna, of me doing the sketching. Yes, I still wear that England shirt, even after that World Cup.

Hey, are you proud of me, sketching all these people?! I’m learning a few things. Prior to the field sketching session, I went to Gabi‘s very interesting lecture on the artist as reporter. Gabi Campanario is a staff sketcher-reporter for the Seattle Times – see his great column online at Seattle Sketcher. Here he is on the light rail – a load of us crowded into a train and started sketching each other like crazy – and you may notice his sketching stool, which is exactly the same one as mine (though his is blue).

I spent the evening meeting and conversing with some of the other Portland sketchers, a very nice bunch; you should check out the Urban Sketchers: Portland blog. The USk correspondent from Tokyo, Kumi Matsukawa, did a great sketch of me talking with local artist Bill Sharp, which you can see here. I hope one day to sketch with them all again, and perhaps capture more of the city’s colourful characters.

build it up with iron and steel

August 11, 2010August 9, 20182 Comments

Urban Sketching Symposium, Day 2. Lapin led the Urban Line field session down to the banks of the Willamette River, to sketch the Steel Bridge. Portland is famous for its bridges. Can’t leave town without drawing at least one.

I was pleased to sketch this, as I wanted something to really sink my teeth into, or at least my micron pens. I felt once it was done that I’d got it out of my system. The morning started out overcast, and the stark, industrial structure provided quite the drama against the blank sky. The bridge moved once or twice, it’s bottom level rising to allow ships to pass, laughing at my previous assertion that I draw architecture because it stands still. Joggers and cyclists passed by as we sketched, freight trains rolled across the river, and the strange sculpture behind us made intermittent and unexplained noises not unlike a monkey smashing a cymbal. We all seemed to have our own approach; I watched how Lapin started from a detail and drew outwards, and how Gerard Michel (pictured right, drawing in the special Urban Sketchers Japanese style Moleskine) constructed it as an architect would, and I leapt in somewhere in between. I started in the middle, but had a rough outline of where I would be going (which I only marginally stuck to), but concentrated on small details as I went along rather than after finishing the outline. I purposely left it incomplete as I liked the effect.

The Sun came out, but I kept my bridge sketch colourless. I did add a little thumb sketch on the same page though of one of the spires of the Portland Convention Center across the Willamette, showing how the sky had turned blue, but the bridge lent itself to cold black and white.

At the end, we laid out our sketchbooks side by side and reviewed each others work. This is always one of my favourite parts of a group sketch, to see all of our different styles and interpretations laid out side by side.

sketching as the sun sets

August 10, 2010April 30, 20204 Comments

Oh, the sketching stops for no one. Day One of the Symposium was not over yet. Still, I had a chance to relax in the hotel with some noodles and a cup of tea. I looked out of the window and drew part of the view opposite while talking on the phone. Then, as the evening came, I copied the sunset onto some brown paper and pottered off to Powell’s Books. Wow! What a place! I didn’t sketch there, I was too busy looking at books. That place is huge, a bookshop lover’s dream. A little while before, I had visited Reading Frenzy, to catch up on some of Portland’s well-known zine culture. I bought one local zine, and I really enjoyed it. I’ve considered (because it’s been suggested) that I turn some of my series into zines, and that is on the table in the foreseeable future, so it was good to see what other people are doing out there.

And so on to Portland’s famous beer culture. I stopped into Deschutes Brewery, where several other Urban Sketchers were already camped out, and caught up on some great conversation and a few more attempts at people-sketching. Below are Lapin, Don Colley from Chicago, and Frank Ching.

Don and I went on to Jake’s Crawfish for a beer and a last sketch of the day. It was an interesting looking place and we both sketched the same scene. His work is great, very dramatic and full of life, and he sketches in a huge old book filled with incredible drawings. It was a pleasure to watch him sketch and learn from him.

Exhausted, i got back to the hotel and posted a photo of the day one sketchbook. Phew! And there were still two more days of full-on sketching to come…

Symposium blog: http://pdx2010.urbansketchers.org/

drawing in the dark

August 10, 2010August 9, 2018Leave a comment

It was almost complete darkness when I was drawing these. The only light was from the projector, illustrating Matthew Brehm’s excellent lecture on the history of sketching as a social activity, and from the laptop of the guy changing the slides. Well, it wasn’t going to stop me from getting another couple of sketches in, and what a fun exercise. I had no idea what they actually looked like until I got outside into the light; I’m pleased with the results!!

It’s funny; normally, I would draw in a lecture or meeting if I was bored, but this is the Urban Sketcher’s Symposium, and the rules are on their head. Matthew’s lecture was very, very interesting. As an architectural teacher he takes students to Rome every year, and compared his own experiences alongside the grand tours of a couple of centuries ago, as well as looking at old drawing clubs and how the newer phenomenon of blogging and posting your art on flickr and such sites has created a new global community of artists, which has in turn given birth to Urban Sketchers and the Symposium itself. (Which he described as the ‘Woodstock of Sketching’) What I enjoyed was his focus on the connections that drawing has forged between us, not just right now but also to the sketchers of the past – those people walking around cities drawing things, just as we are now, having those same thought processes that compel them to do so. That’s what I was thinking about, anyhow, as I drew these people in the dark.

Symposium blog: http://pdx2010.urbansketchers.org/