sketchcrawl 23, SF: part 4, the end

July 16, 2009July 16, 2009Leave a comment

Tired after a long day’s sketching? Just go across the city to a cool little place, get a beer, and keep going. I went to Eddie Rickenbacker’s on 2nd St (I have drawn the outside of it before), a place chock full of vintage motorbikes, hanging from the walls and the ceiling. I sat and drew a 1951 Whizzer Sportsman, in pigma micron 05. It was nice to draw sat in a chair, at a table. They have a humungous cat at that place, called Mr. Higgins (perhaps we were related; there are Higgins on my mum’s side). When it was time to catch the Amtrak bus I left, tired legs, I could sketch no more. Still, it was a busy and very productive day. I think on days like this I learn a hell of a lot. I went back to Davis, had a cup of tea, and started scanning my drawings in…

You can see all of my drawings for this day on the Sketchcrawl site’s forum.

sketchcrawl 23, SF: part 2, the mission

July 14, 2009July 14, 2009Leave a comment

After sketching City Hall, I BARTed it down to the Mission District. I love the Mission. It is actually illegal not to have a big burrito when you come here so I had one (it was ok, I’ve had better), and sketched this from the bus stop, at the corner of Valencia and 16th. The lack of sketching stool meant being creative with my seating choices, so the bus-stop was perfect. I always have to figure, when out urban sketching, that the odd street mental might come and start talking to me. As it happened, the random guy who started chatting to me this time (despite my headphones being clearly on) was actually very interesting, and an artist himself, and we had a chat about how drawing was really just a series of lines and choices. He also told me that Paul McCartney owned the rights to the song Happy Birthday to You. I didn’t know that. He probably made it up. I told him that when McCartney plays Beatles songs on tour he changes the lyrics of “When I’m Sixty-Four” to “When I Was Sixty-Four”. Of course, I made that up, but it could be true.

I strolled up 16th looking for another comfy spot to draw, and chose a really uncomfy spot on a narrow corner with negligible shade, in order to draw the Mission Dolores. Well, dolores means pain, and I suffer for my art.

I love drawing those powerlines, it’s one of the best reasons to sketch in the Mission. I don’t know if the One Way sign was put up by the Missionaries but it could be so (I will tell people it was, anyhow). Might make more sense outside a cemetary. Anyway, it was sunny, but windy, and so I held up the sketchbook for the obligatory handheld shot, and moved on towards the Castro. That’s the thing about Sketchcrawl, you just gotta keep moving. Well, I do.

More to come…

sketchcrawl 23, SF: part 1, city hall

July 13, 2009July 13, 20092 Comments

Last Saturday was the day of the 23rd Worldwide Sketchcrawl, so I took the early train down to San Francisco. The sc23, city hall main group was meeting up at the Presidio, but I didn’t fancy going all the way up there; I was yearning for some ‘urban’ to sketch. I started off visiting the excellent Paul Madonna exhibit at the San Francisco Public Library, the five year retrospective of his All Over Coffee strip, which I’ve followed for almost two years now (I came across it while on the Sketchcrawl in Berkeley, and was drawn to because it was a similar style to what I was trying to achieve; it inspired me to do more monochrome stuff). I was surprised, though I don’t know why, at how large the originals were, but that’s only because I tend to draw everything so damn small. Suitably inspired to get out and draw, I sat outside the library and sketched the San Francisco City Hall. The Tenderloin army shuffled by in groups of one, like characters from a Miyazaki film, lost in their own little odour-filled universes. Somewhere across the square was a rabble led by a very vocal Mexican man screaming, literally screaming, into a microphone, to the point where his voice started to fail him, and the microphone started to break. It clearly didn’t stay broken though because he launched into song, backed by a Latin American dance music band, playing a repetitive one-verse, I don’t know, anthem I suppose, which went on and on and on for about six months. My thoughts weren’t with the guy singing, but with the band members, particularly the guitarists. Their wrists must have been super tired. I was wondering whether they took shifts, if perhaps another person came and took over halfway through the song, to give them a break. For all I knew it was a tape loop. When I was done (and I was really pleased with the resulting sketch, by the way), I hopped onto the BART and went down to the Mission. I fancied a burrito.

Above: sketches from the Amtrak train on the way down. It is now obligatory for me to do these sketches whenever I go down to the Bay Area.

More sketchcrawled sketches to come!!!

boring conversation anyway

July 10, 2009July 11, 20093 Comments

Do people even use phoneboxes any more? I barely even use my cellphone. I have a pay-as-you-go plan, which is not like the one I have on my still-active English phone (which still has the plan set up years ago on one-2-one, even has that logo on the screen!). No the one I have here means that you spend $25 to top it up fro three months. If you don’t add more money by the end of the three months, not only can you not use the phone but you lose whatever money you have left (and since I never use it, that’s usually most of it). If you renenw, it doesn’t just add three months onto whenever your three months is up, it just goes three months from whenever you topped up, so essentially you lose days, unless you renew right on the last day. Confused? I am. I have never liked mobile phones here. It’s just incredible to me that you get charged for receiving a call. That’s why I never give people my number, because I’ll never pick up if I don’t recognise it (for a while I was getting a lot of marketing calls, especially around the time of the election).

Speaking of cold calls, I hate those ones that have that pre-recorded message, “this is your final notification to renew your car insurance”, or some such, when yesterday and the day before and the day before that were the final norifications, and tomorrow too, all from companies I’ve never done business with. I hate the robots. At least with real people calling I can antagonize them a bit (sometimes I talk reeeeallllyyy reeeeeaaaallllyyyyy slowly), but even then my heart’s not in it, and I feel sorry for them. After all, everyone’s gotta work. I had to do it, once, for about a week and a half, many many years ago. It was not fun, and the guy running the show (I think he was called ‘Boyd’ or something) fancied himself as a bit of a hardnose, so I left to get a job as a male dinner-lady at a posh school. I remember one time, I made the marketing call, and ended up chatting to an old guy on the phone for about half an hour about his work (writing travel brochures), literature, travel, I forget now. Either way I didn’t sell him whatever it was they were selling. It cheered me up though. I sometimes wonder if those cold callers wouldn’t also fancy a nice long chinwag, a chat about the footy, or the state of modern television, just to ease the drudgery of their work. But if they do, I wish they’d stop calling me right in the middle of Jeopardy.

as june becomes july

July 1, 20092 Comments

Optometrists (opticians in the old tongue). They are always filled with hundreds of glasses you can’t imagine anybody wearing, let alone yourself. I bought a pair of glasses from here once, though I usually get mine from a different place in Davis. On that occasion, my one had no styles I liked, so I went here, and found one that I thought might suit me, a different theme for me. I called them the ‘half-Svens’ because they were kind of half like the Sven Goran Eriksson rimless style (they had half a rim). Normally I prefer the Fabio Capello style of specs. Anyway ultimately I decided I didn’t like them. They didn’t quite fit right; I did get them adjusted, at least slightly, but still no. So I went back to my old place and found they’d just started doing some great Fabio Capello type glasses. (For those who don’t know, I’m not talking about great fashion designers, I’m talking about foreign England football managers, who happen to wear trendy glasses). I didn’t really like this optometrist anyway. They weren’t enormously helpful, and were a bit disinterested, not even calling me to let me know they were ready after they said they would, whereas the service in the other place is much better. (Jeez this isn’t a consumer blog). However, they operate in a bloody cool looking building, very sketchable, and so I drew this today at lunchtime, on the first day of July. The second half of the year has arrived.

it’s not easy being green

June 28, 20092 Comments

A couple of months ago I mentioned the story of the Davis Toad Tunnel, and promised to draw the little toady post office they built to evade the snakes. It’s down by the human post office, on Pole Line Road. Toad Hollow, it’s called.

Yes, they are actually pretend solar panels on the roofs. This is Davis, after all.

chipotle shoulder

June 23, 20092 Comments

Lunchtime downtown, sketched out in the heat (almost hit a century today). Had a burrito at Chipotle. That’s not my bike, by the way.

Have you noticed how everything these days is ‘chipotle’? Food marketers can’t get enough of it. I even saw some chocolate dessert thing somewhere that had chipotle in the title recently, presumably to entice ye who cannot get enough chipotle. I’m surprised automakers haven’t started using it to shift cars in these troubled times. “The new Chevrolet Chipotle, more fuel efficient than a Fajita and spicier than a Ford.”

a change it had to come

June 19, 2009Leave a comment

Hundred degree weather came back to Davis this week, after a relatively cool period for California – on the KCRA3 Weather they said it had been a ‘summerless June’. Apart from a few clouds and some rain in the mountains, it has been generally sunny and in the warm 80s. So, obviously gloves and scarf weather. You gotta love Californians.

I’ve drawn this view – the Bike Barn and South Silo, as seen from Bainer Hall – several times before. I like the view, it is fun to draw and you always see it anew each time. The only things that change are the leaves on the trees and the work on the green in the foreground. Funny enough, that even changed while I was drawing. I had to spread it out over a couple of lunchtimes, and on the second lunchtime that fence had gone, and someone was mowing the lawn (after I’d drawn all that spongy long grass). Oh well! It is the front of the Hog Barn – sorry, it’s not called that any more, it’s the Hubert Heitman something or other, as they made clear at a campus design council meeting I went to there (coincidentally, fellow Davis sketcher/blogger Pica was at the same meeting, and caught me without sketchbook). Anyway it has recently been renovated and opened (and it smells so new inside) so they’re adding the finishing touches. The world sits still for no sketcher.

Here are some other versions of this scene.

the sweetest thing

June 13, 2009June 12, 2009Leave a comment

The last one from Monterey. I sketched this fabulous building from the 1880s, the Thomas Kinkade National Archive, in the Harry A. Greene Mansion. Or Willy Wonka’s Summer House, as I prefer to call it.

I sat across the road on Sunday morning sketching this venerable candy stick, wondering if there might be an old witch stuck in an oven inside. Why would someone put a giant toffee apple on their roof? Perhaps it attracts the flies and mosquitoes, they stick to it, nobody gets bitten, they’re laughing. Makes sense, really. I might try it. Better than spraying insecticide everywhere to prevent West Nile. Stick a load of half-sucked sticks of rock or candy canes out in your garden. Maybe that’s where the Christmas tradition came from, you don’t know.

Here’s the obligatory action shot.

as long as i gaze on

June 10, 2009June 9, 20092 Comments

Monterey, sunset. Micron pen and watercolour, in a watercolour moleskine, and pretty much all but done in the dark. That’s ocean fog hanging out there in the distance.