sketching a rainy day in davis

April 26, 2024Leave a comment

Last month we held another Let’s Draw Davis sketchcrawl in downtown Davis, this time on 2nd Street. It was a really rainy day too, but we had a good turnout of sketchers not minding that. I sat beneath the shelter of the Varsity Theatre and sketched the Avid Reader bookstore, a local favourite spot (and where I worked a long long time ago). the rain was really hard, absolutely bucketing down. That was a busy day for me; I had woken up early and taken part in the annual Lucky Run, and this time I ran the 7k distance for the first time ever. Usually I run the 5k, but I wanted a bit more of a challenge. I’ve not been running as much and am definitely heavier, but I smashed that 7k and want to run more. I am aiming to go for the 10k by the Fall, so I had better get back to training, cut back on those milkshakes. Next week, maybe.

I went into Mishka’s Cafe to do a last sketch, and several of the other sketchers were there. I sketched the scene in my brown fountain pen, and had a big fruity smoothie (which took several straws to drink, because their plastic straws are a bit too weak to be used in their smoothies, I must remember to bring my reusable metal straw next time). Then we all got together afterwards to look at each others’ sketchbooks, there were some great styles on display.

I recently posted the next Let’s Draw Davis event which will be on Saturday May the 4th, so I made a Star Wars style logo for this one. Check out details at the Let’s Draw Davis FB page.

raining champions

November 4, 2023November 3, 2023Leave a comment

Fall came at last. We had one Sunday where it really rained, an absolutely deluge. I was staying indoors that day because knackered, so I didn’t mind. This was the day I was trying out that new brown De Atramentis ink that had arrived the day before (thanks JetPens for quick delivery!). I’d just watched the USA Grand Prix, which was an exciting race in which Lewis Hamilton came second and could have won if there were another couple of laps, only to later be disqualified entirely from the race (along with LeClerc) due to his car’s floor being a millimetre too high or low due to wear, honestly I forget which technical rule had been unwittingly broken, but it meant that whole entertaining race we’d just meant zero. I hate it when stuff like that happens. The reigning champion Max Verstappen won anyway, that didn’t change. I looked out of the window instead, at the driving rain. This was a big storm, creating big puddles. Thankfully no big trees went down, unlike the calamitous storms of last January. By the way, I love Now and Then. It’s not necessarily a classic, but I love the sentiment, because I love the Beatles.

raining champions

August 12, 2023August 12, 2023Leave a comment

It’s going to rain in Scotland. It’s Scotland, not Arizona. Of course, it didn’t have to rain quite so much on the very day we hired the car and drove north from Glasgow, past the mighty Loch Lomond and the Trossachs, over wild Rannoch Moor and through the awe-inspiring Glencoe, on to Fort William at the foot of Ben Nevis (which we never actually saw, it was so shrouded in cloud). We never saw most of these lovely scenes because the rain was very thick, but we did our best and still explored. We first stopped bu the shores of Loch Lomond at the pretty little village of Luss, and stood looking out at the greyness, unable to see the other side. I came to Loch Lomond once before, in 1999 with my friend Simon and his uncle who drove a Jaguar, and can vouch that it is beautiful here. So, we continued through the rain along the shores, going north up to the Falls of Falloch. I had warned my wife before our tip to Scotland that we had to be aware of Scotland’s biggest menace – the Midge. Being from the south of England, we don’t get them, but I remember camping in Cumbria when I was 17 and everyone was being constantly eaten alive by the things. Tiny little fly creatures that bite you to pieces. We watched videos of people walking around the Highlands dressed in nets, we bought loads of midge-repellant, we checked the Midge Forecast online. Yet in the whole trip, the only time we encountered the Midge was at the Falls of Falloch, and they didn’t really get us at all. We got lucky, maybe, or the Midges know not to mess with me. The Falls of Falloch are lovely, and it was raining, but I tried to grab a sketch of them. As you can see my Fabriano sketchbook is splotched with raindrops. If you look closely though, you can see the remains of one dead Midge. See you later, sucker.

After a brief stop for lunch at a pub in Crianlarich, just beating the rush of hikers making their way up the West Highland Way (some day! There’s a lot of hiking I want to do in Scotland, some day), we continued our drive north through the rain. We crossed the boggy Rannoch Moor, one of the largest wildernesses in Britain, which I’d been eager to see. We couldn’t see very far. It wasn’t too long before we arrived at the main attraction, Glencoe. Or Glen Coe, as it’s usually written, Gleann Comhann in Gaelic. Even in the gloomy rain it was breathtaking scenery. We stopped a few times for photos and to take in the sheer Scotland-ness of it all. I’ve heard so much about Glen Coe since I was a kid, and its tragic history with the Glencoe Massacre of 1692, and its geology, the work of ice age glaciers carving through ancient volcanic rock. Scotland looks very different from England, and this is because geologically they are not from the same place, but collided together millions of years ago, Scotland originally being part of the same landmass that is now North America. Of course I had to at least attempt a sketch. I had it in mind that I would come up here and do sketches like Richard Bell in that book of his that I love, but the weather had other ideas. I even tucked my umbrella into my jacket to attempt some shelter, to no avail, I couldn’t look upwards and the wind and rain just laughed in my face. I drew the panorama above, of the Three Sisters, and decided to just leave it like that, rain splotches making my watercolouring impossible. It was a brave effort. Sometimes what comes out in these moments says more about your time than trying to draw it later. I drew another quick pencil sketch a little way up the road, adding a quick grey wash afterwards, but otherwise enjoyed what scenery we could. We visited the Glen Coe visitor centre, saw their little film about Glen Coe, went into the reconstructed turf hut, and bought stuff in the gift shop. And then we drove on through more dramatic, wet countryside, to our next port of call, Fort William. We were going on the famous Jacobite Steam Train…

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atmospheric river / bomb cyclone

January 8, 20234 Comments

Before we return to the sketches of summer 2022, here’s 2023 so far. Here in California we are going through some of the worst wave of storms I’ve seen since coming here, knocking down more trees than I’ve experienced before (in my life that would be since the Great Storm of 1987 in the south of England, the Michael Fish Not-a-Hurricane). We knew the ‘Atmospheric River / Bomb Cyclone’ was incoming, but weren’t expecting it to cause so much damage. Atmospheric River and Bomb Cyclone sound like two flavours of anti-perspirant spray, or maybe a double A-side twelve inch from a 1980s dance group. With all these trees down I wasn’t not sure whether to call it ‘Arbor-gedden’ or ‘Arbor-calypse’. The situation has been pretty serious though.. The first biggie was on New Year’s Eve. It was pouring with rain and the wind was picking up, but we weren’t going anywhere, just played some board games and ate a nice roast dinner, and then noticed that the internet had gone down. We watched a movie saved on the iPad (the new Pinocchio, funnily enough) We could hear some big crashes not far away, but couldn’t tell what that was, maybe a big tree limb had snapped off. Just before midnight, the rain and wind had stopped revealing a bright starry sky. My son and I took a little walk around the neighbourhood and saw some trees had come down, but turning back towards our road the lights were out, but we could just about make out that a big tree had fallen and totally crushed the carport opposite. That’s it above, as seen first thing next morning. The car was just missed. Then walking away from that we nearly walked right into a huge tree that blocked the entire street, twice as big as the other fallen tree, and that had taken out the street lamp too. We found a way around and went back home. Power was out through much of Davis, but we were ok. The next morning I saw that the huge tree that came down had also totally flattened a car and pulled up the pipes from beneath the street, right outside our neighbour’s house. The sound of chainsaws had started at about 2am, before crews even made it out, there were neighbours just cutting away branches so that people could get past. Another enormous tree came down on top of all our mailboxes (that stopped the junk mail for a few days). I walked around, and saw that trees were down everywhere, a huge one already cleared from the main road, plus one house which had two trees fall on it, one damaging the roof and another crushing a car (I know the owner actually; he told me that they heard the first tree come down and went out to see, and only narrowly missed getting hit by the second tree which took out the car – so very, very lucky). This was just in our few blocks, trees were down everywhere. I’ve seen a lot of trees fall in Davis, but never this many all at once.

It took a while for the internet to come back on at home but I went into work a few days later, to find that the massive tree in front of our building had fallen too. Other trees have gone down outside the Math Sciences Building over the years but this was the biggest, a huge pine I think it was, and the roots had pulled up the sidewalk too. Crews have been out there ever since with chainsaws and shredding machines pulling it all apart, the the huge stump is still on its side and roped off. Several other trees around the building have had large parts come off. In front of Mrak Hall, two historic trees, oaks I think, fell on the main path. I walked through part of the Arboretum, mindful about loose branches, and saw one of the big Redwoods in the old Redwood Grove had fallen too. A lot of old trees fell on New Years Eve, a lot of history (and some much-needed shade) went with it; it made me feel sad. However, we were told that this was only a taster, that the really big storm was coming on Wednesday evening, with the worst hitting on Thursday afternoon. I got a little bit drenched cycling in on Thursday morning, but by about lunchtime it was another calm lull. In the early afternoon however I could see from my fourth floor office window a long black line against the sky, ominously stretching from north to south, moving fast in our direction. By the time it reached Davis, it was like we were suddenly engulfed in a giant grey wave, with the view from my window being a wall of water across the city. I had to quickly sketch while watching this deluge.

Thankfully the storm didn’t bring quite as much damage to our area as on New Year’s Eve, but still caused chaos around the state, and there have been big floods already with the region on high alert for more. There was another lull on Friday, and then on Saturday night (last night) the next wave hit, and boy was there some wind. It reached around 65 mph here, and I was pretty nervous watching as best I could from my bedroom window, as the silhouettes of large trees dancing around like jelly against a sky illuminated by flashes of lightning, to the constant pounding drone of the winds. The one tree that is right outside my window was giving it all that, mouthing off and getting lary, but by sunrise the tree had sobered up and acting as if nothing had happened. I took another walk this morning to survey the damage around our part of Davis, and while there were some big branches down and at least one tree it didn’t seem quite as bad, but I can’t speak for the rest of town and the news showed that midtown Sacramento got pretty badly hit. Our electricity was on, unlike for much of town after some power lines went down, but the internet was out. I cycled down to campus during today’s lull to check that power was on in our building, thankfully all ok (first day of the quarter starts tomorrow!), but didn’t sketch anything. All along each street there are piles of branches, and chopped up tree trunks, or the scars of where they crashed. Last night was pretty scary, but the news is telling us the next wave of this Atmospheric River will hit tonight, the winds of the Pacific stretching out its long arm to give us another clobbering, and this one will be even worse than last night? It’s nature’s way, sure. Fingers crossed that tomorrow will be ok. I’d say ‘touch wood’ but frankly I want to keep as far away from any wood as possible…

gimme some Leuven

September 4, 2022September 2, 2022Leave a comment

I woke up and it was raining hard. There was no way I was going to Charleroi to draw old factories if I was sitting on top of a hill getting drenched. I spent enough time getting drenched in Charleroi between 1999 and 2000 for a lifetime. So I had a little lie-in, and then hopped on a train to the nearby university city of Leuven (Louvain in French, but this is in the Flemish region). I have only been to Leuven once before, and that was an even rainier day, meeting up with one of my fellow year-abroad teachers. Always thought it would be a good place to go back to a less rainy day, but since it was raining anyway I thought, what the hell. This was my last day in Belgium, I was going to be catching a Eurostar that evening back to London. Originally I’d planned to stay another day, but as much as I like Belgium, an extra day in London is something I knew I’d love more (and I did). I dashed from shop doorway to shop doorway to stay relatively dry, until I reached the centre of town. I spent a bit of time in an interesting bookshop looking at Flemish books, including one very big volume all about the various dialects of Flanders, complete with detailed maps. If I could read Dutch better that would be a fascinating book. It’s hard for foreigners to sometimes pick up the subtleties of accent and dialect in a language where they struggle just to understand the words (I said that very thing to someone when I first came here in 1999, they asked if I was having difficulties with the accent, I said no it’s the vocabulary). I didn’t for example realize that the French of Charleroi was a particularly peculiar version compared to many other places in Belgium, such as my friends in Liege who told me they couldn’t always understand Les Carolos. Meanwhile they are struggling to understand my French, and then when I went to Charleroi, people told me “oh you have such good French!” so I understood, right, I learned it here, that’s why nobody else comprehends me. That’s my story anyway. So, I got to Leuven and had a waffle, and tried to figure out what sort of drawings I would do. I was faced with this big church – I’d go inside later – and the extremely ornate Stadhuis (Town Hall) building, which I knew I’d need to draw, but wasn’t sure where to start. I walked about, and found a covered passage by the Grote Markt where I wouldn’t get splashed on too much. I drew the panorama above. This took under a couple of hours, though I added most of the paint later. Click on the image, you will see it in more detail (on Flickr). It was a reasonably busy Wednesday lunchtime. As I drew, a girl crashed her bike not far from me, sliding on the watery street, and she seemed pretty hurt. I went over with some other bystanders and she was helped up into the dry, and her bike put to the side. I got back to my drawing, I couldn’t really help much more with my limited Dutch, but someone else was able to help her get her phone to call her mother who came to collect her. I felt really bad for her, I don’t think she’d broken anything but she was pretty upset. As much as I enjoyed this drawing I do think of that poor girl falling from her bike now when I look at it.

Leuven is an important old town, the historic capital of the Duchy of Brabant. Its university goes back to the 1425 (as the old University of Leuven, though that was abolished in 1797, and its successor KU Leuven was founded in 1834). The university’s library was atrociously burned to the ground by the invading Germans in World War I. The enormous St. Peter’s Church (Sint-Pieterskerk) is opposite the Stadhuis and dates from the 1500s, though it too was seriously damaged in both world wars. I stood at the rear of the church sheltered from the storm, and drew the sketch above. I liked the shape of those rooftops. The flags were above a bar called Leuven Centraal, where I would stop in for some food before heading back. there was a young couple seated nearby who were if not on a date, seemed like it was a kind of date, they were having that “I like this music, do you like that music” sort of conversation (from what I could gather of their Flemish; I may have misunderstood, they could have been talking about horse racing for all I know). So I went into the church, walked about, was a bit overwhelmed to do a proper big sketch int here, and drew this big wooden pulpit thing that looked like a magic tree. I bet the priest loves going in there, it’s like walking into a fantastical sculpture, like you become some sort of wizard on the other side.

A couple of different things. The first was outside a friterie, and is an anthropomorphized bag of frites eating a frite. He only has one arm so maybe another bag of frites ate his arm. Maybe cannibalism is a thing in the live-action-frites community. Either way this was CREEPY as hell, but not the creepiest frites related image I’ve seen in Belgium (that would be the odd three-legged feminine-frite, a ‘frite-fatale’ if you will, seen in Charleroi next to an image of, for some reason, Dopey the Dwarf). Still it is a bizarre figure. Yet it still made me hungry for more salty frites. The next statue is a more well-known Leuven fixture, ‘Fonske‘, or ‘Fons Sapientiae’. I would presume this is Leuven’s version of the Fonz, is telling kids “eeeh, be smart, be cool, read books, stay in school” and then for some reason pouring a drink on his head, which Fonzie would never do, unless the drink was hair gel. I don’t know, I’ve not seen Happy Days for a long time. Fonske was created in 1975 to commemorate the university’s 550th anniversary, and the name means “the fountain of wisdom” in Latin. Just like Mannekin Pis in Brussels, the statue is sometimes dressed up in costume. I really hope that one of those costumes is of the Fonz. (Side note, when I first met my wife in France, I would sometimes make her laugh by singing the theme tune to Happy Days in French, “Dimanche Lundi, Heureux Jours…” etc).

Well there was no goodbye grey skies, hello blue just yet, so I popped into the cafe Leuven Central (my guidebook recommended this place) for a late lunch. I got a veggie curry and drank a Kasteel Rouge, which to my surprise was a kriek (or cherry beer). Krieks are popular over here, I’ve never been a big fan of them but this was quite nice. And that was my day out in Leuven. I had to get back to Brussels and back to London, and this little sojourn in Belgium would be over.

Lille, dimanche après-midi, il pleut encore

August 23, 2022August 24, 2022Leave a comment

It stopped raining for a little while after lunch. After walking about the back streets of Lille in the steady drizzle to find a restaurant to sit down in and enjoy some ch’ti region food, with little success (most of the outdoor seating had closed up due to the rain, and places were generally full inside at lunchtime) I ended up eating at the cafe that was that day’s “hub” for the urban sketchers, near the Treille cathedral, and just had a fairly small snack. I ended up chatting with some German sketchers I bumped into, such as Basel-based Tine Klein who I had met at previous symposia, she paints dramatic watercolour sketches I really admire and was talking technique with her friend from Berlin. I didn’t see any of the other sketchers I know, I was planning to join them in the evening for the drink-n-draw (or rather “drink-n-look-at-amazing-sketchbooks”). So after lunch I went back to the hotel to dry off, and when I headed out again the rain had stopped. I headed towards the train station, Lille Flandres. I couldn’t remember if Lille Flandres was the French name for Ned’s wife, on the Simpsons. In the road leading up to the station, Rue Faidherbe, there are these big green sculptures, so I stood next to one and drew the Gare itself. It opened in 1842, known then as just ‘Gare de Lille’. I spent a lot of time in European train stations when I was younger. In the summer of 1998 I took a five week trip around Europe with a Eurail pass, carrying the big Thomas Cook Rail Timetable book with me, but I never passed through Lille Flandres. I love a train though. I got this far with the station and that was enough, because the rain was back.

I crossed the street and took shelter in the awnings of a closed cafe. The rain wasn’t heavy (yet), and I felt quite contented. As a resident of Davis California I don’t see much rain any more, so it’s still a thrill to get a downpour, even one that stops me sketching wherever I want (spoiler alert – it rained a lot more on this trip, I still made the best of it). I still had a decent view of the rear of the Eglise St. Maurice de Lille and I couldn’t resist all those triangular turrets. I plotted it out and started sketching, and then the heavens opened up. I’m assuming someone in the heavens left the bathroom taps on. The rain was the heaviest I had seen in a pretty long time, and it was getting hard to really see. It was also being driven in towards me, so I was still getting wet, though not as drenched as those dashing down the street. Well, I thought, no point in trying to draw in pen, so I gave up and went to the next page, and added a wash, before adding in what details I could with the paintbrush (below). Not the sort of thing I usually get to draw but I definitely enjoyed it, and it definitely reflects the mood of what I saw more than the line drawing. I left the original sketch as it was, that’s part of the story.

The day’s urban sketching exploration was over though, so I jumped from shelter to shelter and dashed to my hotel. I am glad I stayed in such a good central location. It wasn’t a fancy hotel, just a regular Ibis, but the room had a desk which is something I always look for in a hotel room, as a sketcher who sometimes has to finish stuff off.

In the early evening, I walked out to the citadel park, to a little bar where the Sunday night meeting of French urban sketchers was going to take place. There I met with people that I knew from sketching trips gone by, such as Sophie Navas, Vincent Desplanche, Mauro Doro and more, and enjoyed a beer and looked over some amazing sketchbooks. We then went on to meet with my Belgian sketching friends Gerard Michel, Fabien DeNoel and Arnaud De Meyer, as well as French sketchers Martine Kervagoret and Lolo Wagner, it was great to see them all again. There were some others who I did not know as well, and others whose art I was very familiar with such as Jean-Christophe Defline and Sylvain Cnudde, whose work I have been really loving for a number of years (his sketchbook is even more amazing in person, I tell you). We had a quick drink at a cafe, before many of us went off to find some dinner at a place big enough for an urban sketching evening. Aux Moules on Place Rihour was that place, we ate in the large room inside and the staff were very friendly. I did do some sketching on the paper placemat (as did others), and also drew a panorama. Sophie (who I had first met briefly at the Strasbourg USk France Rencontre in 2015, and who now lives in Strasbourg; her sketches are great and she also designs excellent posters) did ask if I minded that everyone spoke French (she knows my French is a bit rusty) but I said that I loved to listen, and that I did understand most of what was being said, but I probably couldn’t join in to speak as much! Vincent Desplanche had copies of his book of sketches from Japan to buy, I snapped that up.

My moules were great, the beer was nice and it was fun to meet up with old sketching friends (and listen to some French, if only occasionally speaking it!). It had been another long day, so I went off to bed and fell right asleep. Next day I would be off to Belgium for a few days of sketching and exploring.

la pluie à Lille

August 22, 2022August 22, 20223 Comments

The sudden storm from the night before turned into a steady shower through the night and all morning in Lille. I don’t mind, I like the rain, and the day before had been very sunny. On rainy days when travelling with a sketchbook you do have to be creative, and open to the fact that maybe you will need to sketch inside a lot more, or just have a different experience. I live in Davis California nowadays, so rain is a proper novelty. That said, I went out for breakfast pastries in the morning, and I just had to try and sketch the bakery. Paul is a chain, but the bakery still looked like a good sketch. However there was very little shelter across the street, so I stood back to the wall holding my sketchbook upright and drew what I could, adding in some colour when I got back to the dry hotel room to eat my pain au chocolat. Oh man, French pastries for breakfast is still my favourite thing to wake up. Although on our second trip to France in July, I could tell my wife was getting a bit bored of them. I particularly like the pain au chocolate aux amandes, the one with almonds in it, it’s delicious. Big fan of an escargot as well (the sticky raisin-filled pastry shaped like a snail’s shell).

As I say, you have to be creative as a sketcher when it rains, and you also have to seize the best spots before they are taken. Here at the back side of the Notre Dame de la Treille cathedral in the middle of Lille I found a shop on Rue de la Monnaie that was not open but still had its awnings out, with a good view down the alleyway leading to the bluish-grey hued church. It was raining steadily but not yet too hard, and generally people weren’t under umbrellas. Another French sketcher came and started sketching underneath the awning too; events like this are nice because there are so many sketchers around and they all say hello to each other, and you get to see other peoples’ styles. Some more passed by, evidently looking for a dry spot. Several French sketchers I had met were seeing Lille for the first time, like me, though I did speak to a local while drawing this as well, he was telling me about how he loves living in Lille. It’s a nice place (and in a great location, so easy to get to London…). Though as with everywhere else in this part of Europe, you get used to the rain. I spent a year in Belgium, I saw my fair share (it rained a lot more there than even in London).

Next up, I stopped at the interesting-looking Musée de l’Hospice Comtesse. While I didn’t go inside the museum itself (I’m here to sketch outside! Rain be damned!) it was interesting to walk around the courtyard and some of the grounds. There is a big purple ‘cosmic serpent’ sculpture as you go inside – two serpents, actually – but it was just too wet to really draw those. There was a small covered area in front of a corridor facing the courtyard, where about four or five sketchers had installed themselves on various little stools. There wasn’t much room, but I squeezed in out of the way, and held my sketchbook vertically to attempt to draw the clocktower. It looks like the two serpents are waiting for someone to come and let them in, or out. The rain was pouring down by this point. I listened to the other sketchers talking in French, they had some very nice art styles. Behind us there was a corridor leading to the Jardin Médicinale, and I could see someone drawing what looked like a little figure with a pumpkin for a head. The sketcher left, and I drew the corridor with pumpkin man at the end of it. He looked a bit dejected, poor pumpkin head. I walked down to the little garden, and it was full of similar figures with pumpkins and other such vegetables for heads. Very realistic little people they were, with believable poses, doing things like watering the plants, or climbing a ladder – I drew that guy quickly. They are called Minitos, and were made by Jean-François Fourtou. according to the Lille 3000 Utopia site, this project originated in “a tale that the artist recounted to his daughter about little characters who lived underground in their garden, digging labyrinths and growing things in the vegetable garden.” I enjoyed being around them. The rain kept on coming down though and I was getting hungry (though maybe not for pumpkin soup), so I went to look for lunch.

the world’s still spinning round we don’t know why

May 18, 2019May 18, 20191 Comment

Rain has returned for a bit, a surprise at this time of year. More is coming. Not too much I hope. Anyway this week I decided to finish off Sketchbook #32 (my numbering of my panoramic sketchbooks brings us to this number) with a two-page spread of the corner of 3rd Street and B Street. I last sketched this corner over a year ago on a rainy March day, stood as I was this day beneath the entrance of the US Bicycling Hall of Fame. I think it will be a restaurant. Another changing corner of Davis. 3rd Street has had quite an upgrade from this corner down to the University, this week getting a bit of a celebration (that I didn’t go to). Click on the image to get a closer view (or just put your eyes really close to the screen).

duck soup

March 9, 2019March 9, 2019Leave a comment

A break from the London sketches, to show a Davis sketch. I’ve not sketched as regularly as usual since coming back, which is common after a trip abroad. I get back to Davis and I’m like, yeah I’ve drawn it all before. However I don’t think I ever drew the view from my office. I have been in a new office since summer 2017, having previously been in a windowless office in the same building. In that office, I had to draw on the whiteboard to pretend there was an outside world. Now I can see what the weather is like. Usually it’s sunny. Lately however we have been having ridiculously wet and stormy winter weather, rain that has been flooding some areas. Many of our soccer games (and this week’s tournament) have been cancelled, causing my son to instead kick his ball against the front door (a lot). Good weather for ducks they say. Not all ducks. Apparently one duck got sucked into the embarrassingly-named Lake Berryessa “Glory Hole” (which I see is referred to as the ‘Bell-mouth Spillway’ by some news outlets, which sounds SO MUCH better). I don’t think the duck made it. When I heard the news I immediately thought of Donald Duck going red and getting angry and making those furious steam-eared Donald Duck noises. What do you think of when you see the headline “Duck gets sucked through Glory Hole”? Actually don’t tell me the answer to that, honestly. The rain was bucketing down as I sketched this, stuck inside on my lunchtime, eating a microwave ready-meal of ‘roast’ turkey. Speaking of turkey, there are these two turkeys that live near our building and are a verified Menace to Society. One of them chased me into my building one morning. I wasn’t going to fight it, I’d look pretty silly fighting this big leathery-feathered bird on the way to work. It was pretty aggressive though. I did that thing where you make yourself look big and say “I’m the boss”, but the turkey was having none of it, and came at me with his huge beak and surprisingly long claws, giving it all that. So I went inside the building and made faces at it through the window instead. It stood there looking at me, trying to be all alpha male (which clearly it was), but I won out really, not being drawn into a battle of talons and feathers, I walked away with my dignity still intact, when that turkey went low I went high, and if it chases me again then I will run away and live to run away another day. Bloody thing. You tell people back in London about these turkeys and they’re all like, “just kill it and have it for thanksgiving!” Like yeah ok, I’ll kill a wild turkey with my bare hands and skin it and freeze it until November, or I could just not do that, and go to Safeway instead and buy a frozen turkey. Infinitely easier. Or they’ll say, “if that was over here,” (and this is in London, not the countryside) “someone” (immigrants is what they mean) “would hunt that and eat it! They would! I read about it in the Sport! They do that to all the geese!” Or they could just not do that, and just go to Sainsbury’s instead and buy a frozen goose. I do like telling people back home about the wildlife around here though, the black widows, the massive birds of prey, the coyotes, the mountain lions (bit rarer here but not that far away), rattlesnakes, bats with rabies, cats with the plague, sharks with jetpacks, trans-elemental spectres, werewolves, and those bees that come together and form a massive giant hammer and stomp all over things. And they always have the same response, “oh if we had those over here,” (in the inner-city housing estates, not like on the moors and fens) “if we had trans-elemental spectres then people” (foreigners is what they mean) “would hunt them for dinner and eat them, it’s true, I saw them doing it, I read about it in the local paper, they ate all the elemental spectres from Grahame Park duck pond.” Or maybe they could just not do that, and go to Lidl instead for frozen trans-elemental spectres.

This story is starting to have very little to do with the weather. Time to ‘rain’ it in a bit (I see what you did there). Anyway, it is rainy and continues to be so. I probably could have added some colour to this, to show that it is rainy and grey, but the small person at the bottom with the umbrella should be illustration enough. And because I like looking back to days of Davis past, below is a small sketch I did from the same building (but from a window further along) back on a rainy day in November 2006. I had been in Davis barely a year back then. I don’t think I had even seen a wild turkey back then, let alone any of the other dangerous wildlife.

grey view from msb

Post-script: It turns out the bird that fell into the watery glory hole was a cormorant, not a duck. Cormorants make bad headlines though. Good job it wasn’t a rooster.

how to sketch in the rain

March 4, 2019March 4, 2019

The weather was lovely while I was in England. Sunny, unseasonably warm for February, nothing like the huge storms I had left behind in California. Only one day was different, when some rain showers came down on the Monday, but that was my designated all-day-sketching-day so I was not letting that stop me. It was President’s Day in the US as well, so an official day off. I had my extendable London Underground umbrella and my AYSO soccer ‘Coach Pete’ raincoat, so I put the umbrella into my jacket firmly, rested the top on my head, and it stayed in place, keeping my sketching-zone dry. Totally worked! I’ll be doing this from now on. I drew a diagram below. It’s a little bit wrong though because the umbrella did not poke out of my jacket, I should have crossed that out or something. Ah well, do what works for you. Anyway, after sketching and exploring Westminster, I popped over to Leicester Square/Covent Garden to do some shopping in my favourite spots, and of course more sketching. Above, the view down St Martin’s Lane, one of my favourite scenes of London. I didn’t get the view which includes St. Martins-in-the-Fields itself, but the globe-topped English National Opera is visible.

I needed to visit my favourite map shop, Stanford’s. I love maps and travel books and I’ve been going there since I was a teenager, and I got there and IT WAS GONE! But not gone for good. It had just moved. I needed to read the map carefully to find the new location (just around the corner, but even to the well-trained Covent Gardener it can be a bit easy to get lost around there), but I found it and spent some good time looking at maps. I went to a few other places, and then at the end of the day I popped into the Nag’s Head opposite Covent Garden Station for a pint and a final sketch. The other way to sketch in the rain, you see, is to just pop into the pub where it is dry and sketch in there. It’s a good tip. The pub was filling up with tourists, tired after a day of London. They do nice McMullen’s beer here, from Hertford. I chickened out of drawing the detailed tile pattern on the floor. When I was done, it was back into the rush hour tube and back to Burnt Oak for dinner.