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!

drawing as entertainment

This picture was taken in April of 1991.

The skinny redhead with the marker in hand is me, age...er, just turned 9.


I discovered early that people are fascinated by artists. whenever you see a caricature booth at a fair or someplace, there is usually a crowd gathered behind the artist watching him create. artists like Winsor McCay used this to their financial gain with "lightning sketches" acts in vaudeville in the beginning of the century, and other artists later developed the "chalk talk," like this gentleman, Rev. Phil Saint, whom I met in 1992-ish, a year before he died at 80.this drawing was probably done in 15-ish minutes, with chalks on a cloth surface that could be erased afterwards. he was 50% colorblind, and had to have an assistant lay out the colors in order on the tray and memorized where they were, but looking at his paintings, you wouldn't know he was at all colorblind:
He actually attended the same art school as my own private art intructor of 10 years- they were classmates and friends. She actually taught some classes in "chalk-talk" techniques, one of which I took.

I still enjoy using the drawing process as a form of entertainment. When i know someone is watching me draw, i will try to surprise them by the things i do. I might create a tension by keeping the subject a mystery, drawing vague shapes and tying it together at the last minute so it suddenly makes sense, or i might draw a "normal" picture and at the last minute add a minor detail to make it humorous or bizarre, like drawing a bugs bunny head, and then placing it on a plate in a waiters hand, things like that. the surprise on the viewers face always tickles me.

It is just interesting to me how spellbinding a simple drawing can be when it is in the process of being created- the mystery of "what is it", the magic of creating images on a flat surface, all seem to hold an undeniable fascination....

...apparently even when it is a bad line drawing of YMCA building and a bicycle (i used to struggle with the construction of a bicycle when i was young- so many bars going every direction!). But hey, what can you expect from a 9-year-old with a brown Marks-a-lot?

a parade of sketches

this last november i went to see my kid brother play clarinet for marching band in a local parade known as the King Frost Parade.

To avoid dying of boredom, i took a sketchpad to draw people who were standing around waiting for the parade to pass them by.

My sister brought her camera and caught me in the act.

I cut a picturesque and dashing figure, no?

no? well, let's move on to the sketches then.
Most of these were pretty quick and rough, so i wouldn't get caught staring at people.

there were plenty of fat chicks smoking, and a number of punks with green mohawks riding skateboards around in the street.


fat men with windblown comb-overs, more fat chicks smoking (and drinking), a hispanic man with a stupendous mullet...


a twinkling old man smiled nicely for this picture, and at the bottom of the sheet is a depiction of an actual event. a little boy with an over-sized blow-up hammer was hitting his dad in the butt with it while he tried to set up a lawn chair for granny.

and there was a shivvering woman who wore odd pants that were slit up the sides and laced together like leg-shoes. the other person is an old man who stepped out of a restaurant as the shriners drove by in their tin lizzies, then went back inside where it was warm. (smarter than he looks- or at least smarter than me!)


The rest of these sketches are just pages from the sketchbook i most recently filled up. there are drawing from church, and wherever else I happened to carry a pencil and pad.
I drew this in an attempt to gross out a sibling who was watching over my shoulder as the picture took shape. GAG! what a shape!


Below is an odd mix of sketches that shows the abstract way my mind wanders while I scribble.











And these are some sketches I did after This Post got me thinking about Bigfoot, and wondering "what if Big Foot was actually a giant foot?"


Then i thought of that stupid penguin movie...

and sharing the space is a less-than-jolly old elf.

patterns

on a 4-5 hour road trip to New York, one must keep one's mind occupied or sleep. I chose the former for once, and instead of the usual cartoon doodles or sketches, i decided to bend my brain in a different direction. see how many levels of complexity are derived from this mass of triangles. if you're color-blind, there are probably not as many patterns in this design as the rest of us see. If i had a larger paper, I might have continued the pattern that began here, which would have resulted in even more complex patterns all interwoven...but we got to our destination before I went completely mad.

creature