little and large

September 26, 20122 Comments

On Saturday night after the Pence Auction, I popped by Little Prague for a couple of beers and the essential detailed bar sketch. Little Prague is probably my favourite Davis pub. It’s the one I’ve known the longest, and they do nice beer (though the Krusovice I used to enjoy is now no longer available). It’s also the pub I have sketched the most. I don’t go very often, and when I do it’s usually on one of those nights where the music is quite dancey and loud. There is however a lot to draw, especially behind the bar, and the lighting is good bar-light. On this night not only did I sell two pieces at the Pence (hooray!) but the San Francisco Giants won the NL West (as mentioned on the TV screen; the Giants tend to be on the TV in my bar sketches). This is great news in our house. This means the Giants will be in the post-season play-offs. Who knows, maybe even with a shot at the World Series? Baseball is a long season with about seventeen thousand million games, so it surprised me that the NL West division only has six teams in it. Even the Scottish Premier League has more teams than that (well, two really, Celtic and Rang- ah, er…). It doesn’t make it any easier though. They play every single day for hours on end, against teams from all over the country and just have to finish with more wins than their divisional rivals (imagine Celtic and Ra-, er, Aberdeen playing against, say, Ajax, in order to get points to win the Scottish title). You see, it all makes sense, especially after a Czech beer.

Hey if you’re interested in seeing some of my previous Little Prague sketches here are a few… spot the difference!

slip inside the eye of your mind

August 27, 20122 Comments

At the end of a busy and interesting week, a Friday night trip downtown was in order. The hundred degree weather has cooled into low 90s and mid 80s, a sigh of relief from me for one. Davis is too hot in the summertime, you just don’t want to be outside doing anything. Summer makes for nice evenings though, so I biked downtown after dinner and walked about. Popped into Newsbeat, the Avid Reader, Bizarro Comics, and then went to De Vere’s Irish pub to spend the rest of the night drawing the bar and drinking the beer. It was as super-crowded as on previous visits, though it got busier later. I read the comic I bought (one of the new DC ‘Before Watchmen’ prequels, this one based on the Comedian; it really wasn’t all that, to be honest) and got out the sketchbook to draw this bar one more time. I have often thought about organizing a ‘Drink and Draw’ group in Davis, perhaps going to different Davis pubs each time; I think it’d be a good idea, though I have had little time to work on it. So I occasionally get out to draw the bars myself; it’s good practise, all those bottles and shapes and light, and you get to sample the local beers. I intended to do the whole thing in dark brown but I had picked up the purple instead, only realising after drawing the beer pumps. The light wasn’t bad, but it was hard to tell between brown and purple. Once I realised, I decided on a two-colour scheme which I really liked. Purple and brown reminds me of Cadbury’s Dairy Milk too. It took a while to draw this, about 3.5 beers (someone did ask me how long it had taken but I couldn’t remember what time I came in, I had been in Bizarro Comics next door for quite a while). You might be able to spot my reflection in there somewhere. The level of detail tails off a bit towards the end, on the right, because of the larger movement of people, the darker light, and the effects of the Sudwerk Aggie ale (not my favourite Sudwerk beer by quite a long shot, but it’s nice enough and only $4 a pint). I chatted to some people at the bar while I sketched, watched the Giants win at the baseball, and made the long walk home through dark Old North Davis (they don’t like streetlights there; apparently they want you to be able to see the stars. Be quite nice to see the street as well though, I would have thought). Passed the bats that live under the bridge at Covell too, squeaking and flapping about. Summer is nearly done, and Fall is coming in, but the warm weather and balmy nights will be with us for quite a bit of time yet, and it’s nice to get out every so often.

(Click on the image to go to a bigger version)

PS: here are my previous sketches in De Vere’s Davis:

city hall tavern

July 16, 20122 Comments

After a very busy week, I went out on Friday evening to the Art About and did some sketching at the Pence Gallery (haven’t scanned them yet), chatted to some very nice folk, and then strolled around downtown before parking at the City Hall Tavern (in the old City Hall building I tend to draw a lot). I wanted to do a bar sketch so I looked at the massive scene of bottledom and said, yeah ok I’ll give it a go. Those revolving bike wheels on the ceiling were a little challenging but there they are. The Giants were winning, beating the Astros, and there on the right are the black straws again that pop up in all of my bar drawings, everywhere in the world. The beer was nice too, Third Shift Amber Ale, and only $4 a pint. It was pretty quiet when I came in, but got busy by the time I left, with the young Friday night crowd. One guy spoke to me while sketching and recognized me as the guy who drew the bar at De Vere’s. Another guy, a younger Aussie bloke, chatted to me about Iggy Pop. I told him I always liked the song The Passenger because I can’t drive either. He said Iggy Pop was a real rocker, not like Justin Bieber or someone. Perhaps, but in thirty years people might be saying, oh these kids now aint real popstars, not like Bieber, yeh he was a proper rocker. You never know. I saw Iggy Pop supporting the Pistols at Finsbury Park in ’96, and just wanted him to put a shirt on to be honest.

This whole sketch took almost two hours, starting from right to left. It was done with a Micron Pigma 02 pen, with a bit of uniball vision micro for some of the thicker lines and shading.

angels and bus-stops

June 26, 2012Leave a comment

Another north London pub, sketched quickly before meeting up with a friend. This is the Angel Inn on Highgate Hill, a pub I’ve been to many times before (it used to be my local, though when I lived there I went once every few months or so at most, I wasn’t exactly Norm from Cheers). It’s a really nice pub though, warm and welcoming, and in a great location – home was always down hill. I love Highgate Village. There are great views over london, nice little shops, intimate little restaurants and warm pubs, plus it’s near Hampstead Heath. Can someone please pay me loads and loads of money to just draw around the world, so I can move the family back there? Cheers.

Anyway, my bus got there fifteen minutes early so this was what I got, not a bad capture for quaretr of an hour. An example of ‘draw what you have time for’. Know what’s possible in a certain amount of time and do what you can. On the way there, I got off the tube at Golders Green to catch the 210 bus, and had eight minutes to spare, so I also drew the sketch on the right, a rooftop opposite the bus-stop. How did i know I had eight minutes? The nice little LED display at the bus-stop told me so, and it was pretty accurate. That is very handy. I remember it not being too long ago that waiting for a bus in London was a case of ‘anyone’s guess’, but it’s not too bad these days.

I keep meaning to do a big detailed pub interior sketch inside the Angel Inn. Next time, perhaps I will.

down camden

June 25, 2012Leave a comment

While back in London I wanted to get at least one in-bar sketch done, and I usually find it harder to draw at the bar when I’m busy talking to non-sketching friends. So one night I met up with a mate at the Hawley Arms in Camden Town, so I got there a bit early, got a pint (not cheap in London, much dearer than in northern CA), and drew from a little table at the end of the bar. It took about twenty minutes. You can see my reflection if you look hard. I do like drawing bars, there are all the usuals, the beer-taps, the bottles, the little shower things that dispense sodas, and of course the black straws. All bar drawings I do have to have a big stack of those black straws that just seem to get in the way of everything else in the sketch. I don’t see that many people using them, but they always keep them right there.

This was a nice pub, popular with famous musicians I guess (well known for one in particular), though I had never actually been here before, in all the nights I have been out in Camden. I used to go to Camden quite a lot back in the old days – the Mixer, the Dublin Castle, NW1 (in the reverse order of appearance) – so always have to go there at least once on any return trip.

the anchor by the thames

June 23, 20123 Comments

And so on I went down the South Bank, until I came to the Anchor pub, decked out for the Jubilee. It was surrounded by a large horde of shaven-headed lager-drinking chain-smoking England football fans, getting a few in before hitting the tube to Wembley for a pre-Euro 2012 warm-up match against Belgium. All good natured, of course, and enjoying the day with all the tourists and Jubilee celebratories. As I sat down in a nice quiet spot to sketch the historic riverside pub, they all moved off, singing about being off to Wembley, leaving only the passing tourists. I didn’t drawn any of those, they kept moving, so I focused on the building itself. To be fair most people who milled were milling away from this spot and in the pub’s beer garden to the right. I sat for almost an hour and sketched (I did finish some detailing later, but chose not to colour it). One young lady came up and asked if she could ask a wierd question. Depends on how wierd, I replied. How wierd could it be? Not very wierd in fact. “How do you find time to draw?” She was an artist herself it seemed but never seemed to have time for it. I had struggled to find time to do all the drawing I wanted to do on the trip (you wouldn’t believe it) but still managed to get a lot done, because it is really important to me to have drawing time. I get grumpy if I don’t (quite grumpy indeed) so I make sure I find the time for it, even when I’m ridiculously busy. I told her about Urban Sketchers, and the Drawing London groups, and said that by seeing how other people busier even than me manage to somehow fit art into their lives inspires me.

With this sketch of the Anchor, I wanted to sit and do something detailed and old and full of bricks. With this other sketch on the right, Stoney Street in Southwark (near Borough Market), my time was running low so I did a quick about-ten-minute sketch to capture the scene. When time is short, think what you might be able to get in with that time, and be ok with it. I hate watsing time, even though I do it often, when I could be sketching already something else. I went on to the market and had the most amazing grilled halloumi sandwich, right by London bridge. Even thinking of the smell makes me ravenous for more – I’ll say it again, I love coming to this part of London.

a tale of one city

June 9, 20127 Comments

And so here are the drawings I did on the London sketchcrawl. I started off by doing a quick sketch outside Temple station before everyone turned up; I must admit I was pretty nervous about the day!

After everybody had dispersed to sketch this and that, I sat by the Thames catching up with my cousins and drawing the view from the Embankment. The big pointy building in the distance is the Shard, Europe’s brand-new tallest building, ingeniously designed to burst any incoming alien balloon. That’ll show ’em.

Here are a couple of sketches I did after that, the one on the right being up a quiet street in the Temple, and the other being on the less quiet Fleet Street, the Prince Henry Room. The gateway around it is actually a feature of the building, around the gate which on weekdays is open and leads to Temple Church, but on this day was shut to the public. I really should have known. So I sketched the building itself in my beloved brown pen. The London 2012 stamp is one I picked up at Paperchase.

This one above, a smaller quicker sketch of the famous view down Fleet Street, was done at the end of the ‘crawl on the way down to the meeting point. My scanner broke before I could scan it however so I can only post the photo.

And this last one, this was of the Cheshire Cheese pub – no, not that one, a different one on Milford Lane near the Temple. When I heard about it I just had to draw it. Old pub drawing – check. It took a bit of a while, about an hour and a half, and I had to add the colour later on, but it was a fun one to draw.

That really was a great sketchcrawl. I still have plenty more London (and Paris) sketches to post…I just need to get a new scanner!

the bar at the end of the sketchbook

May 14, 2012Leave a comment

The last page of moleskine #9!

This is the bar of Sophia’s Thai kitchen in Davis, where I went on Friday evening for a couple of beers and a bit of sketching. Actually I was going to see The Avengers, but the lines were so long – a lot of people really wanted to see it too apparently. I missed the 7:30 show, all tickets sold by the time i reached the front of the line (at 7:45) so chose the 10pm show, and came over here to pass the time. Good way to pass the time, on a hot evening. I’ve never spent time inside here, sketched on the deck a couple of times but not in the bar. It’s nice! I sketched this by washing the page in warm watercolours, plus a little bit of splattered paint while it was wet, and then drawing over it in uni-ball signo pen, with white gel pen for the highlights. This was a really fun one to draw, and after a testing week, drawing this put me in a good mood.

And the Avengers was a lot of fun too! I want to go and watch ‘Thor’ and ‘Captain America’ again now though. And fight bad guys.

russian river brewing co

May 6, 20123 Comments

On Saturday we popped into the Russian River Brewing Co in Santa Rosa. I drank a couple of Perditions, while my wife’s father, visiting from southern CA, tried the full sampler set. Their beer is very famous and very well respected among beer afficionados. We spoke to some fellow beerophiles visiting all the way from Michigan, and I drew this on the astrology page of a local free paper.

don’t start me talking, i could talk all night

February 25, 20126 Comments

Last night’s talk at the Avid Reader went very well, a lot of people came (many thanks to all who came!). I spoke for, I’m not sure, an hour and a half, maybe two hours? It was nigh on half past nine when I left anyway. I introduced the new Urban Sketchers book, ‘The Art of Urban Sketching’, spoke about Urban sketchers as a group, as a philosophy, how it all started, and I think I may have made some sense occasionally, stringing my planned talk together like I string my sketchcrawls together, if you know what I mean. I talked a bit about my own sketching, how and why I do it, and passed around some images of Davis that I’ve drawn. Quite a few familiar faces were there, for which I was very thankful! I even signed some books; nice to see so many people with the Urban Sketchers book, I hope they’ll be as inspired by all the other sketchers as I am! I read from the book, the manifesto, the profiles of certain artists, showed some of my favourite images in the book (several of them were by Luis Ruiz, including his one of Malaga’s now-closed oldest bookstore, Libreria Cervantes, which was very relevant being talked about in an independent bookstore, although the Avid Reader is doing pretty well these days and is in fact expanding into the former space of the recently closed toystore, Alphabet Moon, three doors down the street). I tried to talk a lot about urban sketching to Davis and cities like it, how we as urban sketchers are recording a place’s history in personal ways; I was pleased to meet another artist who had also painted the Davis Lock and Safe building, for example. My throat was getting pretty dry by the end of it.

So after the talk, I popped over to De Vere’s for a cold beer. All of this talk about drawing meant I was just itching to pick up a pen again, so I went straight to the bar and started sketching, and sketching, and sketching. I lay down a wash of browny-yellowy-orange first, to represent the bar’s light, then draw over that in my black uni-ball signo pen. I couldn’t represent the bar’s noise though – where last week’s Little Prague outing was defined by very loud music, this was deifned by very loud talking. It got packed quickly, and you couldn’t hear any music, but quite often people were yelling over each other at the bar. I however kept inside my bubble, and didn’t really mind; I had done all the talking I could that night, and now was my quiet time, in a barful of noise (that’s livin’ alright).