20 years, 20 places in Davis

November 10, 2025November 10, 20252 Comments

In my last post I told you that I have just passed twenty years living in Davis, CA. Twenty years is a long time. It’s twice as long as ten years, but due to Einstein’s Theory of Looking At Your Watch, the first ten years were longer than the second. In terms of number of sketchbooks, the second decade was way longer (see the list here), but I have been drawing Davis since 2005 and often I end up sketching the same thing, over and over. Davis is not very big, there is only so much to draw, but it’s a tale of two cities, or rather a city and a campus, easily distinguished by the colour of the fire hydrants. So here is a chart (containing almost no fire hydrants), but containing twenty places that I have drawn at least ten times over the years. There were some places I drew multiple times that didn’t make the chart (the old Boiler Building / new Pitzer Center which I drew countless times, the Chemistry Building, the TLC, plus Bizarro World which I had drawn only nine times, but added a tenth just today to make up for it). A couple of the rows are not all of the same thing but are multiples of similar, such as ow 20, which are all the Eggheads drawn a couple of times, and row 15, bridges over the creek in the Arboretum, many of which are drawn multiple times. It looks a bit like rows of film, you can get lost looking at it. If this was just a random set of drawings, or if each row was year by year, it would not be that interesting, but this tells twenty stories. The images are not in chronological order, except the last Egghead is one of the earliest sketches I did in Davis.

Here are the twenty rows:

Bike Barn, UC Davis
Varsity Theatre, 2nd St
UC Davis Water Tower, seen from various locations
Amtrak Station, 2nd St
Silo tower, UC Davis
Historic City Hall, F St
Mrak Hall, UC Davis
Farmer’s Market, Central Park
Memorial Union, UC Davis
Davis Community Church, 4th / C St
Hart Hall, Shields Avenue, UC Davis
Newman Chapel, 5th / C St
Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, Vanderhoef Quad, UC Davis
Orange Court, E St
Bridges over the Creek, UC Davis Arboretum
Dresbach-Hunt-Boyer Mansion, 2nd / E St
Walker Hall (Graduate Center), UC Davis
De Vere’s Irish Pub (now Bull’n’Mouth), E St
Mathematical Sciences Building, California Ave, UC Davis
Robert Arneson’s ‘Eggheads’, UC Davis (five locations)

Anyway that’s twenty years in Davis. I’m already in the third decade, time waits for nobody.

June, know what I mean

October 25, 2025Leave a comment

Before I get posting all the summer travel sketches I suppose I should catch up posting all the Davis sketches from June and July as well. I might mix it up a bit, and bunch them up as I often do. Expect more of the same, more drawings of a house in Davis with a tree in front of it. You can tell it’s me, it’s a drawing of a house with a tree in front of it. Above, the nice little house on the corner of E Street and 3rd Street downtown, I’ve drawn it before; I’ve drawn them all before, but this is what they look like in 2025.

I have draw so much this year, and each time that question keeps jumping back out – what is it for? It probably sounds like I’m asking it in a mid-life crisis kind of way, “what does it all mean?”, and I’ve tried to think about the “why” behind all the sketching. The answer is almost always “because I like drawing”, but it feels a bit glib to say that, so I dress it up with ideas like, “the world is a crazy place, I have no control over world events, but by focusing on this one little bit of world in front of me and drawing it, it gives me a tiny piece of control over a tiny piece of my reality,” stuff like that. Maybe it’s about feeling overwhelmed and unable to get things done, but if I can achieve one thing that I know how to do then that is a start. I draw to record the world around me, that’s another big one. I can look back over sketchbooks and say, yes that was my world then, where I lived, and I drew what I wanted to record. Am I doing it for the town, itself as a record for the City of Davis or for UC Davis as a campus? Maybe, and it’s a fun outcome that I have this record of nearly two decades of sketches from this place, but mostly it’s for me. I draw to improve as well, to exercise the drawing muscles, but I also like the comfort of a certain type of drawing, and I suppose this is that type of drawing. I think about pushing myself more, and look I have some highly detailed cityscapes and bar scenes and all of that, but mostly I’m a lunchtime sketcher, as I have a pretty busy job and it gives me a way to refocus my mind halfway through the day. It’s not for likes, though I post them online as it’s an important part of being an urban sketcher and it was that which encouraged me back in the early days of 2006, 2007, discovering other peoples’ work online, but I don’t really engage on the socials like some of my sketching peers do; I prefer it here in my world, old school. If I ever get to writing this new book maybe I’ll write out the whole explanation and motivation as to why I draw, with the history of when I first picked up a pen and all the drawing I did as a kid to try to block out the noisy world around me, and then I will get out my editorial pen and cut it all down to the very simple “it’s because I just like drawing”. End of the day, that’s what it is.

As I post, it’s early in the morning. Not as early as when I started writing all that, the sun is coming up now (well, the fog is coming up, that time of year is finally here) and I’m getting ready to go for my morning run, I have a 10k in just under a month that I am trying to prepare for. I’ve had funny dreams lately, and last night I dreamed of old friends I have not seen in years, I was standing behind them in a queue and was trying to decide whether to run for it or tap them on the shoulder, and in the end I think I made a funny noise to make them turn around, and then realized they might not recognize me, the ravages of time, and then realized it might not be them at all. But it turns out it was them and we went for a beer. I must point out, nobody’s dreams are interesting, and it’s always extremely boring when someone tells you what happened in their dreams, because sure they may have felt real and meaningful to the dreamer but are absolutely not to anyone else. It’s like someone telling you about their Fantasy Football team, it’s like, mate, please. However I did have another dream where I was at my Mum’s house in Burnt Oak, and I had to try and save family members from a vampire that had somehow gotten in and was in the loft. It had managed to turn my cat into a vampire, though nobody thought it was any different. Anyway vampires are really hard to beat and it felt like it was a hopeless situation, no matter what we do the vampire just keeps on going making everything dark and miserable. Then I remembered that my Mum has some Holy Water in the shed (she actually does, she brought it back from Lourdes in the 90s), so I put some in a spray bottle and went hunting for the vampire with that, and it must have worked because I woke up and the vampire was gone, vanquished, but then I looked on Instagram and things were still shit.

That has nothing to do with the drawings, sorry. That sketch was on E Street outside the Hunt Boyer Dresbach Mansion, some ditch cleaning machine that I decided to sketch. I still can’t draw circles as is evident by the wheels. If I had to draw a magic circle to protect from demons or ghosts, I’d ask someone else to do it, I’d be too embarrassed. The next sketch above is a sorority house or something on D Street. I’ve drawn that before too. Another big house with a tree in front. I didn’t even bother drawing the wheels on the car, no point. The Greek letters look like magical symbols, or maybe it means ‘Ax Omega’ which I think is the name of a spray-on deodorant. You can’t use that against vampires by the way, that just do an evil laugh and say something funny like “I don’t sweat you!” It’s nearly Halloween, I have vampires on the mind.

This sketch above was on campus, not a house with a tree but the other water tower, the one near the football field, as sketched next to the funny old building that houses the University Honors program. I had been drawing a lot of flowers during the spring so they popped up again here. It was June the 6th, D Day, 81 years on. The Spring quarter was nearly finished. I like that moment at the start of summer, especially when there are summer plans, but it was still a long way before travelling and the long hot summers we get here feel like a drag. It didn’t end up being as ridiculously hot this year as usual, but hot enough.

Finally, I’ve meant to draw this gateway for a long time, down on D Street outside the Cole Building (on the other side of the road from the Cloud Forest Cafe). That shop The Wardrobe is based in here now. I drew at lunchtime but then finished it off and coloured it in later. I am glad that I captured it like this, because I came back a few months later and it looks really different! It has now been painted with a big colourful blue mural on it, it looks pretty good too. Several of the buildings down here have seen wildly colourful makeovers recently (such as the restaurant on the corner which is now a rather wild pink). This I suppose is why I sketch, to capture a moment in time, just before it changes. It probably won’t look like this again now, and I’ve captured it at the right time. I like drawing.

I’ll post more soon, right now I’m off for that morning run.

views of the campus (with flowers)

July 8, 2025July 7, 20254 Comments

A couple of months ago I completed a commission meant as a retirement gift for a senior administrator on the UC Davis campus, and I drew the view above of Mrak Hall, seen from the UC Davis Arboretum, with more California Poppies (and other colourful flowers) in the foreground. I was pretty pleased with how it turned out. I walked over there in the morning before starting work to map it out, and also get some photos of the building in good light with a nice reflection in Lake Spafford, and then drew it all properly at home. (I might even be in the drawing myself). I hope they liked it, I enjoyed making it. I’m not doing a lot of commissions at the moment due to being generally work busy, but I like ones like this. Besides I had just done a special retirement gift for a distinguished professor in our department, which was actually two drawings in one. The first one (see below) was another view of the Arboretum, looking over at Mrak from a different angle. I had drawn that one before and used my old photos and drawing as a reference, because I wanted to include the tree next to the water that was sadly removed a couple of years ago (and is missing from the drawing above). Of course, I wanted to frame it with colourful flowers, of which there are many in the Arboretum.

And for the second half of the piece, I drew a panorama of our very own building, the Mathematical Sciences Building, also bordered by flowers which aren’t actually there. The drawing might have springtime blooms, but I used photos and a sketch I had done in winter, because I didn;t want the building to be blocked by all the green foliage on that big tree. The big tree next to it fell in the big storms a few years ago, so I am very grateful for the continued shade of this tree, but it’s nice in winter when you can see through it. I’ve spent a lot of my life in these locations now. I’ve been in Davis nearly 20 years, an achievement in itself. Maybe I will have a party. Ok I’m not doing that, but maybe I will have a commemorative sketchcrawl in the Fall. In fact it was in December 2005 that I went on my first sketchcrawl in Davis, and I have been drawing it ever since.

some trees on campus in april

June 22, 2025June 22, 20252 Comments

April was a long time ago now but I’m still posting old sketches. I am forever behind but it’s good to see how the world used to look in the before-times. It’s midsummer already (astronomically, though not seasonally, summer has just begun). Here are a few from a couple of months ago which are very tree-focused, two trees from campus below plus a panorama of the UC Davis Quad showing a lot of trees all at once, like some kind of tree party. The annual Picnic Day is around this time of year but I avoided that kind of thing this year, wasn’t up for the crowds and walking around feeling hot and bored. No sketching Picnic Day 2025. This drawing was done after work one day when the novelty of extended periods of sunlight in late afternoon had not yet worn off, and it wasn’t too hot yet. I like this one a lot though, I might use it in future things at work if I want a regular campus panorama scene. Here are a couple more trees.

kerr

June 11, 2025June 11, 2025Leave a comment

April seems like such a long time ago now. Last week does too, and yesterday, even this morning feels like so long ago. What did I eat for lunch, I don’t remember that far back. Even the start of this paragraph feels like another age, and the start of this sentence feels like some sort of golden epoch before the ever increasing cycle of doom/gloom sets in. Even the time between the start of a word and the end of a word, something else has bloody happened. I can see what’s coming in the very near future too, to the point where I can’t even finish a. Even w. The most accurate sentence is actually only three letters long anyway, WTF. But here is a look back to April, after our trip to DC and NY, I have a few April sketches to share, then quite a few May ones, several June sketches, and by then it will be like time for the next election right, haha, only joking. Anyway it is good to keep posting my sketches on my site, adding to the story, so if anyone looks through my site in days to come they will see the progression/regression/nongression, hopefully not looking for aggressions/transgressions, and definitely no John Grisham. Anyway, this is Kerr Hall. Named after Wayne Kerr, sorry no it wasn’t. It wasn’t Juan Kerr either. Or Jo Kerr, Mark Kerr, and not Plon Kerr because that makes no sense. Kerr Hall is where my department used to live just before I came along and joined them, so I never got to work inside here. In fact I have never once been inside, I suppose why would I. I would only make silly jokes about the name. It’s next to Wellman, which is where my department used to live before it lived in Kerr Hall. I’ve never been inside there either. I would only make silly jokes about the name. “How you doin’, man?” “Well, man. I just came form Illman Hall, and before that I was in Sickman Hall, and before that I was in Healthyman Hall.” “Fine, whatever.” This is why I work in a building with a name that is not applicable to silly jokes, the Mathematical Sciences Building. Anyway as I sketched Kerr I listened to a podcast by some bloke talking to some other bloke about some stuff, it was so long ago I can’t remember.

prehistoric jaws across the street

April 19, 2025Leave a comment

On the final day of March, the last two pages of that sketchbook (#54 in the official counting system, not including all the others) I drew two prehistoric creatures. Now I must point out, the sketches from San Francisco in my last post were done before this but are in sketchbook #55, as are all of the as-yet-unblogged sketches from our recent trip to Washington DC (where I drew more dinosaurs) and New York City (where I drew more everything), but I had two pages left of that last sketchbook so went back to add these two there. These lovely beasts with more tooth per square inch than the Osmond Family are found in the Earth and Physical Sciences Building, the home of the nearly-named-the-same Earth and Planetary Sciences Department, right across the street from where I work (in the Mathematical Sciences Building, the home of the separate departments of Mathematics and Statistics). I must point out that even I got the name of the building mixed up with the name of the department when I wrote my notes. I was at the groundbreaking ceremony for that building so I should know. I just got excited by the dinosaur, and who wouldn’t. This is the famous Tyrannosaurus Rex, and is part of the UC Davis Paleontology Collection. I have wanted to draw the beast below for quite a while but never got around to it, but when I heard that they had crowdfunded and bought a full-size replica Tyrannosaurus Rex skull, well the sketchbook came out right away. They have placed it in the stairwell for all to see, and is cast from the fossil called ‘Black Beauty’ which is on display in Alberta, Canada. When I read that, I could not get the theme tune to ‘Black Beauty’ out of my head. That was a great show. It’s not the first T-Rex I have drawn (I have sketched quite a few now) and not even the only one I drew that month, but it’s right across the street so I can sketch this one as often as I like. Installed in a case right below it is the Smilodon Fatalis (which I presume means ‘Deadly Grin’), the famous Sabretooth Cat. We used to call these Sabertooth Tigers, but the Lions and Leopards wrote in to complain. What a beast though. I have drawn a skull before, on my day out at the Natural History Museum in Los Angeles last year, but not the whole skeleton. This one comes from the same place though, the La Brea Tar Pit in L.A. I would like to visit that place some time. I feel the need for another trip somewhere where I can spend all day sketching at a Natural History Museum. In DC, I spent most of the day at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum, but did get an hour and a half among the dinosaurs on the way back to the hotel. Smilodons lived sometime between 2.5 million to 8.2 thousand years ago, give or take a day or so, between the Pleistocene and the Holocene epoch, in what we now call the Americas but in those days probably had some other name. There were three species of Smilodon – Fatalis, Gracilis and Populator – but possibly less well-known were the Frownodon, the Sadadon, the Angryodon and the Laugh-Emojidon.

Chemistry, finally

April 14, 2025April 12, 2025Leave a comment

Here is my possibly final drawing of the now completed new wing of the Chemistry Building at UC Davis, drawn a month ago, when the bare tree still gave a good view. I’ve been sketching this for a long time now, since before the pandemic started and the old walkway between the two wings was still there and about to be demolished. I’ve been in at least one meeting inside already and it’s a lovely modern space. I like what they have done with the courtyard. I drew this after work when the sun was shining and it wasn’t too cold. In the foreground are those standing stones, a piece of public artwork whose name always eludes me (if only I would just look it up, but that requires effort) (ok fine, it’s Steve Gilman’s ‘Stone Poem’ from 1982, I looked it up; you can read more about the outdoor sculptures around UC Davis in this handy guide by the Manetti Shrem). So this concludes my drawings of this whole construction, on to the next one. I saw a new building with interesting curves being built out on La Rue near the sports grounds, problem is I never want to cycle over there, but it looks like a good piece of construction to observe so maybe I will sketch it.

You can see all the sketches I’ve done of this construction (and others of the Chemistry Building over the years) in my blog posts with the tag: petescully.com/tag/chemistry. Or in this Flickr album, without all the accompanying waffle.

march on campus

April 12, 2025Leave a comment

No, this isn’t a post about a march happening on campus. That’s what you might call a clickbait header, albeit a weak one where you’re not actually trying to bait a click. This is literally a post with some of the sketches I did in March (the month) on campus. Ok it is not all of them, but a few stragglers to fit into one post because I don’t feel like giving them their own posts. Also, it’s not just campus, there’s a sketch or two that are from downtown. So the title is not only clickbait but misleading. I’m getting the hang of this internet lark. Above is Young Hall, or part of it anyway, as seen from the MU across the street. I don’t like drawing bikes, but it’s a necessary exercise on this campus. Above, the Bike Barn and the Silo as seen from the shade of the Chemistry Building. Do i get bored of drawing the same things? Sometimes but mostly I don’t. I draw them from slightly different places, at different times of the year. You could argue I never draw the same thing twice, because either it is slightly different, or I am. Looking back to October 2006 this view was one of the first I ever drew on campus. I hated drawing bikes even then. 2006, what a long time ago now. I moved to America in 2005, twenty years ago; what a long time ago that feels, especially now. Twenty years. A lot has happened in twenty years, but I’m still drawing in sketchbooks.

It was raining a bit, but I had to sketch this fellow yelling outside the MU, preaching some nonsense about machines being sinful or whatever. It reminded me of the being at school. No I didn’t go to one of those schools, but me and my friends formed a band and did a ‘gospel’ version of one of my songs for a laugh, with completely off the cuff gospel style words like we would see people do outside the tube station with their tambourines. I still have the tape somewhere. I thought of my old mate Hooker singing, “Repent your sins he said to me! I did exactly that and now I got a double chin!” I think about that a lot. Fifteen years old, we would sometimes get on the tube with our travelcards and go down London, and encounter all sort of characters about the streets and stations that would make us laugh, and they would inevitably end up in our songs. There was one guy who would stand near Oxford Circus and yell at the top of this voice, “Did man make the Sun? No!!! Did man make make the Elephants? No!!!” over and over, this became a staple catchphrase for us at school. We’d be in the canteen, “Did man the Beans? No!!!” and so on. Life was simple at fifteen, uncomplicated. Funny to think back but within another fifteen years of then I had moved to America and started a new life, and there is longer between me moving here and now than was between me being a cheeky fifteen year old at school and flying across the Atlantic to live in California.

Ok, off campus we go. This is Third Street, downtown. Come on I’ve drawn all these before. I’m not that imaginative. As I say, I’m drawing it at a different time of our lives. This was March 13, 2025. Remember March 13, 2020? I bet you do. And look where we are now. I don’t want to think about where else we might be going, there’s enough sleepless nights. But that was five years ago now. Five years! That’s a long chunk of time. Personally I’m still not over the stupid ‘Imagine’ video with Gal Gadot and friends singing to us all over Zoom. You know what I learned recently that I didn’t know at the time in the pandemic, back in England they were calling it the ‘Panny-D”. When I say ‘they’ I don’t mean ‘everyone in England’ or even ‘most people’ but I heard people referring to it as the “Panny-D” and I became just a little bit less British. I asked my friend James about this, he was visiting California recently with his wife, and he said yes people were saying that, and also using the phrase “Hanny Sanny” to refer to Hand Sanitizer. “Hanny Sanny”. This is on the same level of speech as “Hollybobs”. I left England in 2005, and I swear the longer I’m away the more my own version of English is going to sound like something linguists might discover people speaking on Roanoke Island, some throwback to Elizabethan times. I’ll go home and talk and to them I may as well be saying “Marry, nuncle, prithee ’tis a privy” or whatever gobbledegook. I used to study evolving English, and I take the view of embracing language change, but “Panny-D” and “Hanny-Sanny”? Load of old pony if you ask me.

Finally, this is the Davis Tower, I know it’s not much of a tower but that is what it is called. It’s down by the train station, I assumed it was like an air traffic control tower but for trains, but that is probably just my imagination, which as we have established is not very good these days. It was a Friday morning, pissing down with rain (I have to add ‘with rain’ in case you might think it was pissing down with wee), and I was taking a vacation day to visit my aforementioned friend James and his wife Lauren who were in San Francisco to celebrate their tenth anniversary. They were married there ten years ago that week, I was the only witness, and wow has time flown by. Ten years, blink, that’s happened. This was also the week that saw the tenth anniversary of Terry Pratchett’s death, my beloved Pratchett whose books I devoured as a teenager and twenty-something. I have recently been listening to the new Discworld audiobooks, stories I have not read in decades now, and right now I am re-reading ‘Night Watch’ for the first time in over 20 years, and loving it. I love an audiobook, because I can listen while I am sketching, but when I finally sit and actually read a book I take my time (I’m a notoriously slow reader) (well not ‘notorious’, I’m not like a villain or anything who tortures people by reading stories really slowly) (I just write them out slowly in blog form haha) I can do all the voices in my head, or aloud if I’m on my own, and really dive into the world. Anyway, I stood out of the pouring rain and drew this while waiting for my train, and this was the first page of a new sketchbook. There’s always a first page to a new sketchbook.

a new one just begun

February 18, 2025February 17, 20254 Comments

Every year I dread the birthday week; I don’t technically age any more than I do any other day, but that day does push me ever further into the next category in the local fun runs. I tend to draw a lot in the run up to my birthday, as if to take my mind off it; the run up to my birthday is about 365 days. Ok so now we are in February, and have things got better yet, globally? No they have gotten worse, way worse already than ever worried about, and the rest of this month, let alone the rest of this year, fills me with anxiety. Where do we even start? I marginally ease this despair by drawing the world around me; there are only so many buildings with trees in front of it in Davis, yeah? I sometimes think, with all these drawings recording this city over the course of the past nearly two decades (wow) are they something that will be looked at many years later or are they just things of the moment; I need to put a book together. That would take my mind off things, maybe. I see my work on all these drawings as part of a purpose, the idea that these all might be a book or series of books. Occasionally people do see my work on Instagram or here and are like, wow I used to live there, and it sparks memories, and that’s a great thing. When I see illustrations of London, if it is a place I know and connect with well, I look at it and it takes me to places in my mind. Anyway, above it was a day when I was out sick, felt bloody awful. It had been building since the weekend, felt physically wiped out, and on this day I’d been up all night with a headache. I managed to sleep half the day, had a remote work meeting, and tried to rest for a bit more but I needed some fresh air, so went for a walk, making it all the way down to 5th Street where I stopped and did a drawing. I coloured it in later. People were waiting at the bus stop, so I added those in, “why don’t you draw people in your sketches, don’t you think your drawings would be much better if there were people in it?” they say, forgetting the name of my last book; this will satisfy them for a minute. I have waited at that bus stop before, but not for a long time. The bus that would go along there is the one that took me home to our little apartment in south Davis, the area we lived in when we first moved to this city.

A couple of days before, I was already not feeling that well and ended up going home early. After walking downtown to eat something, I found myself needing a rest at Central Park, so I got my sketchbook out and drew the big frat house on the corner. Drawn this a few times, so I didn’t draw it all, left details out and did not start colouring it in. This is enough, all that’s needed. At least I’m drawing. Often times this might be as far as I can get (due to time) and then I’m like, yep finish this one at home.

The next day, already feeling sick, I had to stay home in the morning because a new bed was being delivered to my house. My body said I needed to rest, but any chance of lying in bed was off the table. I had to take my old bed out (not easy at all, no idea how the guys who brought it in managed to do it) and then bring the new one in and put it together. After I was done, I went to work as there is a lot to do. I stopped off for some lunch on the way in, and then did a quick sketch nearby of The Barn, sketching for about ten minutes half-heartedly, not really having any energy at all. So this is kept like this, I don’t really need another sketch of this building, and this is more an illustration of how I was feeling physically.

And finally, end of the week, felt a lot better by then (maybe the new bed is helping with the sleep) and it was Friday afternoon, everything was done so I finished an hour early and walked downtown for a birthday milkshake. The new year diet never happened, but it’s 2025, comfort milkshakes are gonna happen, while milkshakes are still available. Still wasn’t feeling too well, but definitely better, and that milkshake had my name on it. Before heading home I walked over to D Street and liked the way the just-after-5pm light was hitting the Pence Gallery. The days are getting a little longer. Each day feels like a million years. I drew and added only a few colours and the shadows, this is all it needed. Another year over.

opening reception of ‘Visual Journals 2010-2024’

February 15, 20253 Comments

Recently I was invited to the opening reception of an interesting exhibition called ‘Visual Journals: 2010-2024’, curated by Prof. Tim McNeil of the UC Davis Design Department. The exhibition is at the UC Davis Design Museum, but the reception was in the lobby of the International Center, where some of the work is also displayed. It shows many of the visual journals created by students who went on Study Abroad trips to Europe, a course called ‘Design In Europe’, visiting historic cities and interesting museums, sketching and writing and collecting ideas. Even as I write it, I wish I was doing that myself. The books are displayed in cases so can’t be flicked through, but there were photos of many of the students holding their work and what I could see was already an inspiration (and I get inspired by wondering what is on all of the pages I cannot see, knowing they are filled with experiences and ideas). Tim McNeil (sketched above) spoke about putting the project together, and there were students and alumni and organizers who had been with them all on these trips over the years. There was nice food and I spoke to a few familiar faces I’d not seen in a while.

Here’s an article about the exhibit in the L&S magazine: lettersandsciencemag.ucdavis.edu/arts-humanities/new-exhibition-visual-journals-puts-design-thinking-display-10-years-students

Above, a sketch of some books in the cabinet, and below, some people sketching. I had not done much people sketching in 2025 by this point so it was fun to loosen up. It was at the end of my work day so nice to relax a little. Yes, the more I think about it, the more I would like to just right now get up and take a sketchbook trip across Europe, connect with my old continent again, now that this one is starting to feel so uncomfortable (though this lot in charge are doing their best to make everywhere feel horrible). Sometimes it’s good to get out there and look for the good things. One of the reasons I advocate so much for Study Abroad is because this is how so many young people are able to connect with different ways of thinking and seeing the world, that this here isn’t all it really is. I was so pleased to get to travel when I was young, and independently of my family too, it opened up my brain a little bit more even when I wouldn’t realize it, even when my little brain would rebel and be insular, it still took it all in and had its effect and we all need a bit of that. Going with a sketchbook helps you sit (or stand) and really look at it all, and then when you get back, you see everything else that little bit differently.

I haven’t had time yet to go to the main exhibition itself, but will do so soon; it’s open at the UC Davis Design Museum in Cruess Hall between Jan 21-April 25, 12pm-4pm. See arts.ucdavis.edu/seasonal-event/visual-journals-2010-2024 for details. And get out sketching yourselves!