Used Car

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Used car salesman! 

Mine was a great guy. Balding, pudgy, thick sausage fingers with big rings to match. Claaaaa-seee! 

But the car was beautiful, if completely unreliable. 

It was a 1980 Fiat Spyder 2000. Rootbeer brown metallic paint, mag wheels, the whole bit. I think I have a picture of it around here somewhere. 

When it ran, it was the most beautiful thing on earth. 

Alas, it was a Fiat, so it spent an awful lot of time being "not beautiful". 

Let's see if I can find that picture. 

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Oh yes, here it is. Such a handsome young man. A man with a big "eff you" if you don't like my birkenstocks and Patagonia rock climbing pants (notice the double knees). 

This picture was the late spring of 1987, which would have made me almost 20 years old. 

Just a kid. 

To The Rescue!

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I drew this while sitting at lunch with some friends of mine. Or, at least I started it there. 

Rude?

Maybe. I was listening and talking to them, as well. It wasn't like I completely checked out by putting my iPhone's earbuds into my ears. But I know that some people might take offense at my need to cram as much drawing into my day as humanly possible. 

Growing up, I was that "drawing kid". I was always doodling in class (my good lord, how school bored me to death). Some teachers really got offended by it. But the time I got to high school, the teachers liked anything that would keep the students quiet and still. 

And if the subject was interesting, I heard it all and took every single word into my heart.

* 

This is, by almost all education research, exactly the wrong way to go about it. You're supposed to do one thing with 100% concentration. But I've always drawn while listening to the radio, or class lectures, or books on tape, or something. Even the animation studios that are well aware of this fact turn out to be deafeningly loud and distracting places to work. 

This is good if you're trying to stuff your drawing time into all the little unused corners of your busy life. Balancing your sketchbook while hurtling down the tracks at 70 miles per hour? Not a problem. 

But if I suddenly found myself in a quiet meadow, and tried to draw? 

That would totally freak me out. I wouldn't be able to stop looking around, trying to spot the monsters that were sneaking up on me. 

North Fork

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In Oregon, where I grew up, there were big beautiful snow capped mountains.

My maternal grandparents had a cabin up on the upper North Fork of the McKenzie river. Beautiful place. Down the road there were filbert (hazelnut) orchards. It was the typical Oregon drizzle most of the year. But in the summer it was so beautiful it would just blow your mind. 

I was thinking about that area, as I was drawing this. Cabins, mountains, and rows of crops. 

The Kitchen Crowd

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When I was a kid in the 70's, there were some Mad magazine illustrations where one of the artists had declared war on white space, and they crammed every inch of territory with eye candy. They didn't really have "layouts" or design, but they were fun to look at. 

They were also, one can assume, fun to draw. Little idea firecrackers going off in the artist's head: "Oh, here's some space! And I've got an idea of what to put here! And here! And here!"

Silly, but fun. 

*

And here I am playing with my food again. Seems to be a theme (or maybe it's a meme) this week.

Omlette

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I like to draw things that I don't actually like to "do". 

I am not a foodie. Cooking bores me to tears. I'm not really into eating either. Or drinking fancy liquids (gormet coffee, fine wine, single malt scotch, or craft beer). 

I'm pretty much the recognizable offspring of people who drank Folgers coffee, and drank Blitz beer out of stubby 12 oz bottles. Mom and dad didn't live fancy and they didn't eat or drink fancy either. 

And their kid is pretty much the same way. 

[Although they did produce a kid who draws all of the time. In that way I'm pretty different from my mom and dad.] 

:)

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Horn Worms

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It's good to learn to relax. 

Once upon a time, I would have recoiled at the thought of posting a drawing like this- where the bottom of the horn is crammed out to the very lower edge of the paper. Or perhaps I would have Photoshopped a bunch of digital paper down there, to center the drawing more. 

But now, whatever. 

It's just a sketch in the sketchbook. It's as big as it is. 

Air Cooled

My director at work, Rob,  has a sketchbook that he wants all of us to draw in as a keepsake for his time at Phineas and Ferb. Not that he's leaving ( I don't think so, at any rate). 

For some reason I seemed to revert to my misspent youth, and all the thousands of hours I spent drawing "cool cars", and Rat Fink type monster creatures. Which, as it turns out, are still really fun to draw.

Rob had the good sense to select some nice neutral brown paper for his sketchbook, which I'm used to. And these days I usually have my little "travel kit" of art supplies with me, since I tend to create art on the train and in Union Station.  

*

In other news, I went surfing this weekend. My older twin girls and I took a surfing lesson. They took one spill and they were pretty much done with it. But they loved the wetsuits, and the ability to stay cozy warm in the ocean. 

I liked the wetsuits too, and I probably would get better at surfing itself if I had a place to do it all the time (alas, we live pretty far inland). As it was, I was pretty humbled, and the ocean beat me up pretty bad. Which was still wildly fun. 

I might get myself a wetsuit and a cheap surfboard and practice getting out beyond the breakers. The thing that looks like the most fun for an old guy like me is sitting on a board out in the ocean, and not actually trying to catch waves for a thrill ride.

To my eyes, it just looks so peaceful. 

Love Birds

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My daughters tell me that I need to start writing actual words on my blog. And even though this sounds like even more work, I know that they're right. So from now on I'm going to try to write little blurbs about these drawings.

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This one I started a few nights ago, about 9:00pm on the kitchen table. My youngest daughter "wanted to draw something with me". She knew that daddy was too tired to do much else, and that daddy just wanted to go to bed, but there was one activity that she could get me to do :)

I finished it up early yesterday morning at a kind of "lunch table" down at the Los Angeles Union Station. As it was early (around 6:30), the tables still had the "bike lock" cables that kept people from stealing the chairs, but I sat down anyway and got out my painting stuff. There is a fountain there, which is a handy place to obtain a little rinse-out water for my brushes. 

I picked a spot off in the corner where fewer people would wander over to strike up a conversation. I love working in the hustle and bustle of a crowded place, but I don't like people coming up and disrupting me with their brain teasers ("How did your inner mind learn how to draw like that?  My daughter is a good drawer too, she lives in San Antonio, do you know her? How long does that take if you stand on your head? What part of the bible do you get your ideas from? How do they make corn silk paper?" People are very strange).

Pretty soon the janitor lady started to make a big show about unlocking all of the chairs and tables. So I moved to the side to give her room. "Am I in your way?". She gave me a tight grin and went about her business. No english for this one, but I figured that I probably was. So I gathered up my stuff and made my way to the #4 platform. 

I also did my instinctive reach for my phone to see what was on offer (the default setting of every strap hanger: "What's on my phone?"). And, on Facebook there was a personal message from my boss, Dan Povenmire: "Good morning Bernie. You are now an Emmy nominated writer". And an attached link to the emmy site. 

Cool. 

Morning Cup

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Mr. Spillah de Ink

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Time For Kind

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Top Hat That

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Another Moleskine

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Island Empire

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Eggs and Breakouts

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Cat Hat

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Cat Eyes

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Tube Bah

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Drill Surprise

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Frog King & Friends

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I Saw Your Greeting

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