The Clock Strikes Heavy

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     Super duper clock hauling service, at your service.

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     Hello from the land of rain and thunderstorms. YES! Thunderstorms and rain. This is a rare thing in Los Angeles, but it does happen every few years or so. We love it in these parts. Rainbows, the smell of fresh rain, the washing of the dust from all surfaces and the elimination of summer smog…at least for a while. 

     Los Angeles has three beautiful seasons and one awful one: Summer. It sucks. But this rain makes it beautiful and clean smelling, at least for a little while. 

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Round and Round

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     This is another drawing that was "born on the train" somewhere between downtown LA and the Burbank station.

     On these trains, I am going against the flow of commuter traffic, and I can always get a "table seat" to draw on. If I was going the other direction I probably wouldn't, as those trains are PACKED and it's very nearly standing room only. 

     Mind you, I don't try to get out my dip pens on the train. The ink would go flying all over everything if I tried that. But the pencil sketch underneath it all, the main IDEA of the thing…that I can do on the train. 

     [Do you see the pencil sketch underneath it all? No. Because it all gets erased after I lay down the initial layer of thin ink outline. That is the simple secret behind all great pen-and-ink drawings, if you didn't know. It looks like the pen and ink artist was a pure genius who committed to a perfect ink line right from the start. But there is all kinds of mistakes, corrections, re-dos, frustrations and overworking that is done at the pencil stage. The commitment to ink comes later.]

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By Air and Sea

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     My daughter and I went to the beach on Saturday. It was late in the afternoon when we got the idea, and that usually means a big traffic jam (and no parking) if we try to go to Santa Monica. 

     So I headed for El Segundo, and the beaches right at the end of the LAX runway. For some reason, these beaches aren't as popular…probably because people aren't wild about the giant aircraft taking off right over their heads. 

     But while I wouldn't want this to be my ONLY beach, it was fun this one time (and I was right about the traffic and parking!). Those big planes were kind of awe inspiring, and gave me good ideas for drawing. 

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Bug Convo

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     A glorious morning here in LA. It's supposed to be 100 degrees today. Am I nuts for walking to work? 

     Prolly. 

     I might wear my "walk home" shorts-and-shirt as a "walk to work, also" shorts-and-shirt. Something to sweat into before I change into my work clothes.

     A great perk of working at Disney TVA is the fact that they have a gym/locker room right there on site. The gym I don't care about, but the locker room is great! A place to change clothes that's not a bathroom stall. In a hot place like this, it's good to have a place to change into (or out of) your work clothes. 

     Most days I wear a clean shirt and jeans around the office, and then change into a pair of dork shorts and a floppy sun hat for the mile-and-a-half walk back to the train station. It is blazing hot usually, with a hot sunny stucco wall right at the edge of the hot sunny sidewalk- and NO shade.

     It's not unbearable if you have shorts and a sun hat, but it's not the sort of thing that I like to wear around the office. 

Trains and Daydreams

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     A whole tossed salad of doodle. I don't really know if this all hangs together as a group, but a lot of the little pieces are kind of fun…and it kept me occupied on the train as I rode to work.

     It's a Moleskine sketchbook, it's not supposed to be about finished art, it's supposed to be the development of ideas, right? 

     Enjoy. 

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Row Boaty

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     Yesterday was a Big Start. 

     My three daughters went off to their first day of school and I went back to work. 

     The verdict on school? "Awesome". My older twins went off to start their Junior year of High school (grade 11) and my younger daughter started fifth grade. All three got a bunch of teachers that are really young and enthusiastic, unlike last year (when they had the kinds of teachers of whom it is said: "They should have retired YEARS ago")

     And my work was good. I love my job (it's kind of a dream job), so it's pretty easy to sit down and fall in love with it all over again. I'm a lucky boy, even if I don't live in a place that's as pretty as my home state (Oregon). 

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Desert Treasure

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     "I can't wait to see their faces when I get back to the reef. They all said it couldn't be done. Bastards! They should know by now that they should never underestimate me, or raw determination to get the things that I want."

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Summers End

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I'm back at my own kitchen table again. Back from a wonderful fun time with my parents and sister at Sunriver Oregon. 

I did this one sitting on the Western bank of the Deschutes river, early in the morning as the sun was coming up. I found a sunny spot on a log (it's COLD there, in the mornings) and set myself to work. 

I heard some people walking by, which didn't really startle me since they weren't exactly walking quietly. But when they were right next to me they turned out not to be people at all but three mule deer, including a late summer fawn that was just starting to lose it's spots. 

One of them paused and looked at me (or maybe at my drawing). Then they all continued walking off to do whatever it is that deer do out there. 

Needless to say, on the Los Angeles trains and public-space benches where I do most of my drawing, there aren't a whole lot of deer strolling around in front of me. 

Summer Winter

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Vacation's end. 

I'm about to hop in the car and make the drive to LA. Woo-hoo!

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Downriver

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Another vacation piece in my Moleskine inspired by my recent runs on the Deschutes river. 

...and maybe a little bit of Moonrise Kingdom. 

Playing for Souls

Another from my beautiful vacation in Sun River Oregon. 

*

Yesterday, at five in the afternoon,  I borrowed my dad's kayak, and made a run down the Deschutes river. On the local maps it shows the "put in" spot, off to the left. then the river wanders around the top of the map and then goes off to the right and off the map entirely. There's just an arrow at the end of the map that says "Road to canoe take-out, 1 Mile". 

So whee! In the diminishing light, on an river I don't know, I went off the map in search of the canoe take-out point. Mind you, the vacation houses stop appearing along the riverbank here, and there were no visible roads, and no other people on the river. For a while I thought I had missed it, and doubled back to a place that seemed like it was maybe the point. That's when I really noticed and appreciated the fact that the river no longer looked and ran like a big lake. It had narrowed, and was running a LOT faster. gaining ground against the river was hard in this current. 

I eventually got to this potential pull-out site, pulled the kayak ashore, and started to wonder what kind of cold, mosquito-ravaged night I was going to spend out here in the pucker brush. When finally (duh!) it occurred to me to check my GPS map location on my iPhone. 

Ah. 

Here I was as clear as day. I still had about a half a mile to go to the point where the road stretched out to the river. Clearly the take out point. Excellent! 

So I hopped back in the kayak, and made a quick run down back down to the spot.  

A bunch of people could be seen on the bank once you made the final turn (even though they were little dots). "One of those little dots is my dad", I thought. 

That's when I was suddenly startled by the iPhone ringing in my life vest (very quiet out there on the river). 

It was my dad. "I think I see you." says he. 

"Yep, I see you too." says I. 

Annnnd…here I am the next morning, safe and sound. Though I did get a bit of a talk from my wife about the state of my sanity. "Going out alone on a kayak in a place that you don't know? When it's late in the day and about to get dark? That is slightly crazy, and something I would never do." she said. 

And she's right, of course. It's much more sane to sit in the vacation house and play monopoly. 

BUT-- I got to plunge out into the wild country to see things that I had never seen before. And in the undeveloped parts, when I was alone on the river,  I could pretend that I was Lewis & Clark, and that I was the first person from Western Civilization that had seen it. I slid silently through the world, with beautiful lava formations that came down to the water, towering Ponderosa pines, fish jumping all around me. 

It was a little bit out of my comfort zone, but it was AWESOME. 

Venice Beach

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I roughed this out a few…weeks?…ago. 

It's tiny, but I made it that size so that it would fit in a small hole in my sketchbook. 

The paper is kind of weird. It doesn't absorb any kind of moisture, yet the inks and washes don't "ball up" like it would on something nonabsorbent like plastic. 

I kind of like it, it gives a real strange quality to the inks and washes. Especially the whites. 

Square-ish

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Another post from the road. 

We drove up to Sun River (Oregon) from Redding yesterday. Nice drive, if a little on the hot side.

it was about three or four hours of mostly pin-straight highways through low ponderosa pine trees. 

But now we're here at the big rental house (sleeps ten!) and it's fantastic. All of the cousins are together and having a wonderful time. Foosball and DVDs have been the activities so far, but there is an awful lot of other stuff to do around here…far more than we could possible stuff into the next seven days. 

And though it was hot yesterday it is BRRRRRR! this morning. A bunch of us woke up in the middle of the night freezing in our beds. I guess the temperature swings are pretty extreme around here. 

Small bugs in the vacation ointment. But mostly it's really awesome. 

  

Space Wine

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First posting from the road!

Hotel room, Redding California. 

Air conditioning!

We drove up from LA yesterday, and around noon it was 95 degrees (F) in the central valley. Hot, but I knew that it was only temporary, and that the temperature would be different in Redding. It was. In Redding it was 111. 

Sunrise

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Uploading from my laptop today because…

I'm on vacation!

Actually, I'm sitting here at my kitchen table, with a cup of coffee. (Peter, Paul and Mary style: "oh my bags are packed, I'm ready to go..."). But this setup is the same one that I'm going to use "from the road". WiFi uploads, laptops, and a big bulky scanner that's almost as big as my laptop/art supplies backpack.

The scanner situation could be improved upon, but the rest of it (if it works), could be a great little travel kit. 

It allows me to dream of a day when I travel the world, uploading my art as I go, maybe with a MacBook air and really svelte scanner (or maybe a high-def camera?…that's part of my cellphone?).

Nothing good in my life has ever happened without my dreaming about it first ("Wouldn't it be cool if…?). So this will be my current dream during the trip: Travel + make art at the same time.  

I have a dream job at the mo, but that would be an even dreamier job. 

Dreams become goals that become realities if you're willing to put in the work. 

Remember that. 

Street Scene

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Nice cropping LOSER!

I posted the right side of this drawing on Facebook yesterday, but I didn't post here. 

I took a picture of the right side with my iPhone. It is a cool drawing in it's own right, and THAT is what I posted on FB. A blurry iPhone picture taken in bad light. Yuck. 

I drew the left side today, and I scanned them both together for this one mega-cool spread. 

So I'm still doing, and posting a drawing every weekday. But this one is a combo of two, because of the funny circumstances of upgrading my OSX to Mountain Lion 10.8 and scrambling all of my scanner/Photoshop settings. 

I'm also up against a deadline at work and I'm about to go on vacation.

TOO MUCH DO DO! 

I'm a mess. 

[But I draw a lot]

Broomship One

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Wheee! Kitty cats in space. 

It's the kitty cat way to start your day, in the merry merry month of May...

(sorry, I'm in a rush and I'm having a hard time forming a coherent thought upon the page...)

[Memorandum to myself:  Must. Try. Harder. ]

Artificial Light

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Not too long ago I would have been put off by the lumpy, hand-drawn night sky. I would have wanted to go into Photoshop and smoooooth it all out in some kind of mad desire to make things all slick and perfect. 

Now that seems to me like complete nonsense, and I'm so glad that it's all lumpy and obviously hand drawn and scanned in. 

Much more comfortable with the warts and flaws in my work and in (and on) myself. 

That and the fact that I'd rather make a new drawing than make an existing drawing "perrrrrrfect".

[also, on a purely practical level, where would I ever find the time?]

Bad Habit Cat

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I don't smoke, myself. In real life it's a gross, disgusting habit. Expensive too. 

But visually, for an artist like me, The act of smoking is beautiful. 

Cartoon characters should always smoke, ride motorcycles (without helmets), and climb around the outsides of their cars while they are zipping down the road. 

Not because it's what we humans should do, but because -in a drawing- it's fun to look at. 

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Nervous Balloon

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Some people are just absolutely bad for you. Period. 

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Donut Kitty

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Donut Kitty. 

This is a very tiny piece. It would fit neatly upon any post-it note. 

A doodle really. While my mind was out wandering around. I'm kind of up against a tight deadline, and I'm behind, so this was about the best I could do tonight. 

No wait, one should never say such things. Please allow me to start over: 

Pure genius! That's what this is! Once again, Bernie hits it clear out of the park! And the fans go WILD! That cheering is so loud that blood will pour from the deafened ears of women and small children. 

The Glory! 

The Horror!

Turned Out Okay

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Oh, predictable boredom, why do you-

Oh my god! I'm totally gonna die! 

OH!

Oh...maybe I'm not gonna die. 

Oh well.