Old Men of the Hills, 1

Early stages of this one. But it might be possible to guess where it's going.


The blog and the sketchbook are keeping nice and active, but I still haven't found the best time of day for them. Gonna try first thing in the morning.

Old Print

No new drawings today. So, here's a linoleum block print, from the chapter illustrations I did for Neil McAlister's (ed.) first poetry anthology, New Classic Poems, back in 2005. I still like this one:

Devil Woman: New! Improved!

I was probably hasty, uploading this yesterday. I've made some changes with the eyes and the mouth, and she looks, to me, a lot more sinister now:

Devil Woman

Well, this is different. Was surfing, using my Stumbleupon Firefox add-on, and came across some interesting, what I think they call "edgy," illustration. Began to wonder, "can I do something like that?" The result:



For me, stodgy old fart that I am, this is fairly risqué. But was a great deal of fun.

Something Different

Long hard day, doing work for client. Not enough energy to do a new drawing. What to post? What to post? Ah, here's something:


A piece for another prospective client, who's looking at doing a book of poetry for children. Yes, I do this sort of thing too. He's a tiny little guy, who likes to make boats out of leaves.

The Flowering of the Western Tradition

I finally figured out a title for this one. It was kind of a study for the one I posted yesterday. It's also a bit more pessimistic about how the tradition is developing:

The Endless Conversation

Done? Not sure. Ready to post, though: "The Endless Conversation":

Participants in the conversation, from the bottom up: Muses at play (aren't they always?), then Sappho, Maya, Moses, and Vergil (Plato? Euclid? Archimedes?), then Michelangelo and Lorenzo de Medici, Galileo versus Cardinal Bellarme, Luther and Pope Leo X, Queen Elizabeth and a young Shakespeare, Lincoln and Douglas, O'Keefe and Steiglitz (not sure), Einstein and Bohr .... it goes on .... endlessly ...

The participants could have been countless others, rather than these. These are the ones who occurred to me as I was drawing.

What is this "Endless Conversation?" If I had to put words to it, I would say, it's us talking to each other, as we have for centuries, trying to work out the answers to questions like, "What is true? What is right and good? What is beautiful?"

Why do I have four Muses holding it all up, as though it had no weight? That gets into some things I don't have good answers for. I'm not sure why there are certain images I return to again and again. I like to picture the fundamental source of life as something mysterious, unfathomable, but effortlessly playful. Being male, whenever I look for a symbol of the mysterious and unfathomable, the symbol usually winds up being female. In mythology, the Muses are the sources of poetry, but I like to use them to symbolize the mysterious and unfathomable sources of imagination, story, song, thought, reason, history, drama, science -- you get the idea. So in this picture, they carry the whole thing -- civilization, culture, what have you -- they carry the whole "conversation" along. But without effort, as play, as a dance.

Newton And Friends

Was going to finish "The Endless Conversation" today, but (this is starting to sound familiar) this drawing happened instead:



Isaac Newton in a letter to Robert Hooke, year 1676: "If I have seen farther than others, it is only by standing on the shoulders of giants."

The Endless Conversation, 3

Nearing the top:

Soon to join the conversation: Lincoln (again), Galileo, Luther, some Pope or other, Queen Elizabeth . . .

The Endless Conversation, 2

Ascending ever skyward. I'm not sure I know where this is going, but it's certainly fun:

The Endless Conversation, 1

This idea may be starting to come together. I'm pretty happy with those Muses, there on the ground floor, so to speak:

This is gonna be a lot taller when it's done.

Muses At Play

Well, I lied. I won't be posting a "finished" version of yesterday's drawing, today. This drawing happened instead:

Yesterday's drawing and this one should be regarded as experiments, towards a more involved piece, still developing. The idea hasn't really come into focus yet.

Western Thought

I'll post a "finished" version of this tomorrow, once I've figured out what to call it.

Thinking

I'm playing around with some ideas for  drawings, and this is just a "study:"

All I've had time for, in the last two days.

Tired

Just finished twelve straight hours of work, to meet a deadline, and I'm too tired to even do a scribble. So here's an illustration from the anthology of poems by Lorna Davis, which I hope will be published this year:

The poem is about things that go along timelessly, like farmers planting and reaping their crops, year after year, century after century, while kings and empires come and go.

The Irreverent Invaders

Another old one. Same excuse as yesterday, for not posting something new.

This one's original title (brace yourself) was "At Times, The Most Vulgar And Outrageous Invasions Of Irreverence Attempt To Subvert The Most Solemn And Serious Imperatives Of Civilization." Yeesh.

Here's a detail, lower left-hand corner:

Out On the Edge: Strange Architecture

Old drawings. Posted here because of lack of time to do anything new today, apart from work for clients:

This shows some detail:

The idea: out on the edge (not a place, but a state of being), where the rules are looser, people can put things together in strange and delightful ways.

Flamenco Steps To Reach the Moon, with color added by cheating.

OK, this is the most egregious form of cheating. I wanted to see this with color, but the paper in my new home-made sketchbook does not do wet media, like watercolor, worth a damn. And once you add the watercolor, or the colored pencil, the black-and-white pen-and-ink drawing is no more. So I yielded to temptation. I sinned. I Photoshopped the color in:

I also did some cheating with the Moon. Photoshop is very seductive; it makes you such a powerful cheater.

Flamenco Steps To Reach the Moon

Ink! At last, ink!

I may or may not add color to this. Gonna sleep on it.

When I went to ink this, I had to change that babe on top. Now I like her a lot better. She carries herself with a definite flair.

Flamenco Steps to Reach the Moon

Another long day, which I spent trying to keep them client people happy. Only had time to make a couple of these dancers a little more decent.

I remembered to horizontally unflip the image in Photoshop, this time.

Alternative Methods of Reaching the Moon

First pencil work:

And yes, I'll put some clothes on them. I just hope I get the figures right. 

The longer I do this, and the more I learn about how to render the human figure, the more beautiful the human figure becomes to me. If I can get just one line right, for instance the contour along the collar bone, over the shoulder, and out along the stretched-out arm, that is indescribably satisfying.

More on What Magritte Left Out

Same like yesterday, but with a few refinements -- mainly the balance of the rock, and the stonework of the castle:

I did some work drawing Flamenco dancers, for a free-lance job last year. Grew to really like those dresses, and the rest of the dancers' costumes.

What Magritte Left Out

I'll probably be refining this a bit tomorrow:

Apologies to Rene Magritte, and to his immortal painting "Castle in the Pyrenees."

Ben, Abe, Emily, Tom, Frederick, Mary, et al.

Done, mostly:

The characters: Ben Franklin, Abe Lincoln, Tom Paine, Emily Dickinson, Frederick Douglass, Mary Wolstonecraft, Mark Twain, some others ... Turned out to be mostly nineteenth-century folks, mostly American, probably because it got started with Ben Franklin. Why him, I'm not sure. Someone I deeply admire, maybe.

Ben and Friends

Got a customer to keep happy, so this drawing is just inching along. Driving me nuts:

I think Ben and Abe look good. That's Tom, back behind them. Tom Paine? Tom Jefferson? I'm not sure.

Ben, Abe, Emily, Tom, Mark, Frederick, Mary and some other people

It's a little further along, now:

Some days are sure too damned short.

Ben

I probably won't get much further with this tonight. But I thought that it might be interesting to show the pencil work, with the ink just starting on top of it. Yes, that's Ben Franklin. The big feather quill pen will make more sense by and by:

After the Apocalypse: Father Time Watches Mother Nature, Still Dancing.

Greetings to all.

This is getting to be kind of an old one. This is a drawing from 2001, back when I thought it was cool to do grim, serious -- well, apocalyptical -- stuff. But I'm still pretty pleased with it:

I did this one at the end of a few month's intense study of anatomy. I bought a Mr. Thrifty model human skeleton, half-size, and I learned almost all the muscles, including the ones in the hands and feet, their origins and insertions, and a lot of the names of them --- the whole nine yards. Forget your latissimus dorsi --- do you know where your tensor fascia femoris is? (It's on front of your hip, between the pelvis and the hip joint. It's part of what you use to lift a leg out to the side.)

In Doodle Woods

Good afternoon, everyone. Here's page 5 of the new sketchbook. Ah, the joy of surprising oneself:

For me, anyway, this sort of thing can take a while to get rolling. But the idea is, just start stacking stuff, and put the next thing that comes to mind on the stack -- put it on fast, without giving yourself time to think about it -- and keep adding things to the stack that way, and stop when you hit the top of the page. 

-- Although, to be honest, sometimes the "stacking" starts in the middle of the stack.

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Bob and the Muses

This one started with the knife, a couple of days ago, but the knife turned out to be too big for what I had in mind. At that point I left it and did the Muse and Poet drawing (see below) -- starting that one with the knife, again, but drawn a lot smaller.

Then I thought maybe I could have some fun trying to "finish" this one today, big knife and all.

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