late July, downtown Davis

August 27, 2024Leave a comment

The Seawhite accordion sketchbook that I filled in the second half of July was very much a double A-side. The campus side, well that was We Can Work It Out, and the downtown side is Day Tripper. Or the other way round. The campus side is Strawberry Fields Forever, the downtown side is Penny Lane. Or maybe the downtown side is the B-side, the I Am The Walrus to the campus Hello Goodbye. No, it’s a double A-side, and this is side B of the double A-side. It starts off on 1st street with that big white Dutch gabled building I have drawn before. I realize now, this ain’t a double A-side, it’s an album, and clearly a greatest hits filled with old favourites (but surprisingly not the Bike Barn or the Silo). This is like the Red and Blue Albums condensed, all the greatest bits but for some reason no sign of I Saw Her Standing There.

Now I drew this out of order, not starting at the left and going right, but starting in the middle. In fact apart from that first one (which I drew last) I drew this all over the course of one weekend while my wife and son were out of town visiting family. The weather was suddenly a bit cooler after a really awful heatwave, so I took advantage. I went downtown on the Saturday afternoon and drew the Amtrak station below. I’ve never enjoyed drawing the train station, because those curves and arches always seem to get the better of me, but I had some shade and a big electrical box to lean on. You can see some haze in the sky, that was smoke from the Park Fire that was burning further up north. It didn’t end up drifting down this way thankfully, but it was a terrible fire. I drew this, and then went for dinner at Froggie’s.

You can’t have a series of downtown sketches without the Varsity Theatre slap bang in the middle of them. I spent the whole of the Sunday out there drawing, finishing off at home with the colour and hatching, and was quite tired by the end of it. You can see the poster for Deadpool and Wolverine in this picture in a couple of places, I had been to see that on the Saturday; fun, very silly, very violent. As you can see I’m using street signs and trees as dividers between the pictures. That’s something I did in the original 2010 accordion book. I think I’ve drawn the Varsity about 21 times now. I need to do an itemized list of which places in Davis I have drawn the most, and keep it like a league table.

Next up, the old City Hall, we’ve heard this song a few times too. It’s part of the restaurant / deli Mamma’s now, which I’ve still not been to.

And below, the old house on D Street in between the Pence and the Mustard seed, which I have drawn many times. It looks like it is called Mabel’s Market now, and I’ve not been in there yet. Ten years ago when it was an art studio and gallery space called Art-Is-Davis I took part in a small joint exhibition in there called Scene In Davis. That was a fun evening. I think the first time I sketched this place (in that 2010 accordion book) it was an Antiques shop.

And that’s your lot, I hope you liked this little tour through downtown. I did buy a second one of these sketchbooks which I will fill, not sure when.

the start of another long hot summer

August 5, 2024Leave a comment

I’ve done quite a lot of drawing since I got back from England, despite this awful heatwave we have had. July was perhaps the hottest on record. I did a lot of at-home drawing, not around the house itself (that was so 2020) but more drawings of places in London that I can put on the wall, not in the sketchbook, and I’ll show you those later. I have been getting out to sketch where I can though. Usually when I return from London I’m in a don’t-wanna-draw-Davis type of mood, but I needed to finish the sketchbook as I only had three pages left, so I went downtown and got working on them. The one above, that as you all know is the Varsity Theatre, sketched while stood in the shadier north side of 2nd Street. I liked how the faded red parasols stood out against the shaded cinema. This was the day before July the 4th, which was the day of the UK General Election, when the Tories were booted out after 14 years of misrule, and now everyone’s being nice to each other over there (checks news; oh). It was also in the middle of the Euros football tournament in Germany, where England got to the final and (remembers the game; oh). Still not talking about it. I’m still not talking about the Euro 2020 final either. It was hot, 102 degrees and rising, and it got way hotter the week after, hitting 116 at one point, July had more triple digits than the whole cast of the Simpsons (I had to think about that one, and I still don’t think it’s right) (Simpsons cartoon characters have three fingers) (no I don’t count the thumbs). I like the Varsity, it was the first building in Davis to have air-conditioning, so the stories say. The first film I ever saw in here was An Inconvenient Truth, the documentary by Al Gore about global warming (eighteen years later Al, we are living the dream!) and the most recent film I saw there was the 25th anniversary re-release of The Phantom Menace (love it). I like going to the movies. I also like drawing this building, this is probably my 20th time drawing the Varsity, and I’d draw it again later that month, because I’m nothing if not unoriginal.

The next one I drew was on the morning of July 7, that was a Sunday and Lewis Hamilton had just won the British Grand Prix (what a race! His team-mate George Russell had to retire his car, but at least was able to come back and grab a win at the Belgian Grand Prix a few weeks – oh). This is on E Street (That’s “On E Street”, not “One Street”, it’s not a typo), at Orange Court which I’ve drawn before. Name a place in Davis I haven’t drawn before. It’s less of a mission to draw everything in Davis now and more a joke repeated over and over. Though it was still only mid-morning, boy it was hot. In the end I went to Mishka’s and got a nice cold smoothie (or was it an ice-cold smoothie? One of the two). Still, I was pleased with the sketch. I’ve never eaten at the Dumpling House, but I have eaten at Sophia’s more times than I remember. The long hot summer starts.

“you carry on ’cause it’s all you know”

February 22, 2024February 23, 20242 Comments

Here are a few downtown sketches from last week. Above is Pinkadot, a clothes shop I’ve never been in (not really my style), next door to Baskin Robbins, which I have been in once or twice. I really like their milkshakes. One thing about milkshakes, they do make a stressful day/week/month feel that little bit better. It’s still only February! 2024 already feels like it’s been going on for about six months, and March, one of the busiest months, isn’t even here yet. I am going on a short trip to Los Angeles in March though, which should be nice, I’m going to a conference for work so it’s business and professional development, but as well all know that will also mean a lot of sketching. Hey, do you see that butterfly on the wall next to Pinkadot? That’s you that is. Sorry, old TV catchphrase alert. It did make me think of the song by The Jam, ‘The Butterfly Collector’. I think I’m like a butterfly collector, in my own little dream world, collecting sketches of places. I love that song.

This is Mishka’s Cafe, next to the Varsity. I don’t come here very often (not really a coffee drinker) but I do like their smoothies. Mishka’s is a Davis mainstay, but when I first moved here, the cafe was a block down the street. It was at that cafe that I first joined a ‘sketchcrawl’ back in December 2005, a long long time ago. I drew this when it was threatening to rain. We have had a lot of rain lately, those atmospheric rivers, but we need it. Those drought years were not fun either. This building is located where the old tank house used to be, years ago. I have spent well over a third of my life in Davis, in fact I’ve spent almost two thirds of my adult life in Davis, in fact you could say I’ve spent all of my actual grown-up life in Davis, but even that is up for debate. Time just keeps moving on, and that’s that. “And you started looking much older…” I’ve got that song in my head now. The Jam do fill me with joy, but also sadness, they remind me of my uncle Billy who passed away a few years ago, who used to play me his Jam records in his bedroom when I was a kid. As I write, on this day five years ago I was in England for his wedding, the last time I saw him. I think of him a lot.

And finally, the Varsity Theatre, that classic Davis landmark I have drawn loads of times. I don’t go inside very often, in fact the last film I saw in there was Jojo Rabbit. I don’t draw it from this angle much, it’s dramatic feels slightly overwhelming to me for some reason. Oh, everything feels overwhelming these days, drawing in a sketchbook is much less overwhelming than the rest of the world. I’ve been playing my guitar quite a lot lately, that’s a stress reliever. I keep dreaming about getting another, though I don’t need one. Well there’s one I want, but I quite like just wanting it. I find I have been trying to find the right sounds lately. I’m not a technically good player, I don’t do all the fiddly stuff, I am more about the rhythm and the chord changes. I have not written a ‘song’ in years and years and I don’t really want to start doing so again, but I cannot help myself coming up with little micro-pieces, whatever comes into my head, and quickly recording them on my phone. I will go back in later and listen to them, all about 30 seconds long each, and I always feel surprised at how much I like those little scraps when played together. Some are a bit pants, but they are like little thumbnail sketches of music, only for me, no words but occasionally some random lyrics thrown over to make a melody. Not for anyone’s ears but mine, just how I like it, little butterflies only a few chords long.

temperature’s rising

July 21, 2023July 21, 2023Leave a comment

This is a big motorcycle in front of the Varsity Theatre in Davis, drawn in the period between trips to the UK. I was pretty busy in those interstitial weeks, work-wise, but I got some sketching done. Got to fill those sketchbooks. This was early June. Now it is mid-July and the temperatures are all up in the 107s, which is really oppressive. We are having our air-conditioning system replaced tomorrow, on one of the hottest days of the year, because our current one has been leaking. Not a lot, but enough to be a worry. It’s really old (it’s from the 1970s apparently, one of the oldest left in the units in our neighbourhood) but has worked well for so long, previous occupants never needed to replace it. It’s overdue though, and the new one will hopefully be a lot more energy efficient. Very expensive to replace though; the fun of homeownership. You cannot live without air-conditioning in Davis, or anywhere in the California central valley. This place gets super hot. I remember my first summer here, 2006, it was the hottest I had ever been. I was working in the evenings at the Avid Reader bookshop on 2nd Street, very close to where this was drawn, and there were power outages in parts of town so people were going out in the evenings to wherever had cool air-conditioning. So our little bookshop was packed. It was a community event, almost. I don’t remember if we sold a lot of books on those evenings but I spoke to a lot of locals. Now the building across the way, the historic Varsity Theatre, that has the distinction of being the first building in Davis open to the public that had air-conditioning. We have been freezing our butts off in cinemas ever since. Speaking of cinemas, or movie theaters as they prefer to say here, one of the other two in Davis closed recently. Those other two are Regal cinemas, often showed the same films, and were just a couple of blocks away from each other. It was the one I liked to go to that closed, unfortunately, the one with better stadium seating, and hardly ever anyone there. I’ve definitely been to see films there where I have been the only person, which is great for me, but not really solid business. No wonder their sodas are so expensive, it’s the only way they can stay afloat.

Variety Hatters

April 15, 2021April 14, 2021Leave a comment

This is the Va… wait what? This is the [insert name here] Theatre on 2nd Street in Davis, which as you can see is currently going by The Theatre Known Formerly as Varsity. (Sorry, “Theater”). Regular listeners will recognize this building from the 500 or so times that I’ve drawn it before, but there was one big difference. Can you tell what it is yet? (Um, that sounded a bit like Rolf Harris, you might be a bit more careful with your catchphrases) That’s right, the ice cream shop is closed. No I’m kidding, it’s the historic “Varsity” sign which ahs been taken down temporarily to be cleaned, or fixed or something. The movie theatre itself has been closed during this pandemic you might have heard about, though coming soon, folks, coming soon we will have cinemas open again. I miss going to the pictures. Nobody says that now, “going to the pictures”, it sounds like something people said in the 1930s. “Oh you’re going to the pictures, eh grandad? Don’t forget your penny farthing and your flat cap!” Oh right because “movies” doesn’t sound old-fashioned at all, like you have to make a distinction between watching a film that moves and one that doesn’t? “The movies eh grandad, well see ya later gramps, I’m off to the talkies“. In Britain we generally say “film” rather than “movie” (though my nan, who was from Dublin, used to pronounce it “fill-um”) and “cinema” rather than “movie theater”, and “theatre” rather than “theater”, and that is the end of today’s unwanted transatlantic vocabulary lesson. But I miss going to the pictures, it was something I used to do a lot. I’d go and see a film / movie here in Davis at one of the three cinemas / movie theaters in town, and then go for a pint / not quite a pint* at a local bar / pub. (*They like a 16oz “pint” in America, as opposed to a 20oz pint in British pubs). And of course I would then sketch the bar/draw the pub. As for the Varsity, I wonder if they will “accidentally” rearrange the letters when they reinstall the sign, Fawlty Towers/Watery Fowls style? It could say “Travisy” maybe, or “Sir Vyta”, or “Sty Vira”, , or “Rayvist” (which sounds like a magazine for techno -clubgoers), or “Stray IV” (people might think it’s a sequel movie about a cat, from the streets, who makes it big against the odds, and in this one he has a catfight against a Russian cat – wait, I might have to sit on this idea, it is Hollywood gold), or “Artsy VI” (about six artists stuck in a room with only one brush, one pot of paint, and a lollypop) or “Try Visa” if they want credit card sponsorship, or “Try Avis” if they want sponsorship from car rental companies. Or maybe sponsorship from the Swedish crispbread sector and call it “Ryvitas”. Do it, Varsity people! This is our chance for some Flowery Twats style silliness.

varsity town

July 17, 2020July 16, 20201 Comment

This is a familiar building. It was the first sketch I drew downtown in three months, and I felt awkward out there drawing after such a long time. I still do to be honest; we have a sketchcrawl coming up this Saturday and I’m nervous about it, although I’ll be wearing a mask with one of my sketches on (see those here!). I was masked up standing on the corner wearing this, I could hear that screeching violin music coming from a block away making me wish I’d worn earplugs as well as a mask, but it was a comforting view to draw. The Varsity Theater always reminds me of first coming to Davis, working across the street at the bookstore, doing some of my earliest Davis drawings of this 1950s exterior. The last film I saw there was Jojo Rabbit, one of our favourites, and in fact after cycling home from sketching this, stopping off in the Co-op to get some cheese and wine on the way, we watched another of Taika Waititi’s earlier films, “Boy”, which was brilliant and crazy. We’ve been on a Taika movie marathon lately, not a bad way to spend time at home.

midtown, downtown, train back to my town

January 22, 2020January 22, 2020Leave a comment

Ok…this one goes back a while. Back to March, in fact. In my defense, I only got the sketchbook back recently, so I could not write a post about it at the time. Well I could have, but stories without pictures? I was invited by Prof David Del La Peña of UC Davis to take part in a special sketchcrawl, which was to be part of the annual conference of CELA (the Council of Educators in Landscape Architecture) in Sacramento. The sketchcrawl would move from midtown Sac and end up in Davis, linking up by train between the two. I joined them after lunch in Sacramento, and we were given accordion Moleskines to draw a series of fast sketches in, on location, at various spots about downtown. Also in attendance was Chip Sullivan, who I was not familiar with but he is very well known as a sketcher and educator and knows James Richards well. So I started off by drawing him and David near the conference center in midtown.

“Where Are We Going” it said on the sculpture near K Street. Well it turns out we were going down to the Cathedral, and I sat behind the large open angel wings of a statue. I remember drawing this Cathedral (Our Lady of the Blessed Sacrament) years ago, 2006 or 2007, back when Pyramid Brewing was right behind, and California was so new to me. I remember trying to draw the Crest back then as well, the classic movie theatre a little way down the street. As we stopped for a moment to mention something about sketching I drew the sign, taking just a few minutes, before we moved on.

Sac sketchbook p4

And then we moved to the newest part of downtown, the area around the Golden One Center, the massive basketball arena. We saw Paul McCartney there a couple of years ago, an amazing show, one of the first performances held at the stadium. Macca sang for three hours and was incredible. I remember when this was part of the downtown mall, I would come here occasionally, but it is long gone now. You’ll notice I decided to deraw in pencil that day. I find that in those accordion moleskines I find drawing in my usual pen to be frustratingly difficult. The paper, the size of the page, the fact that it’s flopping all over the place, plus the extremely limited time in each spot – so I just went with pencil, which moves so fast across the page, and splashed on watercolour when I could. It was a sunny day with great clouds.interesting shadows, but cool enough for scarves. My favourite weather. We walked from there over to the Crocker Art Museum, not with much time to do a larger sketch (such a tight schedule, and distances to cover!) but enough time to pop into the gift shop. Oh but I did get a sketch, of another sketcher in a red coat. And then we went to old downtown…

Old Downtown has lots to sketch, I really should go sketchign there more often. This time I decided to draw some of the fire hydrants, one with a yellow cap, one with a green cap. This was followed by fast sketch of the Pony Express statue, before we walked to the Amtrak station.

Sac sketchbook p7

I sat with a couple of the people attending the conference, Penelope and Tatyana (I think one came from Texas, another from California, but this was in March and my memory has faded). It doesn’t take long to get from Sac to Davis, but there was a table and a defined amount of time to sketch. You can see from the window that the Causeway was still full of water, after all the rain we got last spring. I have sketched the inside of Amtrak trains a few times before.

And then we got to Davis, with just enough time to draw that iconic and sketchable Davis building, the Varsity Theatre on 2nd Street. And then we relinquished our sketchbooks, and walked back to the UCD campus.

The books were shown at an evening event during the conference, I was unable to go to it, but it would have been fun to see how everyone else interpreted the afternoon. Everyone sketches at different speeds and with different amounts of detail; I consider myself a fairly quick sketcher but it was hard to keep up! My feet were pretty tired afterwards, and I needed a good rest that weekend.

sketchcrawl sunday scavengers

October 23, 2016October 23, 201612 Comments

Last Sunday we held the latest “Let’s Draw Davis!” sketchcrawl in downtown Davis, starting at the Amtrak Station and finishing up at Mansion Square. This one was, unlike the other ones I’ve organized in Davis, a “scavenger sketch-hunt”. I provided everyone with a list of things at the start, things which could be found in that section of downtown Davis, and they had to draw between 8-12 of them to win a sticker at the end. In truth, just getting to the end meant you got a sticker, but it’s a good fun way to explore and have ideas of things to draw. I think everyone really enjoyed it! I was told it helps some people get over the “what should I draw” conundrum, like Inktober or Every Day Matters – little prompts, totally optional. I’ll do that again.

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The list is as follows:

The Amtrak Station (or part of)
A Fire Hydrant
A Bicycle
A Piece of Public Art (sculpture, mural)
A Giraffe
A Public Pay-phone
A Musical Instrument
Another Sketcher
A Barber’s Shop
A Bottle
A Street Sign
The Varsity Theatre (or just the sign)

For the record, I managed eight of them – numbers 1, 2 (obviously, come on), 3, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, and 12. Here’s why I didn’t get all 12 – I draw fast, but not that fast. No, not just that. IT RAINED ALL DAY! Unusual for Davis. But I spent some of the summer sketching in Manchester so it felt a little familiar. It wasn’t raining when we started, and we had quite the turnout (around 25 sketchers) despite the threat of rain. A lot of people set up across from the station to sketch it, and I sketched some of them – and then the rain came, and it didn’t stop until, haha, right after the sketchcrawl finished. Like, immediately afterwards, blue skies. Ah well. So, here are my sketches of the sketchers Jesse, Omar and Emily:

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As you can see, splotches of rain started slowly splashing onto the page as I sketched Omar and Jesse; I had to duck under cover when adding colour to Emily’s sketch.

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Here is my sketch of the Amtrak Station, sketched in a dry spot next to the building opposite. Most sketchers had ducked for cover, but there is one with a brolly (a few others held umbrellas and sketched too but didn’t last as long as that sketcher!).

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Yeah it was raining hard when I sketched this bike. I was stood beneath a shopfront awning and the rain was still getting to me, so I just painted it quickly. I had wanted to sketch either the large giraffe statue or the giraffe bench opposite this on F Street, but the rain was too heavy to get a decent vantage-point.

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I did have a nice dry spot to sketch the Davis Barber Shop though. I have never sketched this place before, and should really sketch inside some day. I was glad they were open on Sundays. The barber was kind enough to let other sketchers in to sketch, and I think he liked my rendition of the outside. I kept it simple and didn’t add paint, as I wanted to move on.

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I have sketched the Varsity a million times before and this day was so rainy and grey that I didn’t need to worry about that blue sky bringing out the white building or the shadows cast beneath it, however the pink and blue of the neon sign was too cool to pass up. I added a blueish grey marker to the foreground tree.

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Right, a few items to check off the scavenger hunt list. The street sign, obvious. The bottle, that was at De Vere’s though I had included a bottle on the list just to advertise my show at Putah creek Winery, basically, in case people went by there. And the trumpet, fulfilling the ‘musical instrument’ sketch. Actually it is a coronet, and I sketched it at Watermelon Music on E St, which will be vacating its downtown spot at the end of the year and relocating to West Davis, due to the new landlords downtown forcing all these local businesses to close. Yes, some tough times ahead for downtown. Well, I like Watermelon, and bought some guitar strings as I am inspired now (after seeing Paul McCartney live in Sacramento recently – wow that was awesome! My 12 year old Macca-obsessed past self was smiling down on me that night). Several other sketchers had been in drawing stuff, they didn’t seem to mind too much, and I asked if it was ok if I drew too. I’ll miss them; I probably won’t cycle out to West Davis, see, kinda far for me.

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Yeah, the rain was getting a bit much so time for an interior, and where else but De Vere’s. This time I drew the familiar bar but played a bit with the colours and I LOVE it, that blue and yellow. I’ll do more of that. I had a nice stout, good choice on a drizzly day.

And then we all met up at the end, well about a quarter of those who had started, and I gave out more stickers such as those ones below. I hope everyone had fun! The next Let’s Draw Davis sketchcrawl will be on Saturday November 12, at Vanderhoef Quad on the UC Davis campus, starting at 10:30am. I’ll post a poster soon!

why the panoramic face?

June 1, 20165 Comments

Long weekend here in America, which meant longer drawings. Ok, a horse with an injured tail walks into a bar. “Why the long weekend?” asks the barman. No, no it was a bank, he walks into a bank on a holiday. “Why the long weekend?” asks the bank clerk. Maybe not an injured tail, maybe his tail was all overgrown rendering it useless for whatever tails usually are for, hence not being as strong as his front end, for example. So a horse with a less strong, very hairy tail walks into a bank, while on holiday, and the bank clerk says to him, he goes “why the long weekend?” Maybe there’s nothing wrong with his tail at all, maybe he had just been in a race, and had originally been one of the front-runners (that’s a horse racing term) but towards the end he had started to tail off (that’s another one), finally just ambling over the line, not even trotting, just going really slowly, like he had no energy, maybe he was already thinking of his holidays on the beach, before finally he walked into a bar, I mean a bank, and the bank clerk who had been watching the race on the TV, he asks him “why the long, weak end?”. Or maybe, maybe the horse is Bryan Singer and the race is X-Men Apocalypse and I am the bank clerk and maybe I asked exactly that question after seeing that very movie, which I in fact did, not long after finishing this drawing that you see here. (You see I was going somewhere with all of that, I wasn’t just ambling on, or trotting). This is Second Street (though in my opinion, it’s first), Davis. I sat on the corner of F Street (which in my opinion is more of a B+) and drew this familiar scene. In the middle there, the Varsity Theatre, historic centre of the Davis downtown, right opposite the Avid Reader bookstore. I sat drawing for a couple of hours, drawing furiosuly with my uni-ball signo UM-151 brown-black pen, and doing some of the water color on site and the rest at home; pizza dinner awaited me. And then, X-Men. While it was not a bad film (it was not quite Batman v Superman level of “what-the”, there was no “Clark Kent gets into the bath with his shoes on” moment), and it had some good moments and good call-backs to the previous films, it really suffered in its storytelling. I know that sounds ironic given that I spent five minutes trying to tell a joke about a horse at the start of this post but my budget is a little lower. I just felt the narrative started to fall apart somewhere around the middle of the film. It doesn’t stand up to the other X-films. A few good bits – well X-Men The Last Stand had good bits too but overall gets a terrible rap (deservedly if we’re honest). Even “X-Men Origins – Wolverine” was a good idea, though Logan’s (spoiler alert) cameo in this is (spoiler spoiler spoiler) totally unnecessary, inconsequential and utterly shoehorned into the film (you might say it spoiled the movie). Still, Magneto saying “Who the fuck are you?” to Apocalypse was fun. Everyone knows I love Magneto. As I say though, the ending of the film was long and weak, and since it could be said (not by me, but I’m about to say it so I suppose it is by me) that Fox is flogging a dead horse, then that brings us nicely back to “Why did the chicken cross the road? To stop the rights going back to Marvel.”

Hope you had a nice Memorial Day weekend.

varsity, again

May 16, 20157 Comments

At the end of last month was the 10th annual Davis Feminist Film Festival. Unfortunately I was away in Los Angeles so I missed it, but I donated a sketch for their silent auction, and this is it. This is the Varsity Theatre, as you probably know, I have sketched it before once or twice. I sketched it one lunchtime and was so pleased that red Mini was parked in front. I have no idea if it sold (the auction was silent!) but it was fun to sketch. Of course, the festival didn’t take place here at the Varsity, but at the Veteran’s Memorial Theatre, so the sketch was thematically apt but geographically wide of the mark…