formula 1 on mother’s day

May 16, 2013May 16, 20131 Comment

Last Sunday was Mother’s Day in America (two months later than England). We were over in Santa Rosa, and we all had doughnuts on Sunday morning (or ‘donuts’ as they insist on spelling them over here), after which my son and I watched the Formula One, for it was the Spanish Grand Prix, which was won by Spanish driver Fernando Alonso. I sketched the living room in my Moleskine, while family milled about. Sketched with brown uni-ball signo um-151, with a spot of red paint.

Hope you mothers all had a happy mother’s day!

some forever, not for better

May 7, 20135 Comments

At the end of 2012 I sketched a series about the final days of the old boiler building on the UC Davis campus, as it was being torn down.It has been an empty space ever since, though there are currently odd piles of dirt dotted around like giant molehills that weren’t there before. What will take this place is the Music Recital Hall. You can see if you look really closely something resembling a tiny puddle. Well, not much of one. Last night, for the first time in absolutely ages (three months maybe?), we had rain in Davis. Loud, epic, sweep away your shed rain. Any rain in Davis gets a weather warning it seems (water from the sky is just such a weird concept), this one got a flood warning too. It never rains, quite literally, but it pours. And then it is gone. And people are probably already saying, it rains so much here in spring. A couple of weeks ago with the onset of 90s weather looming I overheard someone say that “we’ve had a week of spring and then it’s summer!” as if it hadn’t been in the 60s and 70s and full of sunshine since January. I also heard someone say that we have had a really long winter this year. That was in mid-January. Seriously, dudes.

The first year I was here, though, we had some proper extreme weather. Rain like I haven’t seen since, for months, with massive floods on New Years Day. I just assumed that it was a permanent lake between here and Sacramento, it was a real surprise to me when I first saw the land part of those wetlands by the Causeway. The rains and snowmelt finally gave way to summer, and what a summer that was. We had two weeks where it didn’t fall below a hundred degrees, even at night, and while I’ve experienced hot summers since, there has been nothing quite like that summer of 2006. Here is a sketch from back then which illustrates it. This Londoner just doesn’t do such heat. Well, summer is coming.

i look at the world and i notice it’s turning

May 3, 2013May 3, 20139 Comments

De Vere’s Irish Pub, Davis. Click on the image to see it larger and in more detail. It was the end of the week (the weekend usually is), and an evening out at the comic shop followed by some beer and sketching was in order. This is a nice pub. I like drawing pub panoramas in my Moleskine, and this one took only two and a half beers (it’s always something-and-a-half; I like to spend that last half pint looking at the sketch, pencil case away). I have drawn curvilinearly in here before, but now it is time to pull back and see more of the room. I didn’t speak to anyone, just got on with the sketching. It wasn’t very busy on this particular Saturday evening, and it was warm outside. This is an exceptionally warm Spring. We have had some terrible winds, but warm winds, and the weather has been pushing the 90s (actually this week it’s been pushing the mid-90s, it’s like Britpop).

If you’re interested, this is how it looks in the sketchbook.

dejeuner encore

April 24, 20134 Comments

One from another Monday lunchtime at the Silo. I just stayed indoors, eating a burrito and listening to the new Art Brut album on my iPod. I didn’t want to be outside sketching, the weather is warm but very windy, and my nose is like a pressure cooker. This time of year is pretty bad for allergies here in Davis. This wasn’t a particularly interesting lunchtime, so I will tell you about the weekend. On Saturday it was the 99th annual Picnic Day. I pretty much never sketch at Picnic Day, mostly because of the crowds, but also because I am here on campus every single day, and drawing Picnic Day, when that same campus is ridiculously crowded, just seems a bit odd to me. Plus I always get too hot and tired, wandering from place to place with my son. We did see some nice cure kittens though. I missed the parade in the morning, the best thing about Picnic Day (no, the late night parties are not the best thing, not that I would actually know). I was volunteering for a couple of hours at the Little League’s Snack Shack, which was a great change of scene. I had to sell snow-cones and other strange candies I have never heard of to tiny children (who mostly shared my dislike of grape flavoured sweets). It is funny how different the candies are here to what I had as a kid in Burnt Oak though. I recall in the newsagents on Watling Avenue, and in Toni-Bells too, there was what seemed like thousands of different “penny sweets” (which actually ranged from half a penny to a whopping ten pence). I would spend hours in there with my friends just trying to choose what to buy. This wasn’t you pick’n’mix neither, this was serious sweets business. This was all brought back to me when a kid of about six or seven presented me with a dollar and just said, how many different things can I get for one dollar? Quite a few as it turned out. Back in my day though, that sort of money would have kept you in candy for a month. And I’m not that old.

and the clock waits so patiently on your song

April 16, 2013Leave a comment

The 39th Worldwide Sketchcrawl took place in the Castro, San Francisco. This here is Castro Street (click on the image to see a larger version), and I was very eager to sketch a panorama of this scene. The magnificent Castro Theater could take up an entire day of sketching all on its own, so full of detail it is. I enjoyed speaking later to other sketchcrawlers who had attempted it, some having drawn more detail and some having drawn less, each impactful in their own way. It’s a tricky one. For me, the horizon was the thing – I had intended on sketching a lot more of the beautiful slopes of old houses on that hillside, but the smaller size of my sketch and the level of foreground detail meant leaving it out would be better. Well, that and I would have been there until about Thursday. No, with this sketch I wanted to capture the sweep of Castro Street, sinking and rising among San Francisco’s many hills. The Castro is well known as the predominantly gay neighbourhood of the city, and you’re not really left in any doubt of that! Rainbow flags adorn lamp-posts, bars, houses; this is an area which is open and proud. I was stood at Harvey Milk Plaza sketching this, and if you have seen the movie Milk, you will know a bit about the Castro and its history, and the great gay rights campaigner and city supervisor Harvey Milk. I saw a documentary about Castro Street once; this community really has a fascinating history. Anyway as I stood sketching this, first in the morning before the sketchcrawl meeting, and then going back to finish it off after lunch, the wind really started picking up, making me rue not bringing little clips for my sketchbook. Is topped without going the whole spread, and I stopped in the right place. Here’s another tip – sketch a scene with a clock in it somewhere, and you can keep good time, without checking your watch and worrying about being too slow.

Here is a car parked a bit further down Castro Street. I was trying to figure out what I wanted to sketch – there is a lot to choose from – but when I saw this it looked like the distant cousin of this other car I had drawn once, and I just HAD to sketch it. Now whenever you draw a car on the street you are always running the risk that the driver will drive away. I checked the meter, still plenty of time left, but I took a couple of reference photos first, and then started sketching, sat on the kerb. Behind me, a stall on the street was offering free HIV tests at a nearby clinic; further down, tourists were giggling at the skimpy male underwear in the shop windows. I got as far as the outline, the license plate and about half of the details before the car’s young owner came and drove it away. He didn’t see me sketching; if he did, I hope he didn’t think I was a traffic warden. I considered putting more money in the meter if he could leave it there a bit longer, but it gave me an excuse to go and sketch other things. Which I will show you in the next post…

In the meantime, check out the other great sketchers from around the world at the 39th Worldwide Sketchcrawl Forum.

hidden in the backseat of my head, someplace i can’t remember where

April 2, 20134 Comments

In all the years we’ve been living here in CA and passing through the wine country region on the way to Santa Rosa, I’ve always wanted to sketch this old diner with this amazing old truck parked out front. I was never sure exactly where it was on that road we’ve driven down a hundred times, just one more place we pass. On Easter Sunday, on the drive back, my wife suggested that we stop, so I was finally able to add it to my Moleskine. This is the Fremont Diner, on the outskirts of Sonoma, a town I have always loved. It was raining, and the diner was closed, so we sat in the car, my wife read a magazine while I sketched. One day I’d like to eat here. Apparently they do ‘fried pies’. Sketched in dark brown uniball signo um-151 pen with watercolour, in a watercolour Moleskine.

eleven’s end

March 15, 2013March 14, 20132 Comments

This is the last drawing inside the sketchbook I call “Moleskine #11“. It is in the back inside cover, and shows some of the physical souvenirs from this particular grapho-temporal voyage. I took to numbering my Moleskines early on, though to be fair this isn’t really #11, if you include all the other types of Moleskine sketchbook, diary, notebook etc I have. This is my eleventh Watercolour Moleskine. Well, of this 8×5 size. What I’m saying is, this is the eleventh in a series of same-size sketchbooks. These sketchbooks tend to be my ‘alpha’ books – all of the others are for certain things, side projects, or when I want to try something else for a while. For a good chronology though (and I want my biographical record to be chronologically correct), the trip from Moley #1 is one worth exploring. I’ve definitely improved a lot, and developed my way of drawing, my type of urban sketching. Choices are different, preferences evolved, but still it’s all a learning process. What I like most is that I don’t really know what it will look like by Moleskine 15. What will I be into then? Along the same lines of course, but it will be different, sometimes subtly, sometimes massively. Or will there even be one? I considered stopping at nine, a nice round Nazgul-like number. Therefore stopping at 11 is not a good idea, no no no that would never do. So I am on #12. Twelve is perfect. Twelve is the best number we have. In English it’s the last number before we start saying ‘teen’. Sesame Street’s best numerical songs were about the number twelve (come on, you know they were). The European Union loved being at twelve so much that it kept twelve stars on the flag, even though the number of members increased. Eleven is pretty cool too though. I grew up in a number 11 house. Alors, Moleskine #12 has already begun, but you won’t get to see that just yet.

Here are the first eleven though, from 2007-2013. An illustrated journey indeed…

And in this Flickr set, you can see the whole of Watercolour Moleskine #11.

roses are red

March 11, 2013Leave a comment

Roses! More flower drawing. These were for my wife’s birthday, over a week ago (they are lasting pretty well), and I drew them with brown uniball signo pen in the Stillman and Birn ‘Beta’ book. I have been saving that book for a while but finally cracked it open, and it’s very nice, lovely thick paper. I watched the movie ‘Brave’ with my son while drawing these, that’s a good film.

the great dane

March 9, 2013Leave a comment

Another football drawing, this one is Michael Laudrup, the Danish manager of Welsh team Swansea City. I love Laudrup. He is forever-young, good-looking-but-man’s-man, right attitude, and in his first year at Swansea he has led them to their first major trophy ever. Swansea City as a club are great too, and it’s great to see a Welsh side gaining so much respect in the Premier League. Laudrup was a great player in his day too, as was younger brother Brian, but Michael was The Man. Total man-crush of course (he’s competing with AVB and Mancini), so he had to get drawn on a Chinese envelope in brown pen. I’m enjoying this series. And I have a lot of these envelopes this year…

and if the flowers are in bloom, i’ll lose myself to you

March 7, 2013March 7, 20131 Comment

Some pretty flowers, which were for my wife’s birthday last weekend. It’s fun drawing flowers because they are so completely different to the sort of thing I normally draw. I sat down and watched Lost In Translation while drawing these. I haven’t seen that film in years; it reminded me of watching it with my wife at the Phoenix independent cinema in North Finchley back in 2003, I think it was. Kind of made me want to go to Tokyo, actually (and North Finchley, funnily enough). Drawn in dark green uni-ball signo um-151 pen (nice effect, huh) and coloured with watercolour. Almost to the end of this watercolour Moleskine now, you can see the rest of the skecthbook on my Flickr site…