Tag: talks

conversing with the campus…

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On October 6th I gave a talk at the UC Davis Design Museum as part of the reception to my sketchbook exhibition, “Conversations with the City”, which is curated by Tim McNeil and James Housefield. A lot of people came! Thank you to all who attended, it was lovely to meet you all and talk about sketching. I talked about my own story with sketching, and how I go about it, what I look for, what I used, and the various sketchcrawls that I have organized. I talked about Urban Sketchers, about the symposia. I also talked about using the sketchbook as a way to document history, showing examples such as the Occupy UC Davis protests of late 2011, the history of my son’s shoes, the progression in my own technique by drawing the Varsity Theatre for ten years and also (the set-piece I’d been dying to show everyone) the progression from the Boiler Building to the Pitzer Center (you can see that progression in this post). It was a lot of fun.

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Here I am talking about some of my pens, the Uni-ball Signo UM-151 pens I love so much. I like to point with my left hand. Goes back to my old big-bus tour-guide days, holding the microphone in the right hand and pointing with the left. And ducking to avoid branches.

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Here, I am pointing out sketches from the pages of my earlier sketchbooks.

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And finally, Q&A. Now get sketching! You can see some much better photos of the exhibition on the Arts Dept website at UC Davis: http://arts.ucdavis.edu/photo-gallery/photos-conversation-city

There is also a nice article about the show (and the sketchcrawl which was held yesterday…) in the Davis Enterprise, which has a much nicer photo of me at the museum event: http://www.davisenterprise.com/arts/scully-leads-sketchers-on-a-lets-draw-davis-crawl/

If you want to to check out the exhibit, it is open Mon-Fri from 12-4pm, and on sundays from 2-4pm. It runs until November 13.

The Art and Habit of Travel Sketching (with Rita Sabler)

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Rita Sabler's Talk sm

There were many interesting and varied talks that you could attend at #uskmanchester2016. Yes, I just used a hashtag in a sentence. Now if were saying that out loud I wouldn’t say the word “hashtag” but then that is why the written medium is capable of things that the spoken medium just isn’t, and vice-versa, and then there is the drawn medium. One thing I like about sketching at talks and presentations is that you can use it not only to document the visual of the event, but also take notes on the text. There is the issue of course that you must be careful what you write down, as that then potentially defines the speaker’s points in possibly unintended ways – take a sentence out of context, written down in a hurry, and sure they did say that, but it may not be what their talk was about. So whenever I have drawn presenters, I have been aware of this and tried to write down the thoughts and phrases that seem most to encapsulate it, though it’s impossible to catch it all.

I only managed to attend one talk in Manchester, having been off sketching the streets all the other times, taking advantage of the non-rain, but I wasn’t going to miss this one, “The Art and Habit of Travel Sketching“, by my friend from Portland, Rita Sabler. I first met Rita at the first symposium in Portland, learning that she was a UC Davis alumna, and have followed her sketching work ever since. She has a really cool and vibrant style, with a lot of travelling under her belt as well. In this talk she showed us some of her amazing travel sketches and shared her experiences around the world, both the good and the sometimes scary. She offered tips and advice on travel sketching, and spoke in general about the act of keeping a sketchbook, and the unexpected interactions it can bring. I wrote down some of what she was saying – click on the image above to get a better view – and some of my favourite takeaways were:

  • Sketching your surroundings, you become “at once the observer and the participant”
  • If sketching people in bars, pick the people who have the fullest glass – they will stay there longest!
  • If people notice you sketching them, smile!

I really enjoyed the talk, and everybody else that was there enjoyed it as well – and it was a full house. I was surprised that more people were not sketching though! I did spot a few others with sketchbooks out. Here was Rita afterwards, holding my book:

Rita Sabler

You can see more of Rita’s work on her website www.portlandsketcher.com, or on her Flickr page. You can also see three awesome chapters written by Rita in my book, Creative Sketching Workshop!

illustrating journeys and urban sketching at the avid reader

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at the Avid Reader, June 8th Last Saturday evening I was fortunate enough to give a talk at my local bookstore The Avid Reader about travel journals, urban sketching, and Danny Gregory’s latest book ‘An Illustrated Journey‘, in which I have a chapter. I gave a talk there last year about ‘The Art of Urban Sketching‘, and I have always liked that store – it was the place I first worked, years ago, when I came to Davis. I had a little office under the stairs.

Saturday was also the hottest day of the year so far, in fact probably the hottest ever recorded on that date in Davis – 109 degrees Fahrenheit at one point we saw, and that sort of heat will drive you bonkers. So big thanks to all who braved the heat and came out to hear me talk!

An Illustrated Journey & the Art of Urban Sketching

The two books. USk spotters: see also my ‘Lapin’ pencil case and ‘Paul Wang’ Moleskine

Ramble on more like. I had a plan, not a script exactly, but you know how it is, once you start talking about this subject you go off in all directions. That’s how I travel, funnily enough. We had a good turn out, I counted about twenty people. Here is store owner (and my old employer) Alzada Knickerbocker introducing me.

Talk at Avid Reader June 8th 2013Talk at Avid Reader June 8th 2013

I prepared a big board of sketches to show people during the talk, so I wouldn’t have to keep scouring through sketchbooks to find the example of that one bridge I sketched that one time, and so on. I enjoyed making this, but I accidentally put one image on there twice (doh!).

Talk at Avid Reader June 8th 2013
For each of the attendees I also made something special – a micro-sketchbook, only 3″x4″ big and eight pages long. I cut up a load of different paper, mostly Strathmore drawing paper, but also some thinner Canson paper, some watercolour paper, some squared paper, even a few grey tinted sheets. I also cut up a whole bunch of those brown Chinese envelopes I like to draw on, the ones I get at work from all the graduate applications I deal with. I stapled them together, stuck a little ‘Pete’ sketch on the front and voila, micro-sketchbooks. I made a whole bunch, and I will probably give out the rest at the next sketchcrawl, or bring them to Barcelona.
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I had a lot of very good questions at the end, most of which I was able to answer without going into too much of a tangent. I hope. I wanted to get across the message that sketching is for everyone, accessible and approachable and doable, and that the important thing is to use sketching as a tool to observe and build a relationship with the place in which you exist. Location sketching, especially when travelling, is much more rewarding as documentation of your travels than drawing from a photo later on. When you sketch on location, you are in effect having a conversation with a place. When you’re not together, it’s not really much of a conversation.
Talk at Avid Reader June 8th 2013

I enjoyed my conversations with everyone who came on Saturday and met some interesting folk! It was nice to have a few familiar faces there too for support (including my very supportive wife, and my young son who sat quietly to the side drawing the whole time, good lad). Thanks also to Alzada and the Avid Reader for inviting me to speak again.

Keep on sketching!