bring it on down

December 6, 20124 Comments

Back to the old Boiler Building, and the machines are really tearing it down now. The whole east side has been turned to rubble, leaving a sad, draughty, haunted shell. A small crowd of people with young, construction-machine-loving-aged children (you know the age, parents!) to see the mighty mechanical dinosaurs at work, and to wave goodbye to a historic part of UC Davis. Back at work, I spoke about this sad demise of a much-loved campus sight to some of the professors who have taught there for the past few decades. “Where’s this, then?” they said. “Boiler Building? Is that downtown somewhere? Don’t know that one.” Well, I’ll miss it. Even if I too had no idea what it was for until recently.

go on, go on, go on, go on, go on, go on

December 3, 201210 Comments

This is a true story about when I blew up the kettle (accidentally) when I was nine. Probably long forgotten by everyone else, but something I remember every time I plug the kettle in. I drew this, my kettle and tea-making equipment, here in my kitchen in Davis, and it is part of the Pence Gallery’s ‘Teapot’ show, being displayed until the end of December upstairs at the Pence (D st, Davis: visit www.pencegallery.org for details). I do love a good cuppa tea. I don’t use a teapot (no point unless there’s a few of you) and I don’t do none of your fancy nonsense, just a working class cup of tea, thank you, lovely. Fortunately I can get my normal teabags here in America, so I can have my typical four or five cups a day. I would not have lasted long here otherwise. I remember being nonplussed when my American mother-in-law first came to England and remarked at how cute our little ‘tea station’ was (it was the kettle and jar of teabags), now I live here I know it’s not actually typical to have an electric kettle in every single household- in Britain and Ireland it’s so essential, we get a kettle before we get a bed or a roof or anything. A cuppa tea back home is a language we all understand. I won’t drink anyone else’s tea here in California either, not even in cafes, I only drink my own tea, made at home, perfect and unbeatable in every way. And when I discovered you can get chocolate Hobnobs here in Davis, well my cuppa tea experience moved a little closer to perfection. Now I’m just waiting for my son to get old enough, and that’ll be his job, just as it was mine. Hopefully, of course, he won’t blow up the kettle.

the way we used to be

November 29, 2012November 30, 20124 Comments

While I’ll be posting the remaining set of NaNoDrawMo pieces altogether shortly, I thought you might like to see #50, the final one. It’s a self-portrait, although admittedly a few years have passed between the photo being taken and the drawing being drawn. I have had a haircut since then, and wear glasses, and I’m sure those dungarees don’t fit any more. No this is me aged about three, demonstrating why I keep my hair short (so as not to look like a diagram of the Atlantic Summer Hurricane Season). Hair is a bright red, eyes a bright blue, cheeks a bright pink; nothing’s changed there! I’m still as sweet. I still remember this face though, having to stand on the chair to see it in the mirror. This face makes me think of the Mr.Men theme music, by far my favourite show when I was a little one. Drawn in uniball signo um-151 pen (two sizes, 0.28 and 0.38) in a big Moleskine.

walls come tumbling down

November 20, 20122 Comments

And so, demolition has finally come. I have drawn the old Boiler Building on the UC Davis campus several times now over the past few years, with a little more frequency since I knew for certain it was being pulled down. After much waiting, the mechanical monsters have moved in, pulling down the two smaller buildings to the side, and now a large gaping hole has appeared in the main Boiler Building itself. It’s days are numbered. It will make way for a new Recital Hall, as the sign says, which I’m sure will look very snazzy. I will keep sketching this historic old beast until it is a pile of rubble, and then chart the new building as it rises from the, ok I’ll stop with the hyperbole. Buildings rise and fall all the time, like the great Empires of old…

Sketched with brown uniball signo um-151 in the watercolour Moleskine. I listened to a History of England podcast while I sketched, which was actually mostly about medieval Wales, on the eve of the wars with Edward I. Kind of fitting.

space travel’s in my blood

November 19, 20125 Comments

Here’s a sketch I did one lunchtime this week, of the old phone box and Mustard seed restaurant in downtown Davis. There’s no phone in the phone box, it’s just a bit of anglophile decoration. They lock the door now, which is a shame, as me and my young son always used to stop by and pretend it was a rocket ship, and we would go inside and fly off to Saturn, and maybe stop off on the asteroid belt, before coming back to Davis again. It’s good to get off the planet, every now and then.

I sketched this in the watercolour Moleskine (#11) with that uniball signo um-151 brown pen I love so much.

and the stinking streets of summer are washed away by rain

October 31, 2012November 1, 2012Leave a comment

I’ve been away, out of the state, up in Portland Oregon if you must know. I wanted to walk about in the rain. Well of course we get rain here in Davis now, and some of it came the same week I left. So one wet lunchtime I got out during a lull in the weather and filled in the last remaining space in Watercolour Moleskine 10. I only sketched a bit before the rain started again, but as Alan Partridge might say, you get the general idea. The long long summer is finally gone, autumn is here, a new stage in the year begins.
Anyway, that ends Moleskine #10. Watercolour Moleskine that is, which are generally my ‘alpha’ sketchbooks. I have other Moleys, and other sketchbooks besides, but I’m already well into Moleskine 11 now and will have to do a 12th to keep some symmetry (I remember when I was ‘stopping at 9’). I’m used to them now, and they look good on the shelf (which is odd, because I keep them in a box).
If you want to see the rest of the sketches from this book, which cover London, Paris, San Francisco, Oregon, Davis Santa Cruz and some other places, please visit my Flickr set “MOLESKINE 10“…

five little houses

October 16, 2012Leave a comment

Back in May I did some sketching for the Pence’s Garden Tour, and one of the things I drew was a set of birdhouses which I just loved. I sold the original, and I wanted to draw them again but never got around to it, until now. I drew these lovelies on the Stillman & Birn Delta paper (very nice for these types of things) using the sepia uniball signo um-151 pen (the pen of choice) with a bit of watercolour to wash it.

Hey guess what, it’s available to buy in my Etsy store! If you’ve not been to my Etsy store there are several prints and originals for sale, got to etsy.com/shop/petescully.

impossible acres

October 12, 20121 Comment

Every October, we head out to the north-western edge of Davis to a farm called Impossible Acres. There we try to take a photo of our son as he easily navigates the hay maze, spend a couple of minutes holding a baby duck and stroking a kitten before leaving the animal petting zone to rush back to the corn maze (cost me seven bucks, but holding the baby duckling was worth it), ride around in a circle on the back of a tractor to see, well, fields, and then pick some pumpkins and get home before the young one has a meltdown. Yup, that pretty much sums it up. It’s great out there though, and I always try to grab a very quick sketch if humanly possible. While my son and my wife were lost in the corn maze, I sketched the big barn. You can make out one of the heavily pregnant goats in the picture; there were tiny baby goats, kids rather, wandering about in the enclosure, one was only a day old. Before very long my son came back from the maze and wanted to do some sketching himself. I forget this, now he’s at the age where he needs to draw if I’m drawing, and I always forget to pack his sketching stuff as well. This whole thing took me less than fifteen minutes so I’m happy with the result. We picked our pumpkins (I got a white one, I am thinking ‘stormtrooper’ this year) and went home. Our annual tradition in Davis.

a door on the beach

September 9, 2012Leave a comment

On our trip to Santa Cruz, we drove down to the other end of Monterey Bay to Monterey itself, where we go every year. We spent a foggy morning at the playground, before spending a foggy morning at our little beach in Pacific Grove. Yes, the morning was foggy, but it burned off eventually. It wasn’t the only thing that burned. My feet, for one. The sunscreen went on them later than the rest of me, and it was too late. That stung later. Lesson learned. It was while I sat sketching this door, which is a sea-kayaking place. This was in the Moleskine with the uni-ball signo pen which of course runs a little when you add watercolor (I knew this and wanted it to add a bit of rough darkness to the stones), but which has amazing accuracy and control when sketching, more than any other pen I have used.

recently-burned feet just out of view

slip inside the eye of your mind

August 27, 20122 Comments

At the end of a busy and interesting week, a Friday night trip downtown was in order. The hundred degree weather has cooled into low 90s and mid 80s, a sigh of relief from me for one. Davis is too hot in the summertime, you just don’t want to be outside doing anything. Summer makes for nice evenings though, so I biked downtown after dinner and walked about. Popped into Newsbeat, the Avid Reader, Bizarro Comics, and then went to De Vere’s Irish pub to spend the rest of the night drawing the bar and drinking the beer. It was as super-crowded as on previous visits, though it got busier later. I read the comic I bought (one of the new DC ‘Before Watchmen’ prequels, this one based on the Comedian; it really wasn’t all that, to be honest) and got out the sketchbook to draw this bar one more time. I have often thought about organizing a ‘Drink and Draw’ group in Davis, perhaps going to different Davis pubs each time; I think it’d be a good idea, though I have had little time to work on it. So I occasionally get out to draw the bars myself; it’s good practise, all those bottles and shapes and light, and you get to sample the local beers. I intended to do the whole thing in dark brown but I had picked up the purple instead, only realising after drawing the beer pumps. The light wasn’t bad, but it was hard to tell between brown and purple. Once I realised, I decided on a two-colour scheme which I really liked. Purple and brown reminds me of Cadbury’s Dairy Milk too. It took a while to draw this, about 3.5 beers (someone did ask me how long it had taken but I couldn’t remember what time I came in, I had been in Bizarro Comics next door for quite a while). You might be able to spot my reflection in there somewhere. The level of detail tails off a bit towards the end, on the right, because of the larger movement of people, the darker light, and the effects of the Sudwerk Aggie ale (not my favourite Sudwerk beer by quite a long shot, but it’s nice enough and only $4 a pint). I chatted to some people at the bar while I sketched, watched the Giants win at the baseball, and made the long walk home through dark Old North Davis (they don’t like streetlights there; apparently they want you to be able to see the stars. Be quite nice to see the street as well though, I would have thought). Passed the bats that live under the bridge at Covell too, squeaking and flapping about. Summer is nearly done, and Fall is coming in, but the warm weather and balmy nights will be with us for quite a bit of time yet, and it’s nice to get out every so often.