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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Down Below

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     Hi. I'm in a hurry and kind of late for work so...have a picture! It's on me, brother.

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S.A.E.

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     Paul loved old American cars, and what they stood for. If other people wanted to keep a set of metric wrenches in the toolbox, that was okay. For them. But not for Paul. It was the principle of the thing. 

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Mountain Road

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     Janet and Bob had a strange feeling as they went through the tunnel. It wasn't just dark, it was ice cold. There seemed to be a dull sound like a wind or a distant roar. Worst of all, their thoughts kept being interrupted by sudden visions of extreme violence and despair. 

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The Dry Season

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     Riding a bike around town, you see a lot of happy things that you didn't used to see. You also see a lot of sad things that are hidden just slightly out of view of the passing cars. 

     It turns out that there are a lot of homeless camps in Los Angeles, though they do their best to keep hidden (they don't really build tree houses and wave at the passing cyclists). On a bike, you are down there at street level. You see, hear, and smell absolutely everything. It's magically uplifting and hauntingly depressing at the same time. 

     I guess that's just a good description of all mankind, really. 

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Float

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If I get out early enough, I can float my monster without everybody looking at me. 

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Volantes Libro

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These things will take you places. 

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Conquistador

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     There are some things about this one that I would love to do over.

      How often do I post something that is full of flaws and that I want to do over again? Only EVERY SINGLE TIME! Ha ha ha.

     But then I remember: These are sketches, not finished pieces. That's why they call it a sketchbook. 

     And at any rate, there will be plenty of time later to go in an fix the parts that need fixing. And at this point in my life, I do actually know what needs fixing, which is something to celebrate. Even better, I have the skills to fix it. This is a good thing.

     (The 16 year old version of myself loved to draw, but when he botched a drawing he didn't have any clue about what had gone so wrong, and wouldn't have been able to do anything about it if he did!)

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Whirlpool

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     More silliness with ships, planes, cars, boats and submarines. All stuff that's fun to draw and usually looks pretty good. 

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     This is my crunch week at work. The week before the crew pitch. I can pitch pretty smoothly (getting up in front of a room full of people and "talking through" the show. It's a form of public speaking which has been known to unnerve a lot of people). But the week leading up to it always kind of stresses me out. Lots to draw, lots to puzzle out, lots of notes to address. It's where we really earn our money.

     That's why I try to have a bunch of these daily drawings done, scanned, and ready to go. One less thing I have to fret over. 

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Ball Cat

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Too skinny with the legs? 

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Bike Freeway

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    Two things about this one:

     #1) I got a new bike recently. I LOVE it, and I ride it everywhere, so I'm kind of bike obsessed at the moment. It shows up in my drawings. 

     #2) It has been scaldingly hot out recently. Triple digits, which always plays havoc with the "brown" part of my black-and-brown ink. It partially dries out while I'm working with it, then I add water and it gets a little less like gooey tar. This happens several times. 

     But on the drawing too, it lays there kind of gooey and "never quite dry". And a smart boy would remember to stick a piece of blotter paper between the sheets before he closed his Moleskine book and clamped it shut with a bunch of spring clips*. But in this case I didn't, and the gooey ink kind of blobbed onto the opposite page, especially where it was folded over against some white Cel Vinyl. 

     Oops.

     But fortunately for you and I, I made my big book-folding mess AFTER I had scanned this piece. So it still looks okay here. 

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    *I clamp my book shut with clips for the sake of the pieces that I paste in. They are usually kind of wrinkly from the watercolor washes, and my Moleskine too is kind of round and wavy after a few months of wear and tear. So nothing really wants to lie down in it. But, if you clamp a bunch of spring clips around the edge (three on each side, one on the top, and one on the bottom), it really forces every bit of the wrinkly wash drawing down upon the paper of the Moleskine. Then when the paste dries after ten minutes or so, one can remove the spring clips. 

     JUST REMEMBER TO PUT SOME BLOTTER PAPER BETWEEN YOUR MOST RECENT DRAWINGS SO THAT SOME OF THE GOOEY INK DOESN'T BOND TO THE OTHER SIDE OF THE PAGE!   …like I just did. 

Palm Star

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     I had too much to do this last hot weekend. But all I really wanted to do was  to draw and ride my new bike until the wheels fell off. 

     Summer lasts too long here in LA. We won't really be into the cooler weather until we get on the other side of Halloween. 

     For example, today, the very first day of October 2012….it's supposed to be 106 F. 

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