bayern some time

October 26, 2010Leave a comment

I had to draw this Bavarian band that has been playing occasionally at Little Prague in Davis during this past month or so for Oktoberfest – I finally went there to sketch them. They played interesting German-style music, sometimes donning a sombrero to add some Mexican into it. I sketched alongside fellow Davis sketcher Steve, and after the band finished our photos were taken by the singer’s wife with our sketches and the band.

The band wasn’t called ‘Bayern’ by the way, I just felt the need to write that up there. I like Bavaria – my wife and I spent a couple of weeks there back in 2005, partly in Munich, partly driving around the Alpenstrasse, to small towns and lakes, popping into Switzerland (where I spent an afternoon studying the Abrogans, a 1200-year-old manuscript and the oldest thing in German language), and then back into Bayern and up the Romantische Strasse. I loved that each town had its own beer, and we ate only local food (I had the most amazaing roast duck in Schliersee), and castles and timber-framed chalets and the odd hilarious name (there was a mountain called ‘Wank’). And it was truly ‘Bavaria’, not just another part of Germany, it felt like its own country, with that blue and white flag everywhere and the Bavarian dialect everywhere. I wouldn’t mind going back some day.

and if you hear vague traces of skippin’ reels of rhyme

October 19, 2010October 19, 20104 Comments

I thought I’d try something different. I was watching TV and getting utterly sick of every single advert being a doom-and-darkness political attack ad (please, please can these elections be over? I can’t take it any more! This isn’t politics it is mass brain destruction, spending as much money as possible to make sure the voting public is completely diverted from any real issue). I took my mind off it with art. I regretted that I never went on a sketching outing with the magnificent artist Tia Boon Sim from Singapore up at the Portland Symposium, but everyone that did spoke afterwards about her paint-splashing techniques. Like I say, I didn’t get to learn it, but nonetheless I was inspired to splash paint onto my big watercolour pad, not thinking about what I’d do with it, but very therapeutic after all the nonsense on telly. When it dried, I sat on the couch and sketched the view of the kitchen, adding some more wash when done. This was a fun exercise.

bottle and glass

October 6, 2010October 5, 2010Leave a comment

October is here folks, and October means beer. Even though most Oktoberfests apparently take place in September (giving us Oktoberhangover) – I even drew this while it was still September – it’s culturally important to keep up that association (this is my excuse). One of my favourite beers is in fact the Märzen amber ale of my local micro-brewer, Sudwerk. This year they brought out a special Oktoberfect version, “Fest-Märzen”, and I must say it’s bloody lovely. Perhaps the best beer I’ve had over here. So in the spirit of drawing bottle and glass on brown paper (see the recent champagne bottle), here they are. That glass was empty by the time I finished drawing, let me tell you. We had a heatwave here last week, with weather in the 100s (really! at this time of year), and a nice cold beer was always going to help.

tractor boys

August 25, 2010August 25, 20102 Comments

I feel like I did this ages ago. There have been so many drawings this month, so much scanning still to get on with. I’m sure I’m not the only Portland-Symposium-participant that feels that. Anyway…this is my son’s toy tractor, a metal green Tonka. Living in the agricultural world of Davis, tractors are inevitable.

Tractor Boys… that’s what they call Ipswich Town supporters, isn’t it. I have family in Norwich, so I should be all anti-Ipswich Town, but I have always quite liked them. They were great back in the days of Bobby Robson, John Wark, and, er, the other guys who were in Escape to Victory. I remember I was in Watford once when they were playing Ipswich, and all these Watford fans were giving Ipswich supporters some stick around town, calling them Tractor Boys and saying oo-arrr, and I wanted to say, Watford? Seriously?

Apologies to American readers, you won’t get any of that. I suppose it’s like people from Nebraska calling people from Oklahoma ‘farm-boys’. Or maybe it’s not. I grew up in London; everyone’s a tractor boy from my point of view. Even me, now.

This little brown sketchbook is in fact finished now. You can see the whole collection of brown sketches, minus a few I didn’t bother scanning, on my flickr site.

brown is the colour

July 27, 2010July 27, 2010Leave a comment

I got this small brown paper sketchbook from the campus bookstore for only 89 cents, and it’s a real find. It has a corrugated cardboard cover and is handbound with a piece of string. These past few days it has become my favourite thing (funny how that happens) and I’ve been scribbling in it whenever I can (starting with the sketches at the Railroad Museum). I tend to sketch more quickly in this book; a drawing will take about ten minutes. Here are some of the things I’ve drawn (all in uniball vision micro pen, for the fellow pen geeks out there).

This is Sudwerk Märzen, a local Davis beer I like. It’s an amber beer, and the Sudwerk brewpub was the first place we visited when we decided to move to Davis. Funny what we may have decided if I hadn’t liked the beer.

This is my son’s toy digger, or rather, one of them (a boy can never have too many construction trucks).

This is Luke Skywalker, Jedi Knight and part-time firefighter. This is actually my toy. I love Star Wars.

A quick profile sketch of my wonderful wife. I really am trying to draw more faces on the spot and I think this turned out well.

Finally, a quick lunchtime sketch at the corner of A and 3rd streets, Davis. I’ll take this little sketchbook with me to Portland Urban Sketching Symposium I think. I’ve already packed my bag and chosen my materials, I just need a couple more pens (and maybe a new brush) and I am all set.

call the engines, call the engines

July 25, 2010July 25, 2010Leave a comment

Above: a toy fire truck, drawn in my brown paper book. This was actually in the course of being played with while I was on the floor sketching it. At one point, Luke Skywalker and Obi-Wan Kenobi – volunteer firefighters, didn’t you know – jumped on board and went to rescue a kitty. I find I’m drawing things I think my kid will like. Below is UC Davis fire station, drawn during a lunchtime this week. Did you know the firefighters here actually have collectable baseball-type cards that kids can collect? It’s true, and they’re pretty cool, they tell you about the fireman or firewoman, and they have a safety message on there and everything.

an urban sketch

June 30, 2010June 30, 20102 Comments

This is Urban, who until his retirement this week was our computer guy at work. I took the opportunity to sketch him at his farewell lunch because I need practice drawing people on the spot, and also because this makes it literally an ‘Urban sketch’. Thought you’d like that. I drew it in my moleskine diary.

Speaking of Urban Sketchers…one month until the Portland Symposium…

up, up and away

May 22, 20104 Comments

The ‘Little People’ airplane, we all had one as kids, and my two-year-old has one. He loves airplanes, loves to read about them, even knows his Spitfires from his Messerschmidts, and loves airports; he’s been on enough flights already, he’s an old hand. This plane is full of wooden letter-blocks, which in his universe are actually suitcases, luggage, and that makes sense.

This drawing is appropriate, as this weekend is the finale of plane-crash drama/mystery series Lost, a show I’ve followed avidly ever since we moved out here. It has been a great show (particularly season 4), but last year started to get a little, um, confused, and this season has been a let down to say the least. It’s almost as if they decided all those things which they built up as important over the years – the Others, Dharma Initiative, Ben vs Widmore, even the time travel stuff introduced last year – are in fact irrelevant because they’ve changed the story. They had to resolve the Widmore character (aka Jim out of Neighbours) so they brought him back and had him shot in the cupboard like a, well, a pussy to be frank. All season they’ve been showing us this alternate timeline and wasting time with new characters who are ultimately completely unimportant (ahem, Ilana). So the long awaited finale is tomorrow, and rather than excited, I am feeling like I just want it to be over and done with. At the least, I want to feel that all those years geting involved with the show and watching it with eager anticipation were not all for nothing. I don’t get into TV shows much, so it would be nice for it to be at the least satisfactory.

sc27: joined in the race to the rainbow’s end

May 19, 20104 Comments

Keep on ‘crawling.the meeting end-point was at Union Square, but that was many blocks away from the Financial District where I was. I really had to draw some newspaper boxes. Being from the UK these boxes seem so ‘America’ to me. I don’t mean the ones where you get the free paper, like the ones in London that stock all those Aussie magazines like TNT (do they even still have them?), but the ones where you put in your money and take a single newspaper (even though any thief could just nick the lot). I think of Superman, with Clark Kent getting his tie caught. But with newspapers closing nationwide, these things could very well be a historical relic (like the phonebox…)

Something else you don’t see much in American cities these days are streetcar cables, hanging over the traffic. San Francisco still has lots of them; I drew some on the corner of Post and Kearny. These cables remind me of Europe, but not London, where we haven’t had them for donkey’s years (incidentally, if you ever buy a donkey calendar they are incredibly good value because donkey’s years are very long. Never, ever buy a dog calendar though.)

Fire hydrants however will never go out of fashion (at least I don’t think so). I love them, another reminder of ‘America’ (and possibly a Superman film again). We don’t have them like this in the UK. Did you know it’s illegal (or at the very least a bad idea) to park in front of one? If you do, fireman can smash your windows to run the hose through it, I am told. Seems like a bit of an effort, while rushing to put out a fire, threading the hose through the car, squeezing over the seat, meanwhile buildings are burning down. Think about that before parking there next time.

And so the final meet-up in Union Square. I ambled in, saw the sketchers plotted about in clusters, didn’t see anyone I recognized, so sat and drew Union Square’s palm trees. Eventually sketchbooks were passed around and I spoke to some other sketchers, including Enrico Casarosa (Sketchcrawl’s founder), and met fellow Urban Sketchers correspondents Gary Amaro and Marc Taro Holmes, among other very interesting artists. It’s always a big learning experience to meet other sketchers all with very individual styles.

It got cold, as the fog was rolling in, and so after a little while I called it a day. Well nearly a day, still had just a little more sketching to do before going home. More to come…

sunday afternoon

April 25, 20103 Comments

Leaving the apartment today consisted of taking out the trash.

It was very warm, and very sunny, but wind was blowing pollen all over the place, and the high pollen count is not my friend. April is the cruellest month. So I stayed in and made pancakes and washed up and watched Tractor Tom (“what would we do without you?“), then cooked a roast dinner. While chicken and potatoes were roasting I drew the view from the dining room table.

‘Taking out the trash’. I sound so American now. Or like a TV cop.