The Capitol Corridor Amtrak train ride between the Bay Area and Davis is one of my favourite train journeys, not least because the big Amtrak trains are remarkable to travel in. I used to like the Eurostar, years ago, when I used to zip between Waterloo 
and Bruxelles Midi, but the last time I did it I was amazed at how uncomfortable and cramped I felt, compared to these big American Amtraks. It’s always nicer when you have a table though, so you can spread out your drawing materials. In these cases, it’s obligatory to draw. I usually draw some of the quick moving bird-filled Delta landscape, capture some of the shimmering reflection of the sky in the San Pablo Bay with its lonely shacks and forgotten piers, and the colourful factories and refineries that dot the shoreline around Martinez, Benicia, Richmond. Or I just draw the empty seats in fron of me, which is nice too. I had grabbed a bunch of Amtrak timetables at Emeryville station, ones for the long cross-country routes such as the Zephyr, which goes across the Rockies and over the Plains from here to Chicago, the Coast Starlight, climbing up the Pacific states from LA to Seattle, and the Sunset Limited, running along the hot southern US from California to New Orleans. I look at them romantically, longingly, having once before travelled around Europe on the railway tracks, with the Thomas Cook European Timetable as my Bible; it’s always been a dream to see America from the sides rather than from above.
That was how I ended that brief jaunt to San Francisco, with my visiting friend from England. One last sketch to share, from that morning at Fisherman’s Wharf, while the skies were falling in big wet buckets outside, I was indoors at the Musee Mecanique, one of my favourite places in the city. I’ve sketchblogged about this place before, a year ago in fact (note the Amtrak train drawing also at the top of that eerily mirrored post), but it’s always worth showing again. Remember these arm-wrestling things you used to get at fairgrounds? I always hated them personally, but couldn’t resist drawing this one.
main group was meeting up at the Presidio, but I didn’t fancy going all the way up there; I was yearning for some ‘urban’ to sketch. I started off visiting the excellent Paul Madonna exhibit at the San Francisco Public Library, the five year retrospective of his All Over Coffee strip, which I’ve followed for almost two years now (I came across it while on the Sketchcrawl in Berkeley, and was drawn to because it was a similar style to what I was trying to achieve; it inspired me to do more monochrome stuff). I was surprised, though I don’t know why, at how large the originals were, but that’s only because I tend to draw everything so damn small. Suitably inspired to get out and draw, I sat outside the library and sketched the San Francisco City Hall. The Tenderloin army shuffled by in groups of one, like characters from a Miyazaki film, lost in their own little odour-filled universes. Somewhere across the square was a rabble led by a very vocal Mexican man screaming, literally screaming, into a microphone, to the point where his voice started to fail him, and the microphone started to break. It clearly didn’t stay broken though because he launched into song, backed by a Latin American dance music band, playing a repetitive one-verse, I don’t know, anthem I suppose, which went on and on and on for about six months. My thoughts weren’t with the guy singing, but with the band members, particularly the guitarists. Their wrists must have been super tired. I was wondering whether they took shifts, if perhaps another person came and took over halfway through the song, to give them a break. For all I knew it was a tape loop. When I was done (and I was really pleased with the resulting sketch, by the way), I hopped onto the BART and went down to the Mission. I fancied a burrito.
having such fun. You will too. Bring quarters. I was skinnier back when I first shook this Uncle Sam’s hand; he hasn’t changed (though my less-than-extraordinary rendition makes him look a bit like rowan atkinson). I played the old Star Wars arcade game (i used to be an absolute artist at that; used to be, this time i got shot down by a stupid tower on the death star after dispatching loads of tie fighters), and got my Magneto-shaped ass handed back to me by Chun-Li in X-Men vs Street Fighter – been a long time since i played arcade games. So I did some drawing.
petescully 