Tag: water tower

towering over our heads

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nanodrawmo 50

Finally! I reached my goal of fifty drawings in November for NaNoDrawMo 2010, and here are the last four. Actually I drew more than fifty drawings this month, but I’m not counting those not in this set. I filled a whole watercolour sketchbook front to back with drawings of fire hydrants and other metal pipes that come out of the ground. The final sketch is the biggest metal pipe, the larger of UC Davis’s iconic water towers. This was a fun project, and the majority of the drawings were done on site (except for those few from photos taken in LA), as I had really wanted to use this project to explore and take a closer look at the missable stuff around us. I can now spot even subtle differences between the hydrants I see around town, so the observation exercise was successful. Everything is interesting if you take an interest in it.

nanodrawmo 49nanodrawmo 47nanodrawmo 48

And now, no more fire hydrants for a long, long time! Here’s the book they all fit in, and the pen that made it through to the end (others were chewed up like, er, I dunno, chewits).

nanodrawmo sketchbook

See the other great artists who made it to 50 here.

summer sessions

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davis in the summertime
Regular listeners will recall that often, in the summer time, it gets quite hot here in Davis. A hundred degrees, pah that’s nothing. It was at least that today, so I didn’t venture out into the oven world to sketch. I stayed in the stairwell, sat on a very dusty step, and looked out of the big window. I have drawn this view before, the UC Davis skyline, the tall water-tower dominating events. However, the stairwell in our building isn’t air-conditioned, so it started to feel very sauna-like after a short while. It gave me a headache. I’m not designed for hot weather, I’m red-headed and freckly.  I got this finished during lunchtime though, and in the incredible dry heat the paint dried as soon as it hit the paper.

under the brown fog of a winter dawn

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Bit of a misnomer that title, this being actually a sunny lunchtime sketch (and being about Davis and not London), but it’s from the Waste Land and it’s therefore cool, and sprang to mind when I was finished.
holding water

And it is winter, or at least what they call winter here. This is the tall UC Davis Water Tower (and environs).

Speaking of which, today is Pancake Day, but this year I didn’t make any pancakes. My little plastic lemon squeezer thing (yes, just like the old jif lemons but not called as such here) is out of date, by a month (bit stupid, I bought it for last year’s pancakes and then it goes and expires in less than a year, it’s like when you buy mince pies that end up expiring on December 24th, yes you know what I’m talking about, marks and spencer). It put me off.

Also posted at urban sketchers. That extraordinary site is growing and growing…