two decades in Davis!

November 5, 2025November 5, 2025Leave a comment

Memor esto, memor esto, Quintum Novembris. Today is the Fifth of November, which is Guy Fawkes Night / Bonfire Night to us British, but to Americans it is just plain old November the Fifth. It is also twenty years to the day that my wife and I arrived here in the city of Davis, having moved to California from London a month and a half before. Twenty years! 2005 was a different world. Today was a very rainy Wednesday, out of character in this otherwise quite sunny week. I was not sure how I would commemorate 20 years in Davis. I thought about making a short e-book with 20 years of sketches. I started making a video showing 20 years of sketches over some easy-listening music, to be a bit like The Gallery from Tony Hart’s old shows (why did he have to keep the kids’ drawings, why? That’s why I never sent mine in.). I thought about making a poster like I did for 10 Years in Davis. I even started a very long post featuring 21 drawings from the past 20 years (2005-2025 inclusive, that’s 21, do the Math. s.), one drawing from each year, with a little story about that year. That was getting very autobiographical, more than usual, and so I stopped. I might still do that some time, though I don’t know if it does you good to be too retrospective. I might still do all of these things. Instead what I am going to do is time travel back to 2005, not November but December, to the first sketches I did in Davis. Yes, it’s amazing I went over a month without drawing but things were different in those days. I didn’t yet have a job, or any money, and spent my time going to the library to use their computer to get online and write my blog, or emails back home. My wife heard about this thing called ‘worldwide sketchcrawl’, and that there would be a meeting of sketchers one Saturday in December, and that I should go to it, get me out of the apartment. Good idea. I went to Mishka’s Cafe on 2nd Street (which was about a block away from the current Mishka’s), and was very shy but I did a bunch of sketches, in my 2005 style. The sketch above outside Mishka’s is the very first sketch I did in Davis; there have been hundreds and hundreds since. I don’t know who that sketching guy was, but a couple of the people on that sketchcrawl (Alison and Allan) are people I sketched with for years afterwards. I went down to Covell Commons and drew Borders (remember Borders?), then moved through the Arboretum for the first time, finding my way to campus which I had not yet really explored except for Shields Library. As the day went on I sketched by myself, I was very shy, and in the end I didn’t meet up with the others to see what we had all done, I felt oddly self-conscious. But I like this little group of sketches now. It was a little while before I did more sketching of Davis, it was a slow start, not really getting going again until mid-2006 (but then absolutely I never stopped). So to celebrate 20 years living in Davis here are those sketches from 2005. Borders is long gone, I’m better at drawing those bridges (but still get them a bit wrong), I don’t know if those mysterious sculptures at the back of TB9 are still there, and I’ve drawn the Eggheads many times since.

Anyway, I have officially been a Davisite for twenty years now. If you want to see the sketches that all came after these ones, most of them are in this Flickr folder: Davis CA. Happy Fifth of November!

let’s draw davis at the farmer’s market, again

June 30, 2024June 29, 2024Leave a comment

The weekend before our London trip, I held a small sketchcrawl in Central Park Davis. It was a hot morning already, and the Farmer’s Market was in full swing. I sketched the bustling scene above, with the accordionist standing on a box playing Studio Ghibli tunes and other songs to the shopping masses. Markets are good places to sketch.

I drew the four lads above all seated in the shade while another musician played her guitar nearby (below), four Dortmund fans waiting for the Champions League final against Real Madrid which was starting at midday, I would be dashing off at the end to catch it. Well, two of them had Dortmund shirts, the other two wore a Brazil shirt in yellow and an F1 Mercedes shirt in black, close enough. Spoiler alert, Dortmund lost, Real Madrid always win. The last sketch I did was with the brown fountain pen stood in what shade I could find in the Central Park Gardens. We all met up at the end by the US Bicycling Hall of Fame, there were only about five of us, but we’d done some good sketching. I needed to get some done, I was a week away from my trip for which I felt woefully unprepared, and had a mountain of work to do before I left (and after too; I’ve barely scratched the catch-up yet, after going back in yesterday) so was feeling pretty stressed out, and needed some relaxing sketching time. Not sure when the next one will be scheduled but hopefully not too long.

And finally, something different. I came back a couple of days later armed with a set of gouache paints, as I’ve never used those while out urban sketching before. I sat by the Central Park Gardens and sketched the bench, tree and flowers; bit of a struggle to be honest, not quite what I expected, but I’m determined to play with the gouache at some point, just try something else out for a change.

Now I am back from London, the massive scanning project of all those travel sketches begins…

the very hart of campus

March 2, 2024Leave a comment

Last weekend we held another meet-up of local sketchers as part of the monthly ‘Let’s Draw Davis’ sketchcrawls, this time in the very heart of the UC Davis campus, meeting up outside the immense Shields Library. I had worried it would be a pretty wet day, but in the end we had lovely sunshine. It was a short sketchcrawl at just two hours, enough for a couple of decent drawings for me; above, Hart Hall, one of my favourite buildings to draw at UC Davis, especially on a bright day like last Saturday. I was terrorised by a squirrel while drawing this (in so much as a squirrel can be a terrorist, it might be a bit of a reach to say that coming up to me occasionally saying “yeah come on then” in squirrel language amounts to terrorism, or just normal squirrel behaviour whenever someone sits next to their favourite tree). We share this campus with the squirrels, and as I know too well we are all competing for our little bit of space. I sympathized with the squirrel to be honest.

We had quite a turnout, a lot of students, local sketchers, sketchers from out of town. I drew my second in front of Shields Library, you can see one of Robert Arneson’s Eggheads there. Some sketchers are dotted around. It was a nicely bustling kind of Saturday afternoon on campus, not too busy but not quiet either. At the end we all gathered in a circle outside and did a show-and-tell of our sketches, some really nice diverse styles on show. I was however criticized in front of the whole group by one sketcher from out of town who complained to me that I’d chosen such an “inconvenient” location (“the middle of nowhere” they said) for a sketchcrawl, because it was far from the parking lot they’d parked at. It’s the heart of the campus, the main library, very much “the middle of somewhere”. I was a bit stunned. Oh well. Anyway the next Let’s Draw Davis sketchcrawl will be on March 23rd in the afternoon, this one will be downtown at Mishka’s cafe on 2nd street, easy enough to find. Though I will have just done the Lucky Run 7k race that morning, so I will probably be a little bit shattered, but still sketching.

let’s draw davis at orange court

September 8, 2023September 8, 2023Leave a comment

Last month I organized a Let’s Draw Davis sketchcrawl, the first one I’ve organized in a very long time. The meet-ups have still been happening regularly for a while, though due to my own busy weekend schedule I’ve not usually been able to join them, let along organize any. Hopefully that will change now, and I’m going to start getting out and sketching with other sketchers a bit more regularly again. It was a very hot morning in the middle of August, and we had a pretty good turnout as we met up in the shaded courtyard of Orange Court. I stood for what seemed like ages drawing the scene above, a view I’ve drawn before, I like all the different angles and shapes, and all the warm colours against the blue sky. I wish my scanner had done a better job on it though, I think the settings were a bit off. It was also really hot and dry – I found it very difficult to paint, because my watercolours were not only drying too quickly on the page (that may be the paper too, using the slightly thinner Stillman & Birn Alpha instead of the watercolour Moleskine) but also in the pan, I found it difficult mixing and judging the water to add. Here are some of the other sketchers I drew. The guy in the soccer shirt, Alejandro, I have sketched him a few times before, and I have drawn him in a Wolves shirt. I wasn’t sure what this jersey was – black and white stripes, made by Charly, they make a lot of Mexican teams’ kits, but I didn’t recognize the badge nor the colours. I was stumped. I like a challenge when identifying a kit, but I couldn’t figure it out. It turns out it was the kit of a team called Cuervos (Crows), which is not a real club but is from a popular Spanish-language Netflix show. Still it looked a bit like it might be a Charleroi shirt, and I just had to sketch it. I am a little bit obsessed with football shirts as you know.

Other sketchers posted some lovely drawings on the Let’s Draw Davis FB group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/LetsDrawDavis. I don’t know if there will be a sketch-meeting this month, but I’m planning to organize one on the UC Davis campus on October 14 – details coming soon.

Let’s Draw Davis – August 2023

August 9, 2023August 8, 2023Leave a comment

Before we continue with our Scottish adventure, I just wanted to let you know (those who live in or near Davis anyway) that I will be organizing a sketchcrawl this Saturday, August 12, in downtown Davis. I’ve been organizing sketchcrawl / sketching events called “Let’s Draw Davis” since October 2010, on and off; I’ve had a fair amount of time off, for one reason or other, in the past few years, and I actually can’t completely remember when the last one I organized actually was. A couple of years I think. I didn’t organize any while I was coaching that first season of AYSO United club soccer, and then after I stepped down as coach I still spent a lot of my weekends watching my son’s games, and just didn’t get around to setting any sketching events up. I got a bit shy. Fortunately, other urban sketchers in Davis (Marlene Lee mostly) have been running Let’s Draw Davis as monthly meetings, often on Sundays in Central Park, and the Facebook group seems to have been pretty active. (‘Facebook’, something else I hadn’t looked at for years). Well, I had a free Saturday coming up and decided that now would be a good time for me to start getting out there again. I met up one evening in London while I was back with the London Urban Sketchers, and that was really nice, looking at everyone’s sketchbooks at the end. I’m hoping to take more of an active part in these again, and will try to organize one in October for the new UC Davis school year too. This weekend though, in this hot summertime, we’ll have a morning sketchcrawl in the shady courtyards downtown. It’s summer so we may not et a lot of people, but if you fancy joining us for a bit of sketching, do come along.

DATE: Saturday August 12
TIME: 10:30am (start) – 1:00pm (finish)
LOCATION: Orange Court, E Street (start and finish at the same location)
FB EVENT PAGE: www.facebook.com/events/157365444045831

We will meet at 10:30am at Orange Court (129 E St), and then you can sketch about this part of downtown (by yourself or in a group as you prefer), before meeting up again at 1:00pm back in Orange Court to take a look at our sketchbooks.

All ages/levels are welcome, this is a fun informal way to meet other sketchers and take a look at our town through our sketchbooks. All you need is something to draw with and something to draw on. (And maybe something cold to drink in this hot summer weather…)

Maybe we’ll see you there?

complicated canopy

October 24, 2021Leave a comment

At the start of this month we held the latest ‘Let’s Draw Davis’ sketchcrawl at Vanderhoef Quad on the UC Davis, meeting outside the Manetti Shrem Museum. Long-time readers might recall that I drew the construction of this building and it’s complicated canopy back in 2015-16, and was invited to the grand opening where I was able to sketch the artists mingling in this great space. I didn’t sketch inside on this sketchcrawl, but I did attempt that canopy again on this sketchcrawl. There’s a lot to take in. I didn’t quite get the gradient from red to purple right on the big sign, I need to play with mixing watercolor gradients a bit. We had a good turnout, it is always fun to see other people sketching.

I drew a quicker sketch from across the street, using a purple pen. It was a pretty hot day, and there wasn’t anywhere to get a cold drink, it’s not a busy part of Davis on a weekend. I had been coaching soccer that morning at a game in Woodland (we drew 5-5; we had been 4-0 down, but came back to lead 5-4, but with about three minutes of stoppage time our opponents scored an equalizer in the last second. Exciting game!)

The last sketch I did was of the Buehler Alumni Center. I’ve only drawn this once as far as I recall, and that was a curvilinear sketch from about a decade or so ago. There it is below. I drew that in 2010, the years have flown. Anyway, we gathered again to look at each others’ sketchbooks and it was fun.

sunday morning drawing davis

August 6, 2021August 5, 2021Leave a comment

Last Sunday morning, on the first day of August, we held our first Let’s Draw Davis sketchcrawl of the year. It has been a while; I paused organizing them due to the pandemic and I’ve been busy on weekends this year, but one of my fellow Davis sketchers Marlene Lee suggested holding one at Central Park that day during the craft Fair that was going on. It was a good idea. There were lots of vendors selling interesting art items, and there was a band called ‘New Harmony Jazz Band’ playing old numbers. It was nice to see other sketchers again, I’ve been hiding away for a long time and seeing others out and about doing their stuff is always good to see. Plus one guy (Alex) was wearing a Wolverhampton Wanderers shirt! I was delighted, I love football shirts but I’d never seen someone in Davis wear a Wolves shirt before. I’m showing you the sketches I did in reverse, so I can put my final drawing – this big panorama of the Craft Fair in the Farmer’s Market area – first. There were quite a few people around but it wasn’t crowded. Many people were masked up but most weren’t. Many of the sketchers were (including me for about half the time, usually when I might be interacting with people). It makes me feel more like a ninja, plus the mask I was wearing has my drawings on it (you can get masks with my drawings on here! https://society6.com/petescully/masks). I drew the scene above in about 1.5 hours, including about two thirds of the colour, but I coloured in the background when I got home. It was already getting hot, and I stopped for a shaved ice (which needed a few more flavours). Below is the band, they played nice music to sketch to. I drew that, and my other people sketches, with the Zebra brush pen that I was using a couple of years ago. It’s nice to use something like that again, it makes for rapid sketching.

And below are most of the sketchers, as you see I drew Alex in his Wolves shirt twice. If I had drawn more detailed sketches I would have done all of the shirt detailing on the front of that particular shirt. I myself was wearing my France football shirt that day, a favourite of mine, but mostly in honor of Esteban Ocon, who had won his first Grand Prix that morning at the Hungaroring in Budapest, a crazy race that saw a lot of carnage at the first corner. Ocon was also the first French driver to win a Grand Prix in a French car (Alpine, formerly Renault) since Alain Prost in the Renault in 1983. To see the podium with just one anthem played and for it to be the Marseillaise, well I’d never seen that before so I wore my French shirt in Ocon’s honor. I am about as obsessed with Formula 1 as I am with football shirts, as you can tell! I get up very early to watch it. 080221 LDD C IG

Below are Ann Privateer and William Lum, also drawn in the Zebra pen…

080221 LDD A IG

…and here are Ann Filmer and Marlene Lee, sketching in the shade. We’re hoping to have the Davis sketchcrawls go monthly again; I just got my soccer coaching schedule (so many Saturdays to the end of the year, and beyond) so others will organize but since campus is all coming back in-person this Fall it will be good for people to get outside and draw with each other again.

080221 LDD B IG

The Let’s Draw Davis FB Page (where events will be posted) is here: https://www.facebook.com/LetsDrawDavis

There’s also a Let’s Draw Davis FB group, where people who attended can post their sketches and photos afterwards: https://www.facebook.com/groups/LetsDrawDavis/

sketching by the train tracks

November 23, 2020Leave a comment

Last week we braved the elements (it was a bit cooler than usual) and held a socially-distanced Let’s Draw Davis sketchcrawl. We started out at the Amtrak station and went down 2nd Street. It was kinda sorta a scavenger hunt, but my list wasn’t very good, putting two of the items/prompts twice, and I didn’t follow any of them. I only did two drawings, at pretty much the same place (just from opposite sides of the train track). In the second one (the panorama of the Amtrak station, below) I stood leaning against the wall and my fingers got chilly. It was only a few weeks ago we were hitting temperatures in the big 90s! I mean it’s not cold cold, but it was noticeably more autumnal. I drew the above sketch with a Lamy safari fountain pen in black ink, and below the uniball signo um-151 in brown-black ink (click on it to see it bigger on the Flickr site).

A Decade of Let’s Draw Davis!

October 31, 2020October 31, 20201 Comment

In October 2010 I organized the first in a monthly series of sketchcrawls called “Let’s Draw Davis!”. We met in Central Park in the morning, drew all day, had lunch together, and met up again in the mid afternoon to look at each others’ sketchbooks. I had been on sketchcrawls in Davis before, advertised on the workdwide sketchcrawl forum, but after going to the Urban Sketching Symposium in Portland in the summer of 2010 (up to which point I had really not been getting ‘out there’ as an artist, except for being one of the original urban sketchers when that website launched) I scribbled thoughts and ideas into a notebook on the plane, one of which was that I needed to connect more with the local art community, meet other artists, encourage people to get out sketching, like Art Brut telling everyone to form a band. I wrote the words “Let’s Draw Davis” into my notebook and was struck with all sorts of ideas, the main one being that we needed a monthly gathering for people who wanted to draw, that would be free and organized with a start and end point, that would not be a ‘club’ or ‘group’ you had to join but an event anyone could feel part of, regardless of ability or experience. I had been on too many sketchcrawls where if you arrived late you wouldn’t know where the final meeting would be, or if you missed the middle point and they changed the final meeting you would be standing around wondering where everyone was (I’m looking at you, sketchcrawls in Berkeley years ago). It needed to be accessible, somewhere you could cycle to if need be, and IN DAVIS – this isn’t “Let’s Draw Davis And Sometimes Woodland Or Vacaville”, though they can definitely be things that should happen. I would put up posters in shop windows, make a website, put fliers in the local galleries, add things to social medias. I did all of that. I still make the posters, but someone else handles the Facebook group, and I’m not printing posters and putting them in Newsbeat like I used to. I am still making stickers, and recently I even tried to make badges. On that very first sketchcrawl I even made a few mini-sketchbooks, and brought extra pencils, so that if people asked what we were doing I could give them a book and a pencil and say, why not give it a go? I know of at least one person that actually worked for, and they went off and started drawing. The sketchcrawls haven’t always been monthly – been a few hiatus periods, such as this year with the pandemic, and also other years when I kinda stopped wanting to draw in groups (we all get like that; even now on sketchcrawls I still prefer wandering off on my own), but I have met so many great people, great artists, prolific sketchers that it’s been so totally worth it. It even kicked off a series of sketchcrawls when I organized a big sketchcrawl down the Fleet Street area in 2012 called “Let’s Draw London”, to celebrate the start of the new London Urban Sketchers chapter. They are still holding them monthly like clockwork there, big events with crowds of artists in all sorts of locations, called “Let’s Draw Trafalgar Square” or similar. I’ve had several other sketchcrawl ideas in California that haven’t been able to happen, such as my Sacramento Sketch Saturdays plan, or my big San Francisco Sketching and History Tour. But we still keep finding things to draw in Davis, even if it’s the same stuff in a different year.

davis sketchcrawl oct 16 2010

So after a year of pandemic and shelter-in-place and wildfires and election stress, I was determined to celebrate ten years of Let’s Draw Davis with a sketchcrawl in the same place, a decade and a day later.

LDD Oct 2020 simple

This was the poster, incorporating many of the posters I have designed (thrown together) over the years. Many fun ones; my favourite sketchcrawl might have been the 2017 City of Davis Centenary one, with the map of all the places that were there in 1917 and earlier (now go and draw them). So on this Saturday, we met at Central Park after most of the Farmers Market was packing up to go, and drew around the surprisingly busy park. It was a nice group of sketchers from around the region, a few new faces and several familiar friends. I drew the panorama at the top of this post. It was a hot day, with temperatures hitting 90 yet again, but pleasant. I stuck to the shade. I drew the compost heap area in the Central Park Gardens, an interesting little spot.

I was going to draw the Carousel, but it looked a bit too complicated, so I chickened out and drew the statue of Gandhi instead. then we all met up and shared our sketching stories. Being a special sketchcrawl I had some prizes at the end, for the ‘sketch of the day’ (William Lum got this), for the ‘most sketches’ (Misuk Goltz won this), and a long-time sketcher award for Marlene Lee who’s been coming on these since Jan 2011 and has come to almost every one since. (I did have a couple of long-time-sketcher prizes for a couple of others but they had left early, so next time!) And that was that! The next Let’s Draw Davis sketchcrawl will be a scavenger hunt on Saturday November 14, I’ll update the Facebook page soon. In the meantime, here’s to more drawing Davis!

Oh, and Happy Halloween!

sketching the birds and getting stung by a wasp

July 20, 2020July 20, 20205 Comments

On Saturday morning we held our first “Let’s Draw Davis” sketchcrawl since the pandemic sent us all home, our most recent one being on February 29th. It was a socially distanced crawl, masked up and stood out of the way, down at the UC Davis Arboretum. It’s been a while. I felt uncomfortable being out sketching, but when I arrived our group was not too big so it was nice to see people. However seconds after parking up my bike I got stung by a wasp! Right behind my ear. That has never happened to me before, not even on those hot June days in the garden back in England, but they finally got me now. So I was in a bit of pain as I introduced the sketchcrawl from behind the veil of my face mask. I was wearing a mask with one of my sketches on it, from Porto. Above is the view from the path of the Redwood Grove.

Above is the richly decorated underpass that goes beneath the train tracks. When I lived in South Davis I would take this route every day on my bike, but it has been years. it was not so colourfully painted back then, but it looks very nice now. It was hot while I sketched, and my head was hurting a bit, probably due to the wasp sting that was still throbbing a bit.

Above, a few grapes hanging down from the Gateway gardens. Below, there were some turkeys passing through with a bunch of young poults, so I quickly sketched some. The bird on the right is a Green Heron, though I thought it was a Kingfisher due to the colouring, which reminded me of Kingfishers back in England, which to be fair I’ve also never seen. I was told it was a Green Heron so I am glad I waited to write that down. It was incredible – it would extend its neck to double its body length like Mister Fantastic or something. I expected another bird that looked like Doctor Doom to come along and fight it and call it “that fool Richards”, or a movie studio to come along and reboot it unsuccessfully. Still it was a fascinating creature.

Speaking of fascinating creatures, here is that wasp. I didn’t know exactly what had stung me because I didn’t see it, but when I went back to get my bike, one of the other sketchers Bill Lum came with me to identify it, to see if it were a wasp, a yellowjacket, a bee or maybe even a murder hornet, at least that is what I was thinking. He noticed that there were plenty of them over some of the bike racks, and they had built nests inside – putting my bike on one had disturbed it, so it had stung me. As he got close, one of the little bleeders came out and stung him too! So, we had to be careful. I held my sketchbook up as a swatter, and carefully extracted my bike from the wasp danger zone. Gently does it. I managed to do so without getting stung again. The sting was not particularly bad, and went down by the afternoon. I’d never been stung before so it was a first experience, nature’s way of telling me it’s not time to go sketching outside yet.

Bill took a photo of it, and identified it to be a ‘paper wasp’. So naturally I have spent the past few days trying to come up with paper wasp jokes, none of them any good, at least not on paper. So not a yellowjacket, not a murder hornet. Very interesting to draw though!