we wish you a Messi Christmas

March 7, 2023Leave a comment

I guess it’s time to talk about the 2022 World Cup. It seems so long ago already. After all the years of build-up and controversy, we ended up getting a Christmas World Cup, and on the football pitch, it was pretty enjoyable. And yet, as often happens when there is so much football, I feel like I’ve already forgotten most of it. England went out to France, didn’t we? Kane missed a penalty in the game? Wales played in it, didn’t they? It all seems a bit like a dream. It happened at the wrong time of year, it should have been in summer. I had all the World Cup flags up at the same time as the Christmas decorations, it was like having Christmas in Australia or somewhere. Sure, I felt conflicted, like a lot of us did. This Qatar World Cup was a talking point alright, and I won’t go into all the reasons why here, suffice to say I didn’t think it should be there. One of the less controversial reasons, for me, was holding a World Cup in such a tiny space, when these days it seems like two countries is barely enough for a major competition. But it turned out this made it a lot easier for the FIFA President Lex Luthor to get to every game in time for the TV cameras to tarry on him in the stands. I wasn’t hyped for this World Cup, being held mid-season with almost zero build-up, and we’ve had so much football the past couple of years since returning from the lockdown break .There was no way I was waking up at stupid-o-clock to watch South Korea vs Ghana (spoiler alert, I was totally waking up at stupid-o-clock to watch South Korea vs Ghana). This was a World Cup during the academic year, so work would be busier than in the usually-quiet summer. And yet, once it kicked off, I couldn’t help myself, and just got carried away as usual. There were twists, turns, surprises, shocks, and it all ended in one of the best cup finals I have ever seen, with Argentina beating France on penalties in a super dramatic match, and Messi finally winning that one thing he’s always wanted (and I don’t mean Cristiano Ronaldo being forced to be his butler for a month). I drew several of the games on my iPad as I watched them, the last one being the final itself (above), and I wrote down the commentary as it was being said. This was drawn in our very festive living room, and when I drew Messi tearing it away on screen, Argentina were still 2-0 up and cruising, before the Mbappe-inspitred French fightback. What an amazing final, and my favourite moment was the goalkeeper Martinez posing with the Golden Glove award afterwards.

We put the games on the big screen at work, in our study lounge. We are a World Cup enthusiastic department, with many of our faculty and students getting right into it. I put up a big wallchart that people could check every day. When I sketched this it was not very busy, but during some of the final group games and knockout stages we got quite a few people in there. We could only get the games in Spanish for some reason, but that was fun because they not only say “GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOLLLL” as they do, but they also write “GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOLLLL” in closed-captions on the screen. We did watch the 2018 World Cup in here as well, I remember watching England beat Colombia on penalties – rather, I remember hiding in the kitchen area, unable to actually watch. On this day, I watched France vs Australia (France won 4-1).

This wasn’t just a Christmas World Cup, this was also a Thanksgiving World Cup. Above, the sketch I made on Thanksgiving Day at my mother-in-law’s house in Santa Rosa, while watching Brazil beat Serbia, with Richarlison scoring an amazing overhead kick. I wish he would score some of those for Tottenham, or any goal at all, that would be nice. The USA played England the next day, and our transatlantic family sat around to watch it (a far cry from when Black Fridays were for going early-morning shopping). It was a pretty turgid 0-0 game, a better result for the Americans than for the English, but not one to convince people what all the fuss is about with this World Cup thing.

Back home for this next one, and our decorations have started going up. We put our Christmas decorations up after Thanksgiving is over, they like the clear delineations in the holidays here. For example, if you go to big stores like Target, Valentine’s Day starts on December 26th, St. Patrick’s Day starts on February 15th, and Easter starts on March 18th. Personally I wish it could be Christmas every day, and I think that would make a really good idea for a song. Speaking of Christmas songs, the biggest surprise this year was when we discovered that Baddiel and Skinner and the Lightning Seeds had written an updated version of Three Lions, especially for this Christmas World Cup. My initial reaction was that it must surely be cheesier than a bag of Wotsits, with that chorus getting a little bit too much airtime the past few years, but was surprised to find I bloody loved it. It was very fresh back in ’96, and now it’s one of my favourite Christmas songs. “Santa says let’s play the Christmas Tree formation” Hanging up behind the tree you can see my 2006 USA (sorry, “USMNT”) shirt, coupled with my 2010 England away shirt, the only England shirt I own. I’ve owned a USA football shirt longer than I’ve owned an England one. The game on TV was France vs Poland, and the commentator was just gushing about Kylian Mbappé, the French superstar. They called him a “cheat code” and a “superhuman”, they said he’s “a postman; he delivers”, they called him not only “different calibre” but “different gravy”, confusingly, and they referred to him as “a Ferrari, but a Formula One Ferrari”, which presumably means he will have engine failure halfway through a game and throw away a lead. They also said it would be “his tournament”. It nearly was.

One of the surprises of the tournament was Morocco, who made it all the way to the semi-finals. I’ve liked Morocco’s team since they did well in England’s group in the 1986 World Cup. Back in 1986 I had no idea really who was supposed to be good or not, other than Italy were the reigning World Champions, West Germany were West Germany, Brazil were super famous, and Argentina had Diego Maradona. I did know that Morocco were not supposed to be good though, because like Iraq, Canada, Algeria and the like, they got half-sized stickers in the Panini album. Even teams like Bulgaria, Northern Ireland and Paraguay got full-size stickers, so ‘Maroc’ must be crap. They were not – they topped England’s group, beating Portugal. I remember they had a player with a festive-sounding name, called Abdelkrim Merry ‘Krimau’.This time around, they also beat Portugal, this time in the quarter-finals, but before that they also dispatched their other neighbours from across the Straits of Gibraltar, Spain. I was at home that day working on my laptop, but it was quiet so I sketched the game. It was pretty exciting, and went to penalties. Morocco’s kit was reminiscent of their kit from 1998, also made by Puma. Morocco ended up losing the semi-finals to France, and finished fourth overall, a heroic historic run. I thought they might actually win it.

Messi Gvardiol

Here are a couple more things. Above, a small graphic I made of Messi in the semi-final against Croatia, teaching masked youngster Gvardiol a thing or two about turning. I loved this iconic moment. And finally, a couple of Christmas ornaments I made, one saying “We Wish You A Messi Christmas”, the other replying “And a Mbappe New Year”. And it was. I’m sold (or am I sportswashed?); I think every other men’s World Cup should now be held before Christmas, a new tradition. Sure it might mess up the European football seasons, but they are being messed up anyway. And maybe there’s nothing wrong with being a bit Messi.

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under the knife

February 28, 2023February 28, 2023Leave a comment

Last September I had to have some surgery on my face, which meant I had to be out in Elk Grove at 7am. It left a massive scar in the middle of my forehead, which is thankfully a lot less noticeable than it first was. I had to be bandaged up for ages. The whole thing took a few hours, a couple of different rounds, but they got it all (hooray) and the surgeons were really nice. They talked to me about things like To Kill A Mocking Bird while cutting into my face, to keep my mind off of it probably. The worst bit was the waiting in between rounds, when I had to sit in the little room waiting to see if it was going to be all good. It wasn’t the waiting – I can draw while I wait (see above), play Carcassonne on my iPad, I’m usually a good waiter. It wasn’t even the waiting for good or less good news, because I knew the surgeons knew what they were doing. It was the music being played in the little room, it wasn’t loud, but it was mostly Phil Collins, I and I can’t stand Phil Collins. And Simply Red, and I can’t stand Simply Red. I had enough of that in the 80s as a kid. My uncle Billy and I used to loathe Phil Collins’s music together. It was always on the bloody radio. I don’t need to explain or justify; I told people here after the surgery that the worst bit was all the Phil Collins being played, and they were like, I don’t understand. I told my family back in England the same thing, and they were all like, oh god that sounds unbearable, they understood. I was given anesthetic so I wouldn’t feel any pain in the surgery, but unfortunately it didn’t block out my hearing. “I can feel it caaaalllling in the aiiiir toniiiight...” oh gawd. I nearly called the surgeon to come and put it back in, I’ve changed my mind! And Simply Red, and others like that, it was like listening to a footballer’s car stereo in 1990. It was eventually over, and back to the (infinitely more enjoyable than the music) surgery. They did a great job. I felt pretty knocked out for a few days after (having fever dreams of Phil Collins singing me lullabies) and the scare was pretty dramatic when the bandages finally came off, but it’s alright now. The area above the scar was numb for a very long time, and even now the feeling is not fully back. It’s not the first big scar on my forehead, I have one over my left eye that looks a bit, well, lightning-shaped, which I got after an altercation with an evil wizard on the Camden Road in Holloway twenty-odd years ago. That one took a bit longer to heal, but I still notice it. I remember not long after it bumping into an old mate of mine on the bus, Gary, and I’ll never forget he said “who gave you that Mars Bar on your Car Chase?” For those who don’t know, in Cockney slang a Mars Bar is a scar (I actually didn’t know that at the time, and had to ask my brother afterwards), while Car Chase is another term for your face, though Boat Race (or just ‘Boat’) is still used. I always think of that phrase, and now I have a new Mars Bar on my Car Chase. This new one is at least in line with my increasingly furrowed brow.

I had to go in a few weeks later to have the stitches taken out and the scarring all looked at, but it was in a different hospital. I was just hoping that they would not play Phil Collins. I don’t recall the doctor’s name, but the nurses told me and for some reason I thought it sounded like a cowboy from the Old West. Dr. Tex Buffalo or something. It wasn’t that but I have an active imagination when I’m in a doctor’s office. My eyes had to be covered up while it was all looked at so I never actually saw him, but it was the strangest thing. Before the Doc came in, the nurses turned on the radio – here we go, with the Phil Collins again, I thought. But it was all country music, Garth Brooks or someone, and I thought, maybe he is a cowboy? I never saw him, he only spoke to me for a couple of minutes, but I couldn’t help imagining him in a big Stetson with rattlesnake-skin boots and a big Colt 45 in his holster. Did he say “howdy pardner?” Surely not. Maybe it just was the local anesthetic talking.

I Wanna See Some History

February 27, 2023February 26, 2023Leave a comment

And in the end, they put the Queen in the ground, and that was that. The Funeral was a Real History Moment, the sort that gets played back in years to come on history shows, with the AI clone of Simon Schama in the year 2081 stating solemnly, “Even for us smart-alec artificial-intelligence history bots, just simple bits of code flying around on a Silicon Valley server, even we had to stop sniggering and start paying attention, knowing with a suspicious lump in the HDMI cable that something immense had happened, the death of a matriarch; this was history happening right before our very photoreceptors.” We had to watch, of course. The Queen’s Funeral was long, solemn, and quite the spectacle. It was like the Avengers Endgame of British royalty and politics, and although the Queen’s last words probably weren’t “And I Am Elizabeth II”, she did somehow snap her fingers and make Boris Johnson disappear into dust. She worked right up to the end, and one of her final acts was to usher in a new Prime Minister, Liz Truss, who managed to hang on to her job until just after the Queen’s Funeral. We didn’t watch the Funeral live; we watched it on YouTube after getting home from work. I’m glad I was in America. My friends back home said the mood in Britain was getting out of hand, which doesn’t sound like Britain at all does it, and said the BBC had started to be called ‘MournHub’. In the end though, we got the show, we got the pomp and pageantry, and I will admit, the version of the National Anthem that they played in Westminster Abbey, in that place, was easily the best version you will ever hear, much better than the dreary durge they belt out at England matches, or that used to be played on BBC2 at about midnight before Close. This stirred the soul, it made my feel feel ticklish. I think it may have been the last time we’ll hear the God Save The Queen with that lyric in a while, in my lifetime anyway, it’ll be all God Save The King now. Sounds a bit off, like something Lord Whats-his-name would say on Downton Abbey.

I drew the Westminster bit in Procreate, before taking a break and then watching the Windsor part on my iPad, drawing on a brown envelope, making those red coats of the Scots Guard stand out. It was a long old drive up to Windsor Castle. The Queen was buried at St George’s Chapel, Windsor, and now we have a King, Charles III. Honestly when I first saw that headline, I thought it read “Charles ill” and I thought, oh here we go again already.

The last event like this I’d actually watched was the Funeral of Princess Diana, back in that frankly bonkers period of time in September 1997. Anyone who was alive at the time will remember this, but for those of us in the UK the response was utterly ridiculous. I had no idea the country could react in such a way to anything. On the night Diana was killed in that car crash in Paris, along with Dodi Al Fayed, I remember that I was unironically eating in an Egyptian restaurant just around the corner form Kensington Palace which had pictures of Diana on the wall, and I even said “wouldn’t it be funny if Diana and Dodi came in right now.” They had not been off the front pages of the newspapers all week, their fling in France being like Christmas and birthdays rolled into one for all the tabloid editors, gossip columnists and paparazzi. They were ruthless; she was not the ‘People’s Princess’ or the ‘Queen of Hearts’ back then, that would not be until a few days later. I didn’t know Diana had died until early the next morning, when my Mum woke me up to tell me the news. She was shocked and upset, being a big fan of the Royals, and it was very shocking news. Throughout my young life I’d grown up watching the Diana story unfold – the wedding of Charles and Diana was one of my earliest memories, and we had a street party for that, one in which my dad won the “dad’s piggyback race”, where you had to run to the top of the street with your kid on your back. My mum did meet Diana at least once, while working on catering jobs, though she regrets that she never got to meet the Queen. The most famous person I met while working on those catering jobs (because I used to work as a waiter when I was first old enough to work) was Ronnie Corbett, and he was brilliant. Anyway, we got the first edition of the Sunday newspapers, News of the World or one of those old rags that don’t exist any more, and the first few pages were pure Historic Moment – the shock, the tears, the gushing about the Queen of Hearts is dead, the anguish, the instant canonization of Diana – and yet, because editors had to get this newspaper out in time for people to grab the papers with the biggest headlines, they had not yet updated all the articles a few pages deep into the paper, which were still full of “Diana is disgracing the nation” and showing long range pictures of her in skimpy outfits with Dodi on a yacht off the Cote d’Azur. Still, I had no time to join in the national mourning, because I was off to France myself, taking the coach to Strasbourg with my friend Terry for a few days of being silly, a little vacation before I started university. While we were away, people would ask us, “are you doing ok?” and we’d be like, “er yeah, we’re fine,” thinking, strange thing to keep asking us.

We didn’t know that back in England the place was slowly becoming Diana Crazy. I sometimes call Britain “Totally Normal Island”, but this was the country at it’s Most Totally Normal. The sea of flowers in front of Kensington Palace was only part of it. When we arrived back in London on our coach from France the country had been gripped with the Diana Fever for several days already, and we were a little taken aback. I went to Kensington Palace to have a look at the flowers; hundreds of people were standing around, many bawling their eyes out. My mum signed the remembrance book down there; I didn’t know what to write so I just put some Beatles lyrics in there, I can’t even remember what. It probably wasn’t ‘I Am The Walrus’. Then the Funeral took place. The whole country closed down, shops, schools (I mean it was a Saturday so they were closed anyway), and we all sat around the telly while about a million people lined the streets of central London, watching on big screens down at Hyde Park. This was Funeral with Entertainment. This was the 90s, we had an excited new young cool PM Tony Blair steering the ship Cool Britannia, and Diana was friend of the famous – her good pal Elton John performed a rewrite of one of his classics, singing “Goodbye England’s Rose”, his eyebrows bobbing up and down as that guaranteed number one echoed through the hallowed stones of Westminster Abbey. And the Diana was put into the ground up at the family home at Althorp (which we learned was pronounced ‘Awl-trup’), and then over the next few weeks the country blinked and looked around as if coming out of some trance and went, what the bloody hell was that about? I started university a couple of weeks later and even then, people were not sure what had just happened, and how we were supposed to think about it other than some collective temporary madness. It’s something we can all look back on though, all remembered slightly differently, all with different degrees of cynicism or sadness, but it was a Historical Moment and gives expatriate Brits like me us a funny story to tell Americans.

skill and stamina and luck

January 18, 2022Leave a comment

A couple of older digital drawings I did back in the summer time that I don’t think I ever posted, but now’s as good a time as ever. The drawing above is of ‘The Warlock of Firetop Mountain‘ by Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone. I got this book for my eighth birthday as a present from my big sister, and not only do I still have it but I still have all of my old Fighting Fantasy gamebooks from when I was a kid (see below). 2021 was the fortieth anniversary of its publication, and my one is one of the great editions with the famous green spine. If you have never played an adventure gamebook, “you are the hero”/”choose your own adventure” style, these ones were very cleverly formatted – almost always 400 entries – with a simple but effective gaming system. You don’t have overly complicated D&D style numbers, this is single player, two six-sided dice like everyone could get from their Monopoly set, you roll for a score for Skill, another for Stamina, another for Luck, and then you just get on with the story. You have provisions, you have some gold, and you have an ‘Adventure Sheet’ where you can list equipment that you pick up along the way – your sword, a few potions, the odd jewel, maybe the occasional scroll with important clues. As you go through the story you have to make decisions – go left or go right, stay at the inn or sleep in the woods, sneak past the orc guards or steal their keys, turn to 239, that sort of thing – but you also have to fight. It’s called ‘Fighting Fantasy’ after all, though running away is sometimes an option. Fighting is done on the roll of the dice and you might lose ‘stamina’ if your opponent gets hits on you. That opponent might be a Goblin, a Dragon, a a Giant Bat, anything really. In this book you have to go on an adventure to go and beat up a wizard – the Warlock of Firetop Mountain – there’s a fantastic colour hand-drawn map in my edition which very much informed how I like to draw maps later in life. The illustrations in these books was one of the things I liked the most, especially the heavy-lined drawings found in Caverns of the Snow Witch, which was always my favourite (along with Creature of Havoc), although I left my original copy of that back in London with my nephew (I’d like to get it back to go with the set some day). I drew this on the iPad with ProCreate, and posted it online, and to my amazement I was then sent a message by none other than the author himself, Ian Livingstone! And he said he liked it. I was fairly gobsmacked.

Or I should say ‘Sir Ian Livingstone’ – he was knighted in the New Years Honours list earlier this month! That is a great achievement and recognition for all his many years of pioneering work in the British gaming industry. He co-founded Games Workshop along with Steve Jackson and has done enormous work in the video gaming world. He did ask if I’d be drawing Forest of Doom next (that one has a great cover of a shape-shifter), but instead I showed him my bookshelf drawing from the previous month. There you can see what remains of my collection of Fighting Fantasy books (I don’t have a complete set, and two or three of mine are missing such as Caverns of the Snow Witch and Citadel of Chaos) (though I do have a copy of Caverns of the Snow Witch in French). After getting that first book from my sister, I would usually seek out these books in the local library, but then I would find them in the bookshops, but if I couldn’t afford to buy many books I would go to second hand bookshops all over the area to scour for copies of them. I displayed them proudly on my shelf at home, and on my windowsill, which didn’t help with the spines getting a bit discoloured. Although that is now a funny story, I assumed that the slightly different shades of green on all these books was due to some being in boxes in old shops, or left in the sun on my windowsill, but it turns out that it was an issue with the publishers; Sir Ian actually told me that himself, it used to annoy him that they’d be inconsistent with the green, and he appreciated that I’d captured that in my drawing! I would share the books with my friends at school, and we would get together and create our own games, using the same Fighting Fantasy gaming system. I would typically come up with the story and the setting (because I loved to draw maps and create worlds) rather than use anything pre-designed, and I created an entire world to set the stories in (it was called ‘Landica’; the name actually came from an attempt when I was 12 to create a new language called ‘Landic’ – this is what I was like at 12 – though I didn’t use the language in the games). Some of them were fun, we would use the big multi-coloured dice I would find at gaming shops, I still have many of the ones I got back then, kept like coloured plastic gems. We never did play more complicated games like Dungeons and Dragons or Warhammer, and I regret that a little, but I always liked to keep it simple. I was always a bit intimidated by Dungeons and Dragons if I’m honest, but I obsessed over the world of Fighting Fantasy, spending ages drawing swords and orcs and maps. I did write two full (though not super long) single-player gamebooks, hand-written and long enough to fit into a classic school exercise book: ‘The Sorceror of the Swamp‘ and ‘Trek to Terror Tower‘. I filled my world with places named after obscure languages (my other obsession, looking up all of the languages of the world), or constellations, or even interesting foreign surnames I’d heard. It was a fun creative time, but I was always frustrated with myself for rarely completing ideas. I tried many times to write longer, more complicated and intelligent stories, but that’s me all over, a million ideas, only so much time. But a lot of reading, a lot of imagination and inspiration, and a lot of fantastic memories.

And yet, as you can see right above this collection of gamebooks, on the top shelf are my sketchbooks. These are The Sketchbooks, the main landscape format ones I use, a collection of Moleskine or Stillman & Birn or Seawhite of Brighton, going from number 1 – 40 (some of them are facing a different direction). You can see all the contents of those on my sketchbooks page. Those books go back to 2007 and represent quite a lot of creative output, so I guess I do occasionally complete artistic projects huh. Though my life’s sketching work is never really finished. That quest does not end here…

thanksgiving in the back yard

January 7, 2022January 7, 2022Leave a comment

Happy Thanksgiving! Oh wait it’s January the 7th. Right, well this sketch drawn on the iPad in my mother-in-law’s back yard in Santa Rosa was done on Thanksgiving 2021, the sky was very blue though the light was a little muted so shadows were soft, and we did absolutely zero Black Friday shopping the next day because ha, no more of that. Remember when they’d get up at 4am to stand in the cold outside Best Buy or Target? Those days are gone. Thanksgiving as you know is the big American holiday where you eat turkey, mash potatoes, cranberry sauce, all things I love, but I really love stuffing, and I really love gravy. Stuffing and gravy, oh man. I love a roast.

I’ve drawn this back yard before a couple of times, and it has changed a lot over the years, but here’s a very early one from way back in early 2007, when it looked very different. That’s the old dog Brutus asleep there, long since departed. That tree is gone too. This was when I drew in a WH Smith cartridge paper sketchbook from England, before I started using Moleskine sketchbooks, long before any iPads, and I was still figuring out watercolours, I was still using a fairly cheap but cheerful set from the university bookstore. I can tell exactly the colours used (payne’s gray mixed with ultramarine and purple lake) to get that specific shadow on the door, because I still sometimes mix those three to get the colour of shadow I want, and it was a bit of trial and error for this one at the time. I enjoy looking at the sketches from those first couple of years in the US, and I am glad I felt it so important to draw them. I still do.

“it’s lights out and away we go!”

December 10, 2021December 10, 20212 Comments

A Sunday afternoon sketch at home from October, drawn on the iPad with Procreate, a slice of the life. Watching the Formula One, this was the United States Grand Prix, which seems like a million races ago now. More on that later. There’s my increasingly-tall teenage son on the couch stretched out with his favourite cat on his lap (apologies to the other cat, no he loves you both equally), while I draw. Outside was a massive rain storm. They called it the “Bomb Cyclone” because everything has to have a gimmicky name now. The “Atmospheric River” and the “Moisture Firehose” were also terms used by the weather news people, who frankly are just having a laugh now. Moisture Firehose indeed, do me a favour. We had such little rain this year, the drought in the west has been very worrying, but then all this rain came along on the same day and provided a perfect backdrop for staying inside, which we would have been doing anyway, especially with this race going on. I was worried that we would lose power, the lights were flickering for a bit, and not get to see the race (it really would have been “lights out and away we go” as they say at the start of the race). And boy, was it was exciting. The young Dutch buck Max Verstappen beat seven-times legend Lewis Hamilton in the end with them being close right down to the final lap of the race. This whole Formula One season has been one of the most exciting in years, with Max (we used to call him ‘Waluigi’- MarioKart reference) Verstappen storming about to win loads of races in the Honda-powered Red Bull, maybe on course for his first world title, while the GOAT Lewis Hamilton in the slick Mercedes has pulled off some of the best drives I’ve seen him do to bring it back to level-pegging, and they go into the final race of this season on EQUAL POINTS, a situation that’s only happened once before (back in the 70s), and that final race is this weekend in Abu Dhabi. Lewis has been magnificent in recent races but it all comes down to this. Whoever comes ahead of the other will WIN the title. If they both crash out (something that’s been done before), Max will win, because he has one more race win than Lewis. To say I’m excited for this grand finale is an understatement. I’m a long-time fan of Lewis (and especially after the way he raced in Brazil this year) but more than anything I’m just a fan of the sport and I like all the characters, and it would be interesting to have a different champion, and I’m not particularly interested in the arguments and entrenching into different camps and all that, I’m just glad we’ve had an epic season. It’s very much a team sport, and a technical sport, not just about the bloke in the cockpit, there’s so much involved. I think Red Bull need to win it now because Honda will leave the sport next season and they won’t have that great Honda engine. Max will be probably champion at some point regardless, but I’ve said that before about drivers. Still, I’m actually very nervous about this weekend. I really don’t want a ‘both crash, Max wins by default’ situation, that would be crap, I just want good racing, and good strategy. I’m still annoyed about Schumacher and Hill in 94. But it’s all drama, and the big race is this Sunday. I would love if the team principals Toto Wolff and Christian Horner just had a massive punch-up, the psychologicals between them all season has been just as entertaining. I have a feeling that Max will win. Aargh I’m so excited!

And just as a throwback… November 2008, Lewis Hamilton’s second season in F1, and he won the title in the very last race of the season, in dramatic fashion, right at the end when local lad Massa thought he had won it (still feel so bad for him). Back then, we didn’t get the channel that Formula One came on but the cable channel still showed it without sound, and I’d have the closed-captioning on. The people writing the subtitles obviously weren’t familiar with a lot of the names, and would write “Lou Is Hamel Ton”, “Right Gone On” (that was Räikkönen), “Cove Align On” (Kovailainen), and “Along Sew” (Alonso). I would watch it for the subtitles mostly. Those were exciting seasons though, and so I drew this in my notebook back then, Lewis Hamilton’s winning McLaren. I didn’t draw cars much back then…

life on the other hand

May 10, 2021May 10, 20211 Comment

I mean, this is my main view a lot, looking over the top of my iPad, on the couch, a can of Pepsi Max (sorry, Pepsi Zero Sugar), my knees. We saw all the drawings of my house a year ago (see petescully.com/tag/uskathome/ for some of them). I was having a bit of a tough week, touch couple of weeks, I think we’ve all been getting a bit like that, but there are days when you just want to focus and get the head straight. I wasn’t sleeping too well, and on this day I got up super early and started doing some work. By lunchtime I was already exhausted again, so I sat on the couch while Paris St. Germain played Manchester City in the Champions League. That was the first leg, when PSG had a great first half but fell apart in the second. I liked James Richardson’s description of the game, that “Parisians were losing their heads like it was A Tale of Two Cities, which in a way it was, the worst of the halves and the best of halves”. I wish I could have thought of that. I think of funny things sometimes but I forget them, and other people do too. Sketching often helps, it’s where I go when I need to go somewhere. That was the case at every age. I like drawing on the iPad to just mess about. I use Procreate to draw, but I use Notability a lot to write notes with, and doodle like I would on a notepad in a meeting. Constantly doodling. Ahhh, I need a sketching trip, a proper trip where all I do is go around by myself drawing everything, but right now even the thought of it exhausts me.

Not Short For “Triceratops”

May 6, 2021May 6, 2021Leave a comment

This here is the Tri-Co-Ops at UC Davis. I have drawn it before (haven’t I drawn everything in Davis before?) but this one was done on the iPad using Procreate, drawn so that I could show the step-by-step as a demonstration video on the UC Davis Sustainability Sketchcrawl on Earth Day, not a real sketchcrawl because it was virtual, done over Zoom, but a sketching event anyway. The people who took part, I am not sure how many there were (nor did the organizers show their drawings after), they were then invited to draw along while I did a live sketch of a wheelbarrow (also from the Tri-Co-Ops), talking about the process as I went.

I drew that on the iPad too so that I could share screen. I recently did my staff evaluation at work, and one thing I did not put down as a skill I have learned is proficiency with Zoom, because even though I’m much more of a master at it than I was a year ago, join the bleedin’ club mate, what d’you want a medal? I have done the thing where I set m phone up as a camera to share that over Zoom, angling it down above the desk so people can see me draw (I did a workshop last year where I did that) but the connection kept freezing, my wifi wasn’t too strong in the bedroom desk where I was giving the workshop. I had considered doing a live sketch on site, setting up a tripod and Zooming direct from the UC Davis campus like a proper old-school live roving reporter, like Danny Baker, but with hopefully fewer train-station arguments. (Danny Baker fans will probably remember that clip, “Don’t you DARE talk to me like that!”). The campus wifi wasn’t strong enough though to Zoom outside for an hour where I wanted to sketch, so I didn’t do that. So, I sat at the relative comfort of my desk at home, with the cats and a cup of tea.

Here’s the video. Now I’m not sure if you can actually view the video in this blog post, but if you click on that image it will take you to my Flickr page which hosts it, and you should see the video there. I tried to approach drawing it digitally as if I were drawing it in my sketchbook, blocking with a bit of pencil then diving into the ink, finishing off by colouring it in. It’s not exactly Bob Ross, or even Tony Hart, and it’s just the drawing coming into shape, no words by me. I have thought about doing a step-by-step video, narrating as a I go, but I think it wouldn’t turn out as well as I would like, and you’d probably hear me saying “oh bugger!” and “oh bollocks!” a lot. Or maybe just saying “err…” a lot.

As it happens, when I did the virtual sketchcrawl last year, they recorded it and put the video on YouTube. So, here’s the video of me sketching a bike in 2020, early in the Zoom era. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5MKklfPxnU4 . Not exactly my best drawing, but it’s always harder when people are watching! And I managed to avoid saying “bugger” or other popular British vocabulary, but I do say “err” and “umm” a lot. And very few silly jokes!

at the desk job

March 30, 2021Leave a comment

Here’s a digital sketch from a recent UC Davis Staff Assembly meeting, with the Chancellor Gary May speaking on screen there. This is my at-home desk still. There’s a lot going on here. I try to keep it clear but things just keep showing up there. I would like a new desk, to be honest. Maybe one of those fancy ones that goes up and down so I can stand. One of our lecturers at work has one that I really like. Drew this on the iPad, took the odd note here and there, did half of it over lunch once the meeting was over while Barcelona played PSG in the background, a Champions League match on a Spanish language channel. This working from home thing is so done now. I do go into the office once a week to take care of something or other, I much prefer it. At home I am too close to the snacks in the kitchen. Part of this meeting was the discussion about our plan to return to campus this Fall, all in-person again. It’s still early doors yet, but I’m optimistic. But it’s going to be a long transition, for everyone. Let’s face it, we’re not going back to normal normal any time soon, this will all take a long time to get over.

The 46th President of the United States

February 2, 2021February 1, 2021Leave a comment

On the day of the Inauguration of the new President of the United States, Joe Biden, I watched and made notes on the iPad. I kinda don’t know where to stop when note-taking a speech as it’s going on, I feel like I have to inscribe every word, but you don’t know before going in what the most important bits will be. For example, I might write down a bit about coat-hangers or something, and then forget to write down the bit about a groundbreaking theory on dark matter or something. Not the topics of this speech but on a historic day you don’t want to be the person at FDR’s inauguration that wrote down the bits about locusts and profits but left out “The only thing we have to fear is Fear Itself”. So I just wrote words as they happened. I didn’t sketch during the incredible inaugural poem by Amanda Gorman, “The Hill We Climb”, I was just enthralled by that, it was a beautiful moment. I will probably sketch Ms Gorman’s performance some other time, I’ve rewatched it a few times already. I really enjoyed Kamala Harris’s speech too. But Biden’s inauguration gave me a great deal of happiness. I just wish I hadn’t drawn him looking more like Robert Kilroy-Silk. He totally does! In my drawing anyway, the real Joe looks nothing like Kilroy. Oh, Kilroy. Remember him? Americans won’t, he used to be on TV in the 90s, in the mornings, he had a kind of Jerry Springer-lite show called “Kilroy”. I remember actually watching it each morning on TV in the common room in the place where I lived in Belgium while eating a tuna panini for breakfast, so I always get the memory of the taste of tuna whenever I think of Kilroy. In fact it wasn’t like Jerry Springer at all thinking back; it was one of those daytime chat shows that was on at around 9:30 or 10am, right after BBC Breakfast Time or whatever was over, but the audience group was all sat facing the camera and there would be a topic they would talk about, I don’t know, whatever middle-England busybodies would talk about, holes in the road or immigrants or something, and Kilroy would bound about from person to person with his mike and his perma-tanned face and his kilroy-silky voice, and then he would tell you all to “take care of yourselves…and each other” in a totally non-creepy way, before his got show cancelled after he wrote controversial things about Arabs, then he was an early UKIPer, bounding about being all anti-EU, and I don’t think I ever thought of Kilroy once since leaving Britain in 2005 until now, when I accidentally drew him accepting the Presidency of the United States. The last thing we’d need is a perma-tanned TV personality with a history of having a go at muslims and banging on about immigrants in charge of things, eh kids. In fact I had to check my notes to make sure I didn’t mis-hear Biden saying “Take care of yourselves…and each other”; thankfully he didn’t. But anyway, welcome President Joe! And I had no idea his middle name was ‘Robinette’, you learn something new every day.