Tag: watercolour

a poem, a stink, a grating noise

3 Comments

“Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream.”

– John Steinbeck, Cannery Row

cannery row in monterey

We were in Monterey at the weekend. Down at Cannery Row (motto: “Yes, We Can”), where they pack souvenir shops in like, um, sardines, I sat and sketched since that day was also Drawing Day 2009. This gave me a contractual obligation to draw. Cannery Row (not in fact named after the actor Sean Cannery) was made particularly famous by John Steinbeck’s book about the place, that people pretend to know well when they go there even if it’s the first time they’ve ever heard of it (and to be faiat captain bullwhackers, montereyr, since bits of it are mentioned somewhere every few yards you feel like you’ve read the book, seen the movie and bought the fridge magnet). It’s funny how if a writer is associated with somewhere then they make sure to drum on about it as much as possible, like those pubs where Dickens/Twain/Kerouac etc drank (Dickens for one drank in every single pub in London, I’m surprised he was ever sober enough to actually get any writing done). Writers hold a special appeal to tourist boards. You never get areas devoted to, say, Joe Bloggs the stockbroker or someone.
The drawing to the right is of the beer garden of the Captain Bullwhacker’s pub (I think that was the name), which was heavily pirate galleon/British pub themed, and undoubtedly where Steinbeck once popped in to use the loo, maybe.

sketching cannery row

Also blogged at Urban Sketchers.

pool your thoughts

2 Comments

pool at alder ridge

This is the pool at our apartment complex here in Davis. I never go there. My mum however is visiting from England, and was sat out there catching some of the unending sunshine that we get here in California, so I joined her and sketched some of the pool area (after watching the FA Cup final played out in BBC website updates). This is what where I live looks like.

you may take our trees

Leave a comment

E street from sophia's kitchen

Memorial Day. Got out on the bicycle tonight after a trying day, and rode about enjoying the evening warmth. Stopped for a cold beer in downtown Davis, where I sat outside and drew the scene opposite me. And actually included cars! This is important. A couple of years ago I sat in this very spot and drew this very same scene, and purposely left a big space where the carwas, because I don’t really like drawing cars (unless it’s a really cool car, and that is the main thing I’m drawing). And then I went and spilled my little water jar all over my sketchbook. You’ve never seen my hand move so fast. Thankfully nothing was damaged – all is well. Thankfully I live in a dry part of the planet and so didn’t have soggy book syndrome.  

Anyway the previous drawing is below. Note how there’s a big tree whose trunk begins bottom right. That tree is sadly gone now. It was enormous, but they chopped it down because it was threatening to fall over and crush you puny humans.

E st (minus the car)

rush hour

1 Comment

frat boards and bikes

Another lunchtime sketch (with purple micron), very quiet on campus right now, and I sat outside the Silo drawing bicycles and fart-boards. Oops, mis-spelling there, I mean frat-boards of course (are they even called that?). They look like a gang. I imagine the frat boards marching animated across campus, independently, gathering to harass bikes. A lot of them seem to be advertising Rush, presumably not a celebration of Ian Rush, though it would be more interesting. Ian Rush, he was great, he drank milk so that he’d be good enough not to play for Accrington Stanley. Funny fact, my A-level history teacher, a Welsh guy, left his teaching job to go and tour with his band who were called, of all things, Ian Rush. They sang in Welsh, and presumably scored a lot too.

get me to the church on time

2 Comments

davis community church

I remember drawing this building, Davis Community Church, three years ago, and thinking, I don’t like this drawing much. Its the colours. I finally got round to drawing it again, and while i prefer this I still don’t like the colours much. So I’ve decided it’s not me, it’s the building, it’s the wrong colour. I might write to them and ask them to paint it something else, pink or white or something. I edited out the homeless person who was ambling about the entrance with a trolley, mainly because she wouldn’t stand still but kept wandering off yelling something like ‘get out of my head’. I also edited out the big SUVs parked outside. While I was drawing another one pulled right up and parked in front of me, and out stepped JR Ewing, or his double.  I’m surprised I saw any of the church. I actually made most of it up.

if you can’t take the heat

2 Comments

The weather over the weekend was a whopping 104 degrees. Stay inside sort of weather. People from Burnt Oak aren’t cut out for hundred degree heat. G and 2nd

Davisites are used to it though. Californians in general love the sunshine and the heat (I have to laugh when my wife complains that it is cold when it is 65 degrees at 8am), though Central Valley heat is not so loveable, and the heat has come early this year. So I was pleased today that the weather plummeted to a brisk 90 degrees. I braved the chilly weather and poked about downtown during my lunch hour, huddling up for long enough to draw the corner of G and 2nd Streets, in purple micron and wine copic muliliner, before cycling back.

cross over the river, where they feel safe and sound

Leave a comment

in the arboretumA sketch by Putah Creek, in the UC Davis Arboretum. I braved the heat and the allergy-inducing winds to sit and sketch this. Putah Creek is a great place to come in Summer if you want to catch West Nile Virus, from all the mosquitoes that hang out here. Speaking of hanging out, the bridges such as this one are home (or sign the sign says) to many bats, (who eat the mosquitoes). If you fancy catching rabies, I read somewhere it’s endemic in local bats. And then there’s the black widows. Don’t get me started.

Dangerous place, is Davis.  And it’s going to hit a hundred degrees this weekend.

wouldn’t it be nice

4 Comments

balboa park, san diego museum of man

After all the modern US corporate architecture in La Jolla’s conference district it was actually a bit of a surprise to come face to face with magnificent decorated buildings from the mid 1600s no less right in the heart of San Diego. Well, it is pretty much where California began (and still begins). We didn’t spend very long at Balboa Park, but long enough to see what an increcible place it is – I could spend all day there, drawing, it’s a sketcher’s dream. I stopped outside the Museum of Man, with its ornate down and ridiculously Churrigueresque entrance and tower, aka the California Tower. To coin a phrase, phebleedingnominal. However, san diego balboa parkit turns out that this building isn’t as old as the other one I saw (which actually was from the 1600s according to its sign), but this building was finished in the early 20th century for some world fair. Still, well worth a sketch. Two in fact; I did the one above in copic 01, while the thumb on the right was done in brown micron.

It’s funny, you know. You think of Southern California and all those people who get facelifts and plastic surgery and so on to look younger; the buildings on the other hand want to look older. Maybe that’s what the Beach Boys were singing about.

I didn’t get much other drawing done in San Diego. We did drive through the cool-looking Gaslamp District and visited the Seaport Village, which was nice; some other time perhaps. San Diego looks well worth another visit. Next time, when our boy’s older, we’ll go to the zoo.

walk of shame

2 Comments

hyatt la jolla I went to a conference in Southern California, as people often do. It was in La Jolla, the wealthy northern part of the San Diego sprawl. I am told it has a wonderful coastline; I barely saw it. I did spend a lot of time in the big tall hotel and big wide road district though. I didn’t stay in the hotel where the conference took place, but in another equally large and corporate one, a short walking distance away (or so it seemed from Google Street View). What you don’t take into account are the massive wide roads, and how America really is not designed for pedestrians; La Jolla more than most. The roads have about five hundred lanes, and you have to wait several months for the red hand to become a white man, which it does for the briefest of moments before flashing back again, ‘hurry up, come on, there’s cars want to get moving here you inconvenient pedestrian’. That’s if there even is a crosswalk; on a couple of occasions there was nothing but a sign telling the weary walker to turn back several leagues and cross via the overhead walkway, which sounds nice until you discover there is no way onto the walkway from the street, no steps, just a grass verge and some sort of swanky polished mall or shiny bank office. Tactics were necessary in order to simply cross the road. This short walk was becoming a mensa puzzle. I finally arrived at the conference with tired feet, but a much sharper mind. And yet in the only moment I could grab to sketch, all I could draw was a bland hotel courtyard hidden by part of a palm tree.