Playing With My Food.

I ate breakfast with a group of friends at a local restaurant, and while they all drew on the placemats with crayons, I took a spoon and spread around the leftover syrup on my plate, mixing in a little pepper to darken and thicken it, and using the burnt crisps of some homefries for a goatee.

Phoning in a cameo.

And now for something completely non-visual....

I changed my voicemail message today from my Ted Koppel impression...

to an impression of Jimmy Stewart.

Next time i re-record it, I'll probably do Regis Philbin.

Water Colors For, or, Light Painting, Being the Detailed Accounting of the Further Adventures an Aspiring Artist on His Journey to Create Art.

I seems to have had a sudden surge in the number of posts I've done recently. Here is another, a detailing of the process I go through to create a watercolor. This was something I painted this afternoon in preparation for a demonstration I will be giving to a group of 7-8-9 year-old boys tonight about the medium.


It is interesting to note the difference in appearance between a photograph of the painting and a scan of the same painting. The colors seem a lot more rich in the photograph(above), as the natural light plays over them, more like the way I saw them as I painted, whereas the scanned version(below), even after tweaking the colors, is a lot flatter with only the light from the scanner reflecting on it.



After I finished the painting, I drank the apple juice in the glass as my reward.

zounds! a pink hound!

Somewhere I read once that Salvador Dali used to lie on a couch with a silver spoon held suspended in his hand above a tea platter so that as he drifted off into a dream-sleep, his loosened grip on the spoon would make a sound that would awaken him so he could paint or sketch what he had dreamed before he could forget it. Whether the story is true or not, that restful twilight between here and dreamland is indeed ripe with images that are waiting to be drawn. I often have zillions of ideas pop into my head as I am about to drift off, but being too tired to get up and draw them before I fall asleep and forget them, they are often lost forever. However, I was taking a nap this afternoon and had an idea which I decided to act on. I grabbed out my pastels and a piece of paper and drew it out straight-ahead. It was more of a color-image than a detailed drawing, so I didn't sweat details like contruction, composition, or other technical aspects of art, focusing more on capturing those colors I saw in my head. sadly, what you see here is a mere shadow.
A fun shadow, but still not quite the picture I saw.

the next generation

Tonight I was asked to do an impromptu demonstration of the art medium of pastels for several royal rangers, a Christian-type boy-scout group. The eight boys were around 9 or 10 or so, and my mission was to give a quick overview and some samples of the medium. after showing them several of myfinished drawings in pastel......I got a fresh sheet and quickly showed them the process of creating art in pastels.
I very rapidly drew this freehand:
and started to reproduce this photo (poorly):
Then I had the boys do their own drawings, letting them use my chalks to color on some smaller sheets of paper I gave them all.

next week i get to do watercolors! oh boy.

Duck, Frog, DUCK!!!

This is a color rendering of the flying frog drawing from the last post.


But after having examined it, I like this composition better, (it looks more alive, especially the frog, who looks kinda dead in the original, like he's a shish-kabob, instead of holding on for dear life):

Politics: from the latin; "poly," meaning many; and "ticks," meaning bloodsuckers.

I strongly dislike artists talking politics, despite having spent 3 years as an editorial cartoonist for a college newspaper. to clarify, I think that artists ought to address ISSUES that EVERYDAY PEOPLE deal with, not the political shenanigans that go on in Washington.

That said, I am still glad that Giuliani has dropped out of the race for Republican candidate, as he and i disagree strongly on many issues I feel are important. How good a leader he may have been during the 9-11 crisis is not as important as the kind of leader he might have been in the White House. So then, here is my take on Rudy's foreign policy:

"The Monroe Doctrine"In case this cartoon doesn't make sense to you, try an image search on Google for "giuliani cross -dress"

And now for a little lighter fare, i present... Spidey's 50th birthday!



And this is a drawing based on an old aesop's fable about The Frog and the Ducks, which was used as a sermon illustration today.
A frog wanted to go flying, but having no wings, had to come up with a different means to achieve that goal. He found to ducks, and got them to hold a stick between them, and grabbing the stick in his mouth, he was able to ride between the two. As he flew high overhead, some people saw the strange picture, and wondered aloud, "I wonder whose idea that was?"
The proud frog said, "I did," but, when he opened his mouth, he fell to his death.

Moral: pride comes before a fall,
or,
sometimes, you just gotta keep your mouth shut!