On the Pole

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     Pole worker and friend. 

     Happy New Years Eve everybody! Have fun and pretend like your steering wheel is covered in slimy bacteria that infect you with a deadly contagious disease if you touch it. You'll DIE if you touch it.   But it only appears on your steering wheel on New Year's Eve. It's magic, you see. 

Down To The Minimum

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     By backpacking standards, it seemed like a lot. But by the standards of, "I live in America, and this is everything I own", it really wasn't much. 

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The View From Here

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Caveman

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Twas the day before Christmas and it's raining! But that's okay. It feels more like winter now. 

I'm busy with "elf stuff" for my kids, but luckily we aren't going anywhere or seeing anyone. All of the social commitments are done. Now it's all about relaxing and working on a freelance storyboard that I picked up from a guy I know. 

I don't mind working over the holidays if I *choose* to work over the holidays. And this freelance job will pay for our solar panels, which we've been wanting to put on our roof for a few years now. They aren't cheap, but once they're in, it's a whole lot of free power, when the sun shines (which is pretty much all of the time, here in Southern California). 

It's free energy if you can afford it. Which is kind of…yep. In this world you really don't need rooftop panels that are powered by the sun. What you really need are rooftop panels that are powered by irony. 

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Cello

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Today is the last school day / work day of the year.

Whew...we made it.

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Yarn

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Recline

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Ta-dah!

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Tailor

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Crazy Christmas season rolls right along. 

Today I've got to post all of this stuff, then do my usual 16 mile bike ride, 

But then after I shower off in the gym, I've got to build a couple of animatics for a crew pitch (crew pitches are the "big" ones), pitch the show -which is a 22 minute episode with three different breaks for quicktime movies [gasp], 

Go to the party/gift exchange/potluck (crap! I still haven't got a potluck thing…maybe I'll run over to Trader Joes at lunch). 

Then at 5:00 things will slow down with a bit of star watching with the astronomy club of Santa Clarita (not that I have to haul myself up there…they'll be down in the Disney parking lot so I can just walk over).

Then down to Little Tokyo for the "Black Christmas" art show (where I have an original piece up on the wall). It's at Q-Pop, if you're local and want to see it. I'll probably meet my older girls down there. They love those art openings with all the creative folks. And we usually grab some sushi first. 

Hopefully I won't fall asleep into my sushi. I think that's bad manners. 

And all the while I'm going to have a song by The Weakerthans in my head. "Aside". I cannot get it to stop playing in my mind. Crazy. 

Gotta run! 

Bye! 

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Igloo Town

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    Today is 12-12-12. Even in jolly old England (where they switch around the month and day). Had I known this ahead of time I might have done a piece with a "dozens" theme (I'm thinking crates of eggs). But- I didn't realize until it was too late. 

     In 2022, please remind the 55 year-old me to do a piece on February 22nd that actually matches the day (it will be 2-22-22 on that day…at least in America). 

     In other news: Chistmas rush + deadline rush(es) make me crazy. 

     And yesterday I went to a graveside memorial service for my first boss at my first animation industry job. He was 49. Cancer. 

     Reminds me to live every day to it's fullest, and to take care of myself. There are rewards for such behaviors. 

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Bang!

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The purpose of a warrior is to fight. The duty of a warrior is to be ready to fight. The reality of a warrior is to constantly train for a fight. 

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Happy Children Cookie Company

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My piece for upcoming group show at Q -Pop: Black X-Mas Christmas Party / Horror Art Show, Dec 14 (not tonight, but NEXT Friday)

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(Q-Pop is in downtown Los Angeles in the Little Tokyo district, for all you local folks).

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Thumbnail Cat

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That little cat on the bottom was all about me exploring how small I could go and still have a pen and ink drawing hold up. It's scanned against a scrap piece of blue jean denim twill for scale. The actual cat can hide easily under my thumb. 

Tomorrow I'm going to go the other extreme and post a really big piece that may not work in this digital realm (too many details that are spread out too far). But we'll see. 

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King Sneakers

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Smaller

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I get busier and the daily drawings get smaller. And a little less frequent. 

But they still happen. 

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Twice As Fast

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When you're pressed for time, sometimes the right tool makes all the difference. 

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Helo Lift

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Silver Cat Food

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     "My daddy was poor and uneducated, but he worked hard. We all did. He would wash dishes, sweep floors, we'd ALL pick cotton,  and occasionally put my sister and me out on the street to sing hymns about the sweet baby Jesus. We were just scruffy moppets, but we must have looked pretty cute, because we always made some money."

*

     I mostly use high quality acid-free paper for this stuff, but this idea came to me at work, and I grabbed a sheet of yellow notecard stock to doodle out the rough idea. But then I figured I'd never achieve that loose, casual layout ever again, so I laid the ink and white highlights right on top of it. 

     That cheap notecard stock is probably 100% acid-treated wood pulp, and in 100 years it'll turn to dust. But it lives for now, and if I get it professionally shot, the digital version could live forever, maybe. 

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Upper Hill Street

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     Chinese Dragons!

     I think I've discovered a new artistic trope! Chinese dragons are super fun to draw, as it turns out. There is no way that this will be my last one. 

     :)

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Tight Bolt

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Some bolts are on the loose, some are tightly wrapped. 

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Unit Responding

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     My cats (in today's drawing) are in a more playful mood this morning. But their artist creator is worried about the big job that was offered to him. Many costs and benefits to consider, as well as the considerations of whether I really want to push myself so hard at this busy time of year. With so many irons in the fire and so many obligations, I'm not sure how much margin of error I would have (one small cold or another bad spill on my bike and I could really be in the soup). On the other hand, a little extra cash would give me more room to maneuver and allow me the ability to expand in other areas. 

     I just have to pull on my chin and wrestle it out with myself over the next few days.

     By Monday, I'll have decided which way to go. 

From Me to You

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     Daddy said that it was a sad song. 

     When I was a kid, it didn't seem sad, it just seemed like a song. That's because I hadn't really made any mistakes yet, and I didn't have any regrets. 

     But when I hear it today...

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Bruised Fruit

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     This one was doodled out very small on a scrap of paper that was left over from the piece, "Mountain Road" that I did a few months ago. I had to test out the little wavy brush technique that I used on that piece, and my little "test paper" was still knocking about on my messy desk. So with a bit of doodling, it became -this! 

     In real life, it's so small that it almost falls apart at computer resolution, but I kind of like the crunchy lines and super looseness of it. Gives it some character, especially these days, when there is far too much slick, smooth, perfect-lines-upon-bad-technique art that is out there in the internet galleries.

     As a person, I don't like to stand out in my appearance or behavior. ("Be invisible. Try not to appear in the mirror")  But I like it when my art stands out. 

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On, In, and Under

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     Aha! Here is my "new" way of looking at ships and water themes. Were you tired of looking at my little seascapes with a few sailing yachts, a few fishes, and a few oddball elements? Yep, me too. There are all kinds of ways to show ships and yachts and people out on the water. 

   Like say, this one: The cutaway! Oooh, such a fine way to show the goodies within. Did you want to know what was going on inside of the ship? Well, now you can. 

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Grub Cycle

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     I pictured this fellow being a Mealworm at first, and I had the not-very bright idea of calling it "Mealworm on a Bike"  but then I realized the [totally AWEsome!] pun of the life cycle of insects…pupae, grub, adult, etc. And since he's riding a bicycle…"cycle". Yeahza! So be careful with this one. It's got so much funny Pun Power that it should be kept out of the hands of children, really. 

     (I am such a goob). 

     I think this will post much bigger than the actual drawing, which is very small. The original is almost Post-it note sized. It's another ink doodle on neutral grey Canson paper with Cel Vinyl highlights. 

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Bike Movie

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    It looked real, when it finally showed up on the silver screen. But it most definitely was NOT real while we were doing it. Nor was it easy. 

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The Littlest Dip

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    Lulu was the littlest dip working the Blue Line. At 17 years of age she looked 12, and she was quick. She was never felt by her mark, but she was occasionally seen by a bystander. On these occasions, she usually started yelling really loud about how the pervy man was trying to touch her and that he should "LEAVE ME ALONE!" People always came to her defense. 

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     I recently "liked" Chris Sanders, and now a lot of his drawings come into my Facebook feed. He was one of the creators of Lilo and Stitch and you can see their DNA in most of his awesome AWESOME drawings. Wow, what a draftsman.

     Anyway, this is me trying to draw a "Chris Sanders" girl. It looked like so much fun that I had to give it a go. So I drew her with giant slanted eyes placed on the side of her head. Fun experiment for me, even though I don't really have the life drawing chops to pull it off. It still made me smile to try something new. 

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Star Lighter

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     In anticipation of this crazy busy week, I had a crazy busy weekend getting all of this week's daily drawings done. But now the pitch date for our show has been pushed back a bit, and our show might have enough "story meat" within it for the Great Powers to extend it from an 11 minute show to a 22 minute show -which would be FUN! …and it would also give us more time. Usually we story artists are in a mad dash to cram a whole lot of story into an 11 minute format, but now the story might actually have some room to breathe. And so might we. 

     I've been breaking in my new bike for the last two months and on Monday I broke it in a different kind of way by getting the front tire caught in an old abandoned railroad track and involuntarily launching myself up over the handlebars and onto the soft concrete below. Oof! 

     I was fine, all thanks to AWAH (Always Wear A Helmet), but coming down hard upon my shoulder [and head] has made me a bit tender this week. And It broke my really cool side mirror, so I haven't put myself out with the traffic very much since then. I'm not good at turning my head to quickly glance over my shoulder and at the same time keeping a dead straight line. I want to though, and I think I will get a new mirror at lunch time. 

*     *     O     B     A     M     A     *     *

     And, there was an election last night. 

     I don't usually type about politics (no postings, no online soap boxing). I'm not good at it, and if I can't be good at it, I don't want to put it out in front of people. I wish I was as funny as Gail Collins of the New York Times. She's about the only one who is funny and still makes interesting points. But I don't have her talent. When I try to type about politics, I tend to sound just as shrill, self-righteous and boring as everybody else out there. And there are already WAY too many of everybody else out there. 

     So let me just say that the guy I voted for won a second presidential term. And I was happy about that. But some of the California ballot initiatives that I voted for got creamed, and that made me sad (But the public school measure passed! Yay!). So a mixed bag. 

     For the next four years, I will be watching the Republican party with some fascination. My own opinion is that they have gone too far to the right to be an effective party that wins elections. But I have a hunch that a lot of their core supporters will come to the opposite conclusion: that they didn't go nearly far enough to the right and they need to purify the message and purge the party of any (remaining) moderates. Which would be really interesting to observe from afar.  

Bomb Bay Days

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The cats had just HAD it with these alien base camps. It was time to strike back. 

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Rendezvous

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When the week gets busier, the pieces get smaller. 

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Frenemies

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     Her daddy had taught her this much: Few agreements were ever held up as a "deal". And in a court of law, no agreement on earth would ever hold up as a contract. 

     So why not?

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Pursuit

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The front "Identification" page for my teeny Moleskine book. 

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Baseball and Billionaires

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     Too many drawings of seascapes, waves and boats? And coming a little too quickly one after another? Probably. 

     I try not to become one of those artists who draws the same thing, just a teensy bit different, all of the time. The world is full of interesting things to draw besides boats and oceans. 

     Right? 

     I'm sending a message to myself: No more seascapes, waves or boats. Let's see if I'm smart enough to get the message. Or if I'm smart enough to re-visit them in a new and really unique way. 

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With These Teeth

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     The shuttle passed through the streets of Los Angeles a few weeks ago. I didn't go out to see it, but thousands of people did. It turned into a kind of festival/street party. It really meant something to people, and I was kind of stunned at their response. But I wasn't unhappy about it. How could I be?

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Hand Crank

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     Oh my busy life. When will you give me some time to do art? [or, looked at another way: "When will I stop piling so many things onto my schedule?"]. 

     At any rate, this is my "little" sketchbook. It's a Moleskine sketchbook with the thick paper, but it's the little 6-inch one that I sometimes carry inside my jacket, with an abbreviated pencil case that is almost as small. My theory here is that if I have a smaller sketchbook, I will do smaller and simpler drawings. And thus, save time.

     Last week I got into trouble making a couple of really huge, ornate, 100-miles-of-linework type of drawings, and then I was struggling to come up with some little spot drawings for the rest of the week. Don't get me wrong- I LOVED those fancier pieces! But they were for a high school kid, or a retired person, or somebody who is independently wealthy and has a lot of time on his hands. Not for dad with a full time job and a house to take care of. Or maybe I just need to get the smaller spot drawings done first? Then I won't feel the heat when I want to do something elaborate…I would be able to stretch it over two or three days. 

     Maybe that's next week's experiment. In the meantime: Little sketchbook experiment. 

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Dirigible

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      My smart, funny, talented work friends all have Twitter accounts that they take seriously. At their urging, I started posting these pictures on my neglected Twitter account too. We'll see if Twitter works out for me.  I don't think I have the dashing wit to jump upon news events and pop culture memes with an instant funny quip. But I can post a daily drawing with a simple period in the "text" space. That's what I do on Facebook. 

     It that the kind of thing that attracts "followers"? I guess we'll find out. 

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Texting While Waiting

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     Can you create a piece of art when you're tired? How about when you're *dead* tired? 

     Turns out you can. 

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On Our Way

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     This one didn't *seem* like a lot of line work when I started it. But my hand was really sore the next day (I inked this one in right after the ink dried on my In a Row piece). Lots of noodle work, but it was fun and I was smiling the entire time. 

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Southpaw

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    Sketchy sketch. Complete with the "Canson" imprint in the paper and the pencil underdrawing. Sometimes less is more. 

     Sometimes. 

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In a Row

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     Olden days classroom with a bunch of props. Not quite sure how many visual classrooms influenced this…there have been so many visual representations of classrooms in my life. But a few: Schoolhouse Rock, Our Gang (Little Rascals), The Little House on the Prairie TV show, and an old black and white photograph of my mom's classroom from around 1950, where are the kids were sitting at their desks. There's also an Old Spaghetti Factory restaurant near us, it's built in the old Duarte school administration building. It's decorated with photographs of the kids from the early part of the century. 

     When I was a teenager, I also spent a few summers working for the Portland Public Schools, and there were still a few surviving schools from WAY back. They always had a certain look to them. Usually they were Italianate or Beaux Arts buildings with lots of wood and giant double hung windows. They couldn't be built today, because of safety codes and cost (lots of fiddley hand work by skilled craftsmen…who were once common and their services didn't cost too much). But they always took my breath away. Sooo charming on the inside. 

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Flood of Nostalgia

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     I don't go to the well of nostalgic pop culture very often. But when I do, I stop and take a good long drink. 

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Bell

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     Whee! Cartoons are cartoons. This is the impression of how ringing a bell looks and feels. 

     I started making another one of these, an earlier version, and it had all of the physics correct, with all of the mechanicals of the little swinging yoke thingy, and with all the pulleys and mechanicals protected under the roof of the tower, etc. But it looked WAY too busy, and by the time I was starting to ink it in, you almost couldn't tell that there was a bell under all that visual noise. 

     So I tossed it aside. It was a drawing for an engineer or maybe it was a detailed construction plan for somebody building an actual bell tower. But the one thing that it was NOT was a cartoon drawing that was a clear read upon the first glance. 

     After a break, I came back to it with the idea that I would strip it down to it's barest essentials: Bell, Tower, Ringing mechanism (simple!), and a cartoon guy straining against the weight and sound of the thing. That's it! That's all it needed. 

     Yay. 

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Morse

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     "And then, just when we thought we'd never be able to pinpoint the location of the monster, we started receiving broadcasts from civilian radio operators who had visual contact"

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Wave

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     Ah, look at that. The two nice things about these vertical images is that 

     1) On my blog, I can post them as EXTRA LARGE. So that the vertical edges stretch almost all the way over to sides of the blog page. 

     2) The vertical format takes up alms the entire screen of my iPhone so there aren't big blocks of black on the top and bottom, and a small-ish image in between. So if I'm handing my phone to somebody ("I do this type of art") it represents well on the screen. 

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     I know I could just turn my Moleskine book sideways, and suddenly do a long horizontal format. But eventually I want to make short little YouTube videos of my hands flipping through the pages of my sketchbook, like the ones that I've seen, and I always kind of find it jarring when suddenly there's an image that you have to bend your head to look at. 

     These are individual works of art, but they are also a book. I find it jarring in regular books too, when the printer goofs up and there is a page in the book that is upside down, or sideways or out of order or something. It looks sloppy and careless. 

     So, I gave myself that limitation. No images included that you have to tilt the book (or screen) to see it's horizontal layout. 

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     I can think of an exception: If I did an entire book in the Horizontal format. That would be okay. So that the viewer could turn the book once, at the very beginning and flip through it from bottom to top for the entire book. Or the camera could be set up once that way and not have to turn. That would be more respectful to the viewer, I think. 

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