On my brief trip back to England I went to Barnstaple in north Devon, with my mum and sister to see my uncle Billy and his family. It had been a long time since I was in Devon; my 16 year old cousin Jade was still a newborn, which gives you an idea how long ago it was. I did go for a little walk on the Saturday afternoon to do a couple of sketches (also to have some amazing chips in gravy, so tasty). I stood at the busy intersection near the bridge over the wide river Taw and drew the scene above, the Barnstaple Museum, with the clock tower outside. Barnstaple is quite a busy town, and has a pretty bustling town centre on a Saturday afternoon. I have to say, coming from California, and coming from a suburb in north London, it was nice being in a town which has all the shops. Our hotel was right opposite a great toy shop too, they had a lot of Lego, as well as loads of model railways. As I say, it has been a long time since I was in Devon, and one of the things I love about the southwest are the hills in the background. I remember going camping in Devon when I was 16, and the scenery just brings me back. The English countryside really is beautiful. I’ve never really spent a lot of time in the country and the smaller towns and cities, always being in London; I’d love to tour the UK with a sketchbook like that Richard Bell book my cousin Dawn got me a few years ago), but living our here I’ll never get time. You can see the hilly backdrop behind the building below as well, I forget the name of that building (if only there was a way I could instantly look that up on the device I am typing this), but also visible is the Long Bridge over the Taw. I got up very early in the mornings to walk around town and along the river, cold damp February mornings. In those early mornings, you still had a few local lads out from the night before, singing, slurring, bit of scrapping. It was actually raining when I drew the one below, and I had to stop when it started getting heavy. I like the colour of the stone they use for these old buildings down here. Barnstaple itself goes back to Anglo-Saxon times and there is an interesting mosaic near where I drew this, at Queen Anne’s Walk, showing the whole history of the place, vikings, pirates, traders and raiders.
Tag: seawhite of brighton
the bones of the blue whale
Back in February, I went back to London for a very short (unexpected) visit. I was down in Devon for a few days, and then back home in London for a day before heading back. For my one day in London, there was only one place I wanted to go – probably my favourite place, the Natural History Museum. It really is the best. I want to spend all day there some day, just drawing, drawing and drawing a lot more. I got a late start on this day, partly because, hey, nice to get a lie in after a lot of busy busy, but also because I’d spent the previous night with friends in Camden Town, after a long journey back from the South West of England. So I made it to the Natural History Museum by almost lunchtime. It was the first time I have been there since Dippy moved out. Dippy was (sorry, is) (if you call being a skeleton of an extinct animal present tense) (I say skeleton, it’s only a model) moved out last year to go on tour around the country, and make room on the ground in the Hintze Hall for more fancy events. Dippy was a Diplodocus, by the way. I realize I’m making Dippy sound like a House Elf. I sketched Dippy’s rear end back at the end of 2016, shortly before Dippy’s departure. Dippy was replaced by the large skeleton of a Blue Whale which now hangs majestically from the ceiling, the largest mammal in the world. I really wanted to sketch it. I don’t know if the Blue Whale has an inventive nickname yet, Bluey or Whaley, but I look at it and imagine I am one of the Avengers, facing down against a Chitauri space vessel. Well, in my head obviously. I’m not standing there doing Hulk impressions. I sketched from above, from one of the staircases in this most magnificent of London buildings, the sort of building that makes me really wish I had never left, that makes me so proud to be a native of a city that has such a place just right there where anyone can go and learn every single day. Sorry Davis, your bike museum is fine, but my heart is in Albertopolis. So, I drew Bluey the Whale from above and always intended on adding the colour, the browns and golds with purple tinted shadows of the museum, contrasted with the pale luminescent blue of the skeletal whale, but my friend Simon arrived and I didn’t want to keep him waiting about while I faffed about with the paints, so I left it as it is. We went around and looked at all the dinosaur skeletons and stuffed animals, and he expressed his grief at the removal of the much loved national treasure Dippy, which made me laugh as he’d just told me he hadn’t stepped foot inside the museum in well over twenty years.
I did draw one dinosaur though, the one above. “Dinosaur” the sign called it. Thanks, but isn’t this, you know, Iguanadon? I know it is. They have moved everything around in there since my last visit (just over a year before) but I know my NHM dinos. When I was four or five I went there with school and was the resident dino expert in my class, counting vertebrae, knowing all sorts of things I cannot remember now (though I still have a couple of my old childhood dinosaur books, themselves relics of a past scientific age). It turns out this is The Dinosaur Formerly Known As Iguanadon, now renamed Mantellisaurus after its discoverer, Gideon Mantell. I wish I had discovered a dinosaur, maybe I could have one named after me. Scullysaurus has a nice ring to it. I don’t know what I’d be doing to discover a dinosaur, I don’t exactly go out digging in the rocks, but I might find one in a park or an art shop. It wouldn’t need to be a ‘saurus’ either, I would take a ‘dactyl’ or a ‘docus’, even a simple ‘don’ like my old big thumbed friend Iguanadon here. Maybe Pteranodon was named after a Pete but they mis-typed his named, we all do it, I’m always typing Ptee or Pere, to the point my autocorrect has given up and says I can be called whatever I want.
We were done with the museum, and it was dark outside already. I could have spent hours longer in there, but I had to get back to Burnt Oak as my family wanted to take me out for a curry (I was flying home next day), so Simon and I walked down to South Kensington and into the little shops there, and I did one last sketch, of South Kensington Books. Small independent bookshops are among the best things in the world, because I am the sort of person who says so, having worked for a couple over the years. I want to draw all of the old bookshops in London, while they are still there. Actually not a day goes by when I don’t miss London, this London, not the crowded working rainy expensive irritated London, but my London, the one I spent my teenage days looking for on Saturday afternoons with a travelcard. I am glad to have had an unexpected afternoon there, a last minute very short trip, but it reminds me how much I really miss it.
building california hall
Ok here is another post. This is California Hall, currently under construction at the UC Davis campus. It has come along since this was sketched, in February, but it won’t be ready for Fall. No, I wish it would be but it won’t. At least that is what I’m told. Perhaps Darth Vader needs to come along and say that the Emperor is coming. I have sketched the earlier stages of this construction before. I like sketching the building work on campus, watching this place change gradually over the years. Another panorama, stood in the shade over the course of a couple of days while people biked past. There is Kerr Hall on the right there. Storer Hall is to the left. Those trees will have leaves now.
Here is what this spot looked like just three years ago: https://petescully.com/2015/03/21/asmundsen-kerr/
among the redbuds
And all of a sudden, two months passed and I didn’t post a thing. Perhaps I just really liked that sketch of the Manetti Shrem; whenever I would give out my little Moo card recently, I always thought, oh the past is old now but yeah, great sketch, I liked that one. I have sketched a lot since my last post (which was dated March but in sketching time zone it was still only January). My computer broke, so I took that as an opportunity to be really lazy about scanning my sketches regularly. Now I have a new machine the time has finally come to sketch the backlog. I’m going to break chronological order though, even sketchbook order, and post for my return to the sketchblogosphere this opening illustration of the latest Seawhite of Brighton sketchbook, the bright pink redbuds in the UC Davis Arboretum, with the Water Tower behind the tree. Those redbuds are gone now, but that colour is a powerful opening line to this book.
Now, in the middle of May, my seasonal allergies are going haywire at the mere sight of foliage. Seasonal allergies are the most boring thing ever. For me, very little really works, other than staying insulated in my office. However since I do have to coach soccer, and I also have to get out and draw from time to time, and also cycle from home to work, exposure to the outside world is, regrettably, necessary. It is boring though, having allergies. Boring, because everyone has a solution you haven’t tried. “Mm, yes, thanks, yes,” I nod, trying to find the facial emoji for “I am pretty sure I didn’t ask you for a cure”. Boring, because there is so much sneezing and never enough Kleenex. It’s funny how sneezing is automatically asking for a tissue. Sneezing is not however asking for a blessing, so come on world, let’s stop doing that. “Bless you.” says random person after sneez one. “Bless you!” they say again after sneeze two. “Oh, bless you,” they say after sneeze three, the concern creeping into their voice. They no more want to continue the blessing than I want to receive it. They have now locked themselves into a trap of politeness, like someone holding the door open for you when you are that bit too far away, they stand there expecting you to walk faster because they are holding the door for you, and even though you weren’t actually going to go through that door but turn and go another direction you feel you have to go through the door and pretend to be doing something in that building, you stand there looking at your phone like you are trying to remember the place you are pretending to look for, and you have to wait for them to leave the vicinity before creeping back outside the door and going the other way (that’s never happened to you?) “Bless you again!” they say on sneeze four, as if to say look, you’ve had your fun, nobody sneezes this much on purpose, and I’m not made of blessings. “Wow, hahaha!” they say on sneeze five and you want to vanish into a portal as you fumble for the dry half of the tissue in your back pocket. On sneeze six they raise their eyebrows, as if saying an internal prayer for forgiveness because they are refusing to bless this clearly sick individual who cannot stop sneezing. On sneeze seven they are ready to fight you. On sneeze eight you are obviously dangerous and they get their phone out, either to tweet about you or to call the police. On sneeze nine they dial, but this time they dial the Guinness Book of Records. On sneeze ten you’ve gone viral, the world’s media shows up and talk shows are discussing whether you are just a crisis sneezer, sneezing for attention, or whether you are the first victim of a new epidemic that will soon sweep the nation if we don’t vote for tax cuts for pharmaceutical companies (oo-er, little bit of politics, mrs thatch, mrs thatch). On sneeze eleven you’ve sold the advertising rights to the space between sneezes, mostly to those same pharmaceutical companies who offer allergy products with names like Zqxywfyl or Snotadrine. On sneeze twelve you’ve received so many blessings that you can officially be listed as a religion on the Census form. On sneeze thirteen – seriously thirteen sneezes? – you’re already appearing in sponsored ads at the bottom of websites with titles like “whatever happened to sneezing guy”. On sneeze fourteen, nothing happens. Everyone is calm and has just accepted you have allergies and will sneeze a lot. Everything is quiet. And then someone says, “I take local honey, that always works for me.” Which is code for “if you ever sneeze again, I swear I will end you.”
So yeah, no more bless-yous, no more “my sister-takes-this” cures, please just ignore my sneezing. By mid-June I should be ok. At least when I am sneezing, I am not making loads of dad-joke puns (oh right, except for the “a tissue!” one).
“You can’t handle the roof!”
This is the courtyard of the Manetti Shrem Museum of Art at the UC Davis campus. In January we had our monthly sketchcrawl here in Davis (we missed February; the next one will be on March 17, details to be posted later today at facebook.com/letsdrawdavis), and it was held at the Manetti Shrem. Regular viewers will recall that I drew this building from its first days of construction right through to the grand opening, and I was even invited to the big fancy party for artists and donors on the night before the opening, which was amazingly fun (the ice cream lollipops made on slabs of nitrogen were incredible). It’s a complicated piece of architecture, and I have not drawn it very often since, so I was overdue a sketch. After a morning of coaching a game of under-10 soccer (we lost 9-2 that morning, ouch) I needed to spend some time on a complicated panorama. This is a complicated panorama. Fun though, and it was nice having chats with people passing by, either other sketchers, or local Davis people I knew who happened to be visiting the museum, or students who were interested in art. One young bloke asked me about perspective and how I approach it. Well, get me on that subject! I told him about the multiple vanishing points, both up and down, and the horizon, and the sphere, curvilinear perspective, but said that with a building like this you just have to throw caution to the wind and say, ah just draw it all and see how it comes out. Don’t worry about it. Also another trick, on a two-page spread when the big valley is in the middle of the page, I used the large yellow pole that was in the foreground as a good place for a middle. Saved all those lines getting screwed up in the centre, falling down the gap. On the right, across Vanderhoef Quad, is the Mondavi Center. We’ll be going to see John Cleese there later this month. I’m sure he will be all grumpy
You can click on the sketch for a closer view if you like. Or maybe if you are in Davis, for an even more close view of the museum why not visit? It’s really cool there: https://manettishremmuseum.ucdavis.edu/
Also, try to draw that roof. Honestly, it is fun, like a puzzle. And if drawing that roof gets too much just put on a Jack Nicholson voice and say …
give you a pizza my mind
This is another from late January. It is Steve’s Pizza on F street, Davis. Or is it Steve’s Original Pizza? It was called that for a while. No, the sign says it is Steve’s Place Pizza. (It might be Steve’s Pizza Place). My son tells me that no, it’s Steve’s Pizza Pasta and Grill. I think it says Steve’s Place Pizza Pasta and Grill. Whatever it is called, if you go there you will get pizza, and presumably it will belong to Steve. Until you buy it. Presumably also it is Steve’s Pizza, Pasta, Grill, Salad, Alcoholic Drinks and Non-Alcoholic Drinks. I don’t know if it’s necessary to say everything on your menu in your name. There is also a sign that says “Now Open Late”. So this probably means that if it says they open at 5 you should probably go around 6, in case they aren’t open yet. I don’t know, I have trouble with signs. I really like Steve’s pizza, I must say, we order it at work, and also this was the first pizza that my son would ever eat, having always turned his nose up at pizza up to that point. Honestly, I didn’t know what sort of kid refuses to eat cheese pizza. Any cheese pizza, he just refused it all. He should try the sort of pizza I used to eat when I was that age, the frozen solid mini-pizzas from Asda, microwaved and eaten with baked beans to give them some flavour (always makes me think of watching Rod Hull and Emu while eating that, for some reason) (remember that? Grotbags and the Pink Windwil, that was one weird show). Well ever since going to a Pokemon birthday party at Steve’s and trying their pizza, he has loved pizza. Only cheese though, nothing too extravagant.
a campus in my sketchbook
If you keep a sketchbook, or maybe several at once, you are keeping a record of things that are in your head, just like a diary. The diary might be an internal monologue of how you are feeling, inward-looking and for your eyes only, or it might be one like a politician or a journalist might keep, their own observations on the world they see. They may be a place to work on your writing, to find your voice, to figure out your thoughts and expand your ideas. Sketchbooks can be very much like that. Sketchbooks can be whatever you want them to be, and for many are a mixture of the two, a sketched journal. I have tried that myself, writing out pages alongside the drawings, but I often have a hard time mixing the two; people can be so differently affected by text than by image. Image is often undermined by the text, which can be a distraction. Text, even open-ended and vague text, sometimes tells the reader what to think about the drawing around it. So I usually reserve my own text for the blog post when it is a step removed from the drawing, and very much a take-it-or-leave-it thing. You can look at my entire website without reading a word and it wouldn’t matter. In fact on my old iteration of my blog from a decade ago, every time I would post a sketch I would shrink the font of the accompanying nonsense writing to about size 8, so not to distract from the sketch itself. Anyway, I thought I would share this thought with you. I think of my own ‘main’ sketchbooks, which are produced very much with the idea that someone would look through them, as visual diaries. I would never let someone read a written diary (not without heavy editing), it gives too much away. (In fact when I was younger and wrote pages and pages in my diary nightly, I wrote in a different alphabet that I invented when I was about 13 or 14; hey you were interested in girls (or boys), well I was interested in alphabets). So my main sketchbooks are ways for me to relax and draw the world that I live in. I do have non-realistic more fantastical drawings too, but I do those elsewhere. Since I live in Davis, my sketchbook is filled up with images of Davis, and since I work at UC Davis, well I can say that I have a campus in my sketchbook. All of which is a way to say, I have just started to catch up on my scanning, so here are four recent (January) sketches from the UC Davis campus.
The sketch above (sorry, you need to scroll back up there) is the Science Lecture Theater, or SciLec, which would be a cool space villain name. It’s hidden behind those trees and frat boards. Below though, on a cloudier day, is Robbins Hall. I’m starting to catch up on the buildings I walk past but haven’t yet drawn (yes, there are still a few).
Underneath, sketched after a morning training class, is Veihmeyer Hall. I last drew this almost a decade ago I think it was, I like the way the shadows cross the white building. I sat in a little garden on a bench and sketched this. When January comes, with its bright chill skies, I get excited because I can finally draw the leafless trees, but sometimes they are a bit intimidating (see the ones of the right). I like it when the trunks are not just that bleached brown or grey, but also have patches or orange or green colouring the bark.
You cannot get much of a window into my thoughts from looking at the sketches. You can only imagine. I assure you I was probably thinking about soccer (listening to the Totally Football podcast or the Football Weekly podcast), or maybe history, or maybe alphabets. Below is one of Haring Hall, but I kept that uncoloured because I like the big yellow sign.
When I first starting drawing Davis in my sketchbooks, I hadn’t been here long and the idea was that I was drawing the world around me to remember it after I had left. Davis, I am still here, and still finding more to draw.
tree’s last stand
One damp grey day last month I ate my lunch and went over to The Barn (an old building on the UC Davis campus) to draw, surprise surprise, a panorama. I approached it in the following way. I mapped out the scene with a few light guidelines in pencil, so that I could be sure to fit the whole building in, and then went straight into pen with the drawing itself, drawing the large, heavy leaning tree. I started there. I knew my lunchtime was short (I had eaten at Shah’s Halal food truck by the Silo, spicy chicken over rice, so good) and that this would take more than one lunchtime. Normally I would draw the front of the building first but it’s always easier to draw on the left page when standing, back to the wall, holding a landscape-format sketchbook. For some reason I always struggle a bit more sketching the right page while standing. So I drew the big tree, it was just too interesting. I did the tree, left the rest, went back to work.
I came back two days alter to continue, and THE TREE WAS GONE!!! Totally gone. The place was all cordoned off while the tree-chopper-people finished off chainsawing it up, and I stood there looking at my page like, “but…but…”. I don’t know how old the tree was, but look at it. It was really leaning over. It was an aging ballerina, tumbling in slow motion as time froze around it. I’m sure the tree was older than me. And I had sketched its very last days. This scene no longer looks like it does in this sketch. I carried on drawing the rest of the scene, The Barn itself, the buildings behind, the lines of the bike path. I was going to add paint but, I don’t know, it didn’t seem right. That tree was drawn at the end of its life. I wonder what it was thinking at the time? “I’ll Be Bark”
but to you in your own little dreamworld
Well this is part two of the previous post, really.It jumps forward in time from last month to today, but posting that sketch inspired me to get out and complete the circle. The sketch I posted yesterday was done on the other side of the street from this one, directly opposite, here at 2nd and G. Froggies is now on the right, with Sole Desire is on the left (oh I get it, Sole like in a shoe and Sole like, no actually I don’t get it). If I had a shoe shop I would call it Over The Heel, maybe if it were a shoe shop for mature audiences. You can see the train station from here. My barber (Razor’s Edge) is a little way down the street on the right. I got my hair cut today. I am the most boring person when getting a hair cut. I get the same thing every time, for years. And every time he asks, how does it look. And every time I say, I assume it looks fine (my glasses are off, I cannot see a thing). I get an easy hair cut. I basically get it cut so I don’t have to brush it, brushing hair is so tedious. I do have a hairbrush for those times when it gets a bit longer. It is green and the initials ‘PWS’ are carved into it, because I bought it when I was 13 in Spain (my sister got it for me actually), a cheap plastic hairbrush from a souvenir shop, that has lasted me until my 40s because I hate brushing my hair. Why on earth am I telling you this? It is in no way relevant.
I have more sketches to post from the interim period, between the last post and today’s. I can’t guarantee the text will be as riveting as my 1989 hairbrush discussion. I did go to England, briefly and unexpectedly, at the start of this month and have a few sketches from there. I’ve been up a long time today. I woke up early and registered for the 9th International Urban Sketching Symposium in Porto. I am excited, but nervous all the same. It’s changed a lot since the first one, back in Portland in 2010. Portland to Porto. Anyway, if you are going to Porto for the Symposium, do say hello to me. You can if you like mistake me for someone else, that sometimes happens at the symposium. I remember Lisbon in 2011, a woman came up to me and said, in an excited but serious manner, “I know you, stay here, my friend really wants to meet you.” I was talking with Florian Afflerbach at the time. He had to go, and I was stood there like a plum, and a few minutes later the woman’s friend comes up to me, and the woman says “this is Paul” and her friend peers at me over her glasses and says , “no that’s not him, ” and then without another word they just walked off!! I’m standing there like an eejit, obviously they think I’m “Paul” (Heaston probably, another redhead urban sketcher) (or McCartney maybe?) (Weller?) (Pogba?). No what I love about the symposium is meeting all the people whose sketches I have followed online, been inspired by, learned from, it is very educational like that. You make connections, you might meet someone at one symposium just briefly, literally a couple of words, then follow their work on instagram or something, and by the next time the symposium comes around you’re like old buddies. It’s nice. I’m interested in seeing what Porto has to offer, it looks like a really interesting city. Of course, the first thing I think about is FC Porto, and that time Spurs beat them in 1991 in the Cup-Winners Cup (which no longer even exists), with an incredible team goal scored by Lineker. I’m looking forward to seeing the Portugal Urban Sketchers again, I enjoyed meeting them before (and eating a nice dinner with a group of them in Manchester, though I understood barely a word). I guess I had better start brushing up on my Portuguese…
you get from day to day by filling your head
Another downtown panorama from January. Remember a few years ago when I did loads of panoramas (panoramae? panorami? panoramodes?) in January 2014 and called it a ‘Panoramarathon‘, or in the spirit of naming months after doing artwork, a ‘januaramarathon’, yeah that one didn’t catch on, not exactly
‘inktober’ is it. Hey maybe there is still time for us to do another movement, okay February is already gone but perhaps this March we can dedicate it to panoramic sketches and call it “Panoramarch”. Seriously we have to do it in March because “Panoramapril” sounds rubbish. “Panoramay” could work though, if you can’t do March. I like drawing panoramas over two pages, in fact I would love to bring out a whole book of my Davis panorama sketches, that would be a fun thing to flick through, maybe include some witty little stories, observations, reminiscences, maybe the odd story with long-term locals about the places they love. If I did that I would probably edit down the nonsensical stuff, the ‘stupid-don’t-make-sense-stories’ as me and my friend Terry used to call them when we were at school. Back then we had a short-lived home-made magazine called “The Silly Goats Gruff” which honestly made zero sense. Like, literally. Like if you read some of my more long-winded go-nowhere blog posts, that is not even close. The ‘Stupid-Don’t-Make-Sense-Stories’ were pretty ridiculous. I should try to find some and post them here. There weren’t very many. Terry’s ones were actually pretty good, I thought, while mine always felt a little forced. Listen to me critiquing my 14 year old self’s writing style. That guy who reviewed my book on amazon (the one who said “the author’s explanations are so boring by the time he gets to the point I’ve forgotten what he was talking about“, that guy) (by the way, that guy, if you have forgotten what I was talking about, just look at the page titles), well he would have hated The Silly Goats Gruff. Definitely would have given it 1 star on amazon, plus a whole bunch of links to better publications about goats. “It doesn’t even tell me how many goats there are!”
Anyway, back to the sketch. I know, I know, you’re thinking “that guy has a point”, well yes, he definitely does. So, this was sketched one Saturday afternoon in mid-January after I got a haircut in downtown Davis, on the corner of G and 2nd. The heart of historic downtown, this. That new signpost is nice. On the left, Froggie’s, a bar that has been there for ages. When Terry came to visit me in 2006 I took him there, he loved it. He doesn’t write Stupid-Don’t-Make-Sense-Stories any more, more’s the pity. Now on the right is a shoe shop called Sole Desire, which again, thinking back to the last post, is another example of a Davis shop using some sort of pun in their name and I just can’t tell what it is. This took me under a couple of hours of drawing, but I added the colours when I got home.
petescully 