Jonathan Day's Art Blog

Last post here

2011-04-18T20:20:00.000-07:00

For about a year, I've been running this blog and another at Wordpress ("My Own Damned Business"). Turns out that Wordpress is more to my liking, so I'm going to just blog there from now on. Many thanks to all who have checked out the blog here.

The Four Seasons: Fall

2011-04-02T13:59:00.000-07:00

Here is number three in the "Four Seasons" series -- "Fall:"

Bornin' and Dyin'

2011-03-19T20:49:00.001-07:00

So I'm on my way home from my evening visit with my mother, who just turned 94. For a person that age, she could be doing a lot worse. I'm driving along, and I think, Yeah, she's doing OK, but the fact is, she's dying. A few months, maybe a year -- two at the outside -- and she'll be gone. And then I think, You could say that about a lot of people at that old folks' home she lives at. There are a lot of folks there who are dying. There's probably quite a few people in this town who are dying. All over the world, when you get right down to it, there are a lot of people who are dying.

And then I think: Yes, but, at the same time, all over the world, right now, there are a lot of people being born. There are new lives, beginning.

That's how it is, all the time. All the time, all over the world, there are people dying. And at the same time, there are people being born. That's what is going on. Old lives ending, and new lives beginning. All the time.

I don't know how all that looks to anyone else. Under more normal circumstances, I would probably see it as obvious, maybe even -- sad to say -- as trivial. But right now, I look at it, and I see something wonderful, and awesome, and maybe a little terrifying. I came home, and I told my wife what I had been thinking, and I swear, while I was talking, my hair stood on end, and I almost choked up.

And I think that's all I know how to say about it, right now.

The Four Seasons: Spring

2011-03-05T15:01:00.000-08:00

Well, the same thing happened with this one -- I couldn't leave it alone. I'm looking at some late nights, now, getting caught up with other things:

Both this and the previous piece are Staedtler Marsmatic technical pens, Rapidograph ink, and watercolors, on Arches 140 lb watercolor paper.

The Four Seasons: Summer

2011-02-20T18:51:00.000-08:00

This is the first piece I've worked on, for a long time, which I found it almost impossible to leave alone. Freelance deadlines, responsibilities, commitments, promises -- all had to fight to pull me away from working on this:

This will likely be the first of four similar pieces -- the four seasons. Spring is next.

Gulliver in Brobdingnag II

2011-02-10T10:03:00.000-08:00

For an iPhone/iPad app, Gulliver in Brobdingnag -- the final version of the illustration I uploaded Monday (damn -- how the days whiz by!):

Gulliver in Brobdingnag

2011-02-07T10:15:00.000-08:00

Well -- I hope that you all had a truly marvelous Christmas, and are enjoying a Happy New Year.

Yes, it's been a while since my last posting. Deadlines, you know. If you are familiar with the Greek myth of Sisyphus, then you will know what I mean when I say that meeting free-lance deadlines is a Sisyphean endeavor. You roll the stone up the hill, it rolls back down, you roll it up again.

Anyhow, this is part of a work in progress, for another iPhone/iPad app. Gulliver again, this time in Brobdingnag. (Wasn't Swift great at inventing names?). This time, Gulliver is the little guy:

UAL DC-3

2010-12-07T16:45:00.000-08:00

And now, once again, for something completely different:

This is a projected illustration for another iPhone/iPad app, this one a bio for kids about a the first woman airline pilot. Medium: watercolor -- actually one watercolor for the plane, another for the clouds, Photoshopped together.

The Artist As A Serious Young Man

2010-12-05T19:23:00.001-08:00

Using Photoshop, and some of what I've learned about contrast in the years since I did this self-portrait.

The original is actually charcoal, not pencil. Done almost thirty years ago.

2010-12-03T11:58:00.000-08:00

Was digging through some old stuff, looking for something else, and I found this self-portrait, done many, many, many, many, manymanymanymany moons ago.

Gahwd Dayum, I was serious back then. I especially like how, with the grim humorless methodical meticulousness characteristic of everything I did back then, I placed the right side shirt collar outside the sports coat I was working in, and the left side shirt collar inside.

The Wages Of Signing Up To Do A Freelance Job

2010-11-25T22:12:00.000-08:00

Take on a free-lance job, and you take your chances. The work is usually at least twice as involved as you expected, and the client's grasp of how much work illustration requires is usually worth a chuckle. But -- you're running your own show, and people are paying you to hone your skills at something you love doing anyway.

So, that's all fine. The long hours which earn a small fraction of minimum wage -- no biggie. No, the real pisser is when you produce an illustration that you actually quite like, and, well, no, that's not what they want. My current project is the Adventures of Theseus, and this is Medea, enraged, fleeing Athens:

No, it's not perfect. Work done under deadline rarely is. And the client wants the dragons done differently. But I like those dragons, and the way the sequence of their heads strengthens the sense of movement. Alas, it will never be seen, except here, and my website, and the other blog, and Flikr, maybe. Hmmm . . . . Sometimes you gotta love the Internet.

And sometimes you have to love Thanksgiving, too. The older I get, the more often I hear myself giving voice to hoary old cliches, like, "the older I get, the more important family becomes." Thanksgiving is the premium reminder of that truth.

Beauty

2010-11-08T09:55:00.000-08:00

So I'm on my way this morning to see my Mom. She's 93, and doesn't do the best job in the world of feeding herself. I cook breakfast for her every morning -- pancakes, sausage, omelettes, French toast, those kinds of things -- so I know she gets at least one decent meal every day. I'm bicycling, because I need the exercise and because it's a lovely late fall morning. The pavements, houses, trees, are all wet, because it rained last night, but there's lots of blue sky. Here and there. Between the clouds. Pedalling along, I look ahead, which is West, and I see a magnificent rainbow beyond the edge of town. Besides being beautiful, this is a hint to what is about to happen, because, you see, it takes rain to make a rainbow. That doesn't occur to me, as I pedal on. It occurs to me when the rain shower, which had made the rainbow, comes on into town to meet me. The shower starts suddenly, and gets heavy fast. All at once I'm wearing wet jeans, and a wet hoodie. I take shelter under a tree for a minute or so, and am reminded, standing there, that trees in the fall do not make good umbrellas. From under the tree, I look back the way I came, and I see the rain falling, all lit up by the morning sun behind me. It looks like countless tiny pieces of sunlight falling from the clouds. The rain eases off, and I get back on the bike and pedal off, standing on the pedals, moving fast. The breeze is cool in my face, there are a few raindrops still falling, and the freshly washed fall townscape is all lit up by the sun.

When I get to Mom's, I tell her about the shower that caught me on the way. I have a little trouble explaining to her why I'm glad I didn't drive.

So This Is Kind Of Different

2010-11-05T13:12:00.000-07:00

Wednesday nights, I teach a painting class, one of those zero-credit community-education classes, at the local community college. This last time, I did the first part of a two-part demo on painting faces (not the same, interestingly enough, as face-painting).

I had to work fast, because I want my students to have as much time as possible for their own work. So this is the work of maybe a half-hour to forty-five minutes:

It's from a black-and-white photograph which I found on-line, and can't post here for © reasons.

For most of this demo, the original photograph was upside-down. See Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain for more about this trick.

Adventures of Wallace and Thaddeus

2010-11-04T20:30:00.000-07:00

My usual exquisitely-prepared morsels of ad-hoc verbiage, apropos of these drawings, will be served up in due course. For now, just the images:

Mr. Podmore Tackles Proust

2010-10-28T12:27:00.000-07:00

Last night was a dark and stormy night, followed in due course by a dark and stormy day, in the Wet. Drizzly. Willamette Valley. of. Oregon.

Meanwhile, the Sketchbook, which had been lonely all through the months of September, and most of October, finally received a few brief visits from the Artist. He drew the Sketchbook a story of a man he knew a long time ago, very similar to his own self, who made a habit of reading, or trying to read, preposterously long works of fiction, especially in times of dark, stormy, Oregon weather:

I am actually almost halfway through the six volumes of Proust's In Search of Lost Time, perhaps better known as Remembrance of Things Past. It's very... um... let me see... ah... French!... yah, that's it... utterly, ineluctably, relentlessly French.

The Happy Gardener

2010-10-21T15:42:00.001-07:00

It's a lovely autumn, here in Oregon. The leaves are turning colors gloriously, on most of the trees. A couple of months ago -- shortly after my last post here -- I exchanged the existential angst of being between freelance jobs, for the much more visceral angst of finding that a freelance job I had taken on was going to be much more work than I had anticipated. We won't talk about the money. I finally got to the project to a point where I could get out of the house, yesterday morning, and take an actual walk, and look at the trees changing color, and smell the crisp fall air, rich with woodsmoke and other scents I couldn't identify. It's astounding, the way little things like that can sooth your soul, when you've been doing without them for a month or two.

I might have a little time for myself to draw, now, and I have some ideas simmering on the back burners of the cast-iron wood stove of my mind, but nothing to show yet. Here's the last drawing I was able to do in my sketchbook, before the walls of the last project closed in around me:

And here's one of the illustrations I did for this last project:

It's actually for an iPhone/iPad app, a rendition of Gulliver in Lilliput, for kids with reading disabilitie, to be published by Brain Integration, LLC. Here, Gulliver is using some handmade stools to step from the outer court to the inner court of the palace of the monarch of Lilliput, who wants to show off his palace to Gulliver.

Here's another -- Gulliver being introduced to the monarch's family.

The Frontier Poet

2010-08-02T20:28:00.000-07:00

Am between free-lance projects. A strange state: suddenly I have some free time. Now I can do some drawing for fun -- when I'm able to forget the possibility of poverty, destitution, starvation, and death, and like that. Because, you see, no current project = no certain future income.

As I say, an interesting state. The soul and the body are both making demands. The soul says, "you gotta do something for fun, for your own satisfaction, otherwise the whole thing becomes pointless." The body says, "Yah, and how many calories does artistic satisfaction provide? and how much of this month's mortgage payment does it cover? "

So I do both. I do some stuff for fun, like this one -- the Frontier Poet:

And I do some stuff for (possible) money --- a new addition to the T-shirt Art folder, in the freelance portfolio:

Well, that second one was fun, too. I think the design came out well. But still.

The Happy Birder

2010-07-30T21:28:00.000-07:00

Finally got a break between projects, and an idea for a drawing, at the same time:

Yah, that's a weird hat he's got on. That's the sort of thing that can happen when you just start the pen moving, and then make everything up as you go along.

Thoreau, and the Illustrations of Henry Bugbee Kane.

2010-07-19T11:07:00.000-07:00

I am wholly of one mind with Alice, who asked,"And what is the use of a book without pictures?" Many's the book I have owned for years, just enjoying the pictures in it, before I got round to reading the text.

One such book was the Bramhall House edition of Henry David Thoreau's Walden, illustrated by another Henry, Henry Bugbee Kane. I don't find much, if I Google the man. This is one of those things which defies my comprehension, because I think that Henry Bugbee Kane was one of the finest artists and illustrators of the twentieth century. The illustrator's job is to bring the text to life, and Mr. Kane does this magnificently with Thoreau's books.

In any event, here are three of the illustrations that he did for Walden:

This one in particular is a favorite of mine. It captures so well the feel, the spiritual essence, of autumn:

Used copies of this edition of Walden can still be found, for not much money, on sites like Addall.com. If you're into Thoreau, and good illustration, I recommend it highly.

Thinkers and Poets

2010-06-27T08:40:00.001-07:00

An Artist's Adventurous and Romantic LIfe

2010-06-25T19:01:00.000-07:00

In between feverish bouts of artistic inspiration, I've spent some pleasant hours digging, this last month. To re-cap: we found a sink-hole in the back yard, near the back fence. This was caused, as it turned out, by a series of leaks in our SEWER PIPE. The original pipe was what is known as Orangeburg pipe, very common in houses built fifty or more years ago. Orangeburg pipe has been likened to a 4-inch-diameter tar-soaked cardboard toilet-paper tube. Hot new technology, about a hundred years ago.

We had a Rooter man here a couple of years ago, because all the toilets wouldn't flush, and it turns out that in the process of unplugging the sewer line with his power snake, he knocked a couple of big holes in the Orangeburg pipe. Maybe two-by-three inch holes. One hole was near the back fence and about eight feet underground; the other was upstream, about eighteen feet closer to the house, and only four or five feet underground. As a result, sewer drain water started leaking out of the upper hole, draining downhill through the gravel bed under the pipe, and leaking back in through the lower hole, taking soil with it. Lots and lots of soil found its way into the city sewer main -- hence the sink-hole.

Ultimately about 20 feet of the Orangeburg pipe had to be replaced with modern PVC pipe. By me, in person.

This is what the sink-hole looked like, with me in it, after I had widened it and deepened it enough to uncover the lower leak in the sewer pipe, the one which created the sink-hole. The bottom of the fence behind me is normally just above the level of the lawn. I'm well over six feet tall, so I figure the hole I'm standing in here is around 8 feet deep.

This next picture was taken about a month later, after much digging. We had to dig a second, roughly rectangular hole (seen in the foreground), about twenty feet nearer the house, to get to and repair the upper hole in the pipe, four or five feet underground. At that point, it made no sense not to uncover and repair the pipe in between the two holes. Hence the narrow section of the trench, just wide enough to get down to the pipe. It's a good thing I did that, because the pipe in that section was in very bad shape.

Wearing my usual dumb-ass being-photographed grin, here I stand at the deep end of the trench, straddling some of the new PVC sewer pipe.

Here is my fetching wife. She's helping with shoveling dirt back into the trench, but she is also helping to give a sense in this photo of the size of the pile of dirt we've still got to move.

My very approximate calculations tell me that the weight of the soil which was in the trench, and is now in the pile, is around one and a half tons. I think my numbers are wrong. I think it's more like two tons.

Thinkers and Poets

2010-06-23T20:04:00.000-07:00

Is it the thinkers who carry the poets? Is it the poets who fulfill the work of the thinkers? Who matters more? Who's having more fun? Who would you rather have a beer with? Who invented beer in the first place? -- Questions apropos of something started in the sketchbook:

The plumbing inspector was by today. We're approved. We've started shoveling dirt back into the trench. I'm still going to try to get pictures.

Rogelio Naranjo

2010-06-22T21:50:00.000-07:00

Came across another amazing artist, on Flikr: Rogelio Naranjo. I know nothing about him (yet) but the name, and that he was born in 1937:

The Flikr page is someone named "ephemera assemblyman." Worth checking out. A lot more Rogelio Naranjo work is there, plus there are a lot of Google images for that name.

Sewers, Continued.

2010-06-21T21:29:00.000-07:00

I worked it out today: in the last month, I've dug, by hand, a trench in the back yard almost twenty feet long, about two feet wide, with an average depth of at least five feet. I'm six feet four inches tall, and the grass of the backyard lawn is well over my head, when I stand at the deep end of the trench. I believe, I hope, I almost pray, that the digging of the trench, and the repair of the sewer pipe at the bottom, was completed today. Pictures soon. Tired now.

The Gathering

2010-06-19T17:44:00.000-07:00

What's it mean? Who knows? I had some good laughs doing it.

A Piece of The Gathering

2010-06-18T20:44:00.001-07:00

Here's a piece of the newest thing in the sketchbook. What to call it? "The Gathering," I think. I should have the rest done tomorrow.

Sewer

2010-06-17T18:58:00.000-07:00

This week has been mostly a sewer-repair nightmare. Too much time spent in a hole in the backyard 8 feet deep, trying to mate PVC pipe to old concrete pipe, in a work space way too small. I have developed a profound loathing for mud, especially the slick, slimy, sticky clay mud you get in the Willamette Valley. And the floor of this hole is a layer several inches deep of that kind of mud, because ground-water is eternally seeping in from the sides.

Life goes on . . . oughta have something new tomorrow.

Still Life With Mustaches

2010-06-14T19:13:00.000-07:00

Honest to God --- I don't know where this sort of thing comes from:

But it cracks me up when I'm doing it.

From the sketchbook, with a border added in Photoshop.

Elven Archer

2010-06-13T20:50:00.001-07:00

As a free-lancer, I have to display a wide variety of potential product to potential clients -- so far, anyway. So, a couple of days ago, I bid on a job for which the client wants some female elves, as archers. My initial bid included some good images, but no actual elven archers. So I did this sketch, as a supplementary image for the bid:

I like her stance.

Landscape With Nesting Birds

2010-06-09T20:43:00.000-07:00

I must have seen a picture of one of those giant stone heads on Easter Island in a National Geographic when I was a kid, and the image stuck with me. I've done tall skinny head sculptures, and tall skinny head paintings, and tall skinny head drawings, for years. So this is from my sketch book today (well, the border is from Photoshop):

A T-shirt Idea

2010-06-07T21:08:00.000-07:00

An idea for a Gothic T-shirt, using a drawing from a month or two ago:

From March, actually. Probably needs a little work, to make the hair symmetrical. But I think that, even so, this is a rather arresting T-shirt.

Death

2010-06-06T21:32:00.001-07:00

An image from the poetry anthology I illustrated last fall/winter:

Poems are wonderful to illustrate. The artist's imagination is given so much freedom.

Beer Art

2010-06-04T19:35:00.000-07:00

So, this might be T-shirt art, or it might be the label of an imaginary beer, or both. I hope that the Snake River Brewery doesn't really exist -- I made it up, for the purpose of this image. Or maybe I hope it does -- they might hire me.

Actually -- I just Googled it -- there really is a Snake River Brewery, in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. But they don't make a Whitewater Stout. Somebody else probably does, though. Jeez.

2010-06-03T20:37:00.000-07:00

T-shirt art: a perhaps under-respected medium. Here's another addition to my so far minuscule T-shirt art portfolio, making obvious use of the sketch I posted here two days ago:

I see this as the sort of T-shirt a babe you don't want to mess with might wear. And here's a revised version of something I did for that T-shirt outfit in the UK last fall:

Xtreme T-shirt Art

2010-06-02T20:01:00.001-07:00

I made some money last fall, doing T-shirt art for an outfit in the UK. I like the idea of doing T-shirt art, art that gets out onto the streets. So I'm working on adding some more of that sort of thing to my portfolio, like so:

I might be doing some more things along this line, but I'd also like to do some stuff centered on music, and dance.

Spy Babe, and Digging

2010-06-01T21:00:00.000-07:00

So the deal is, now, that I've got to dig a trench some unknown distance across the back yard. It needs to be 7 feet deep, at the starting point, at the hole where all this started.

So, yea, verily, I must do something fun to relax. And here it is, from the sketchbook:

Labels and sewer lines

2010-05-26T21:04:00.000-07:00

It turned out today that I've been digging this hole in the backyard, down to the broken sewer line, in the wrong direction, and not down far enough. The Corvallis Public Works guys came out, and straightened me out. It was raining today, and the Oregon Willamette Valley river-bottom clay soil that I was digging in turned into a kind of dense, sticky, gluey mud. You take a step, putting a foot down onto that stuff, and your foot comes up a good ten pounds heavier, with this big mass of clay stuck to it. And I might have to dig this hole another two feet deeper, through that.

So, on the lighter side, here's another piece from my current free-lance work:

Label II

2010-05-24T19:28:00.000-07:00

An interesting side-effect of being a free-lance illustrator, at least at the stage of that career that I'm at, is that you can't afford to hire contractors for home stuff. Well, we've got a sewer drainage problem underground in the back yard, and to get down to it to fix it is going to require that a hole be dug, maybe as much as 9 feet deep. That hole must be dug personally, by me, with a shovel. Because I work for free, you see.

That's what I spent most of this afternoon on. It's been a long time since I did physical work. This evening, I find that I still am able to type, and at dinner I did OK with getting the food onto the fork, and then lifting the food from the plate to my mouth. So everything's fine, and I can look forward to further good progress tomorrow, making the hole in the ground in the backyard deeper.

But I didn't have time today to do any drawing for myself. So here's an image from this new job I'm working on:

Adobe Illustrator is a sweet program.

Friday evening

2010-05-21T21:47:00.000-07:00

Friday evening . . . doing free-lance work . . . yes, it's true . . . and nothing new to post. So, y'all have a good weekend, now, y' hear?

Label

2010-05-20T18:43:00.001-07:00

Well, this is a rough first draft, of a little piece from a current free-lance job. The final version may, someday, be a label on a food product. With any luck.

Dry Rot

2010-05-19T20:27:00.001-07:00

This one started with the "Guy" from a few days back. You can maybe see it's more or less the same face. But then the departed spirit of Edward Lear dropped in for a moment, and this was the result:

Lear's nonsense verse is a treat. He's well worth looking up. Here's a good link:
http://www.nonsenselit.org/Lear/learwk.html

Joe and his Pets

2010-05-18T21:27:00.001-07:00

So here's a new one, from the kids' end of things. I did the lines in pencil, and then just took it right into Photoshop to color it, without my usual intermediate step of inking the lines:

Just having some fun, here . . . something weird about that dog's head, though . . . like he's been chasing too many parked cars . . .

Alice Asks Thor For Directions, in Color

2010-05-17T19:20:00.000-07:00

The pencils for this one got posted here a month or two back. I finally got around to doing the pen and ink, and putting some color in, in Photoshop:

Again, that is Lewis Carroll's Alice, and that is not Marvel Comics' Thor. Comic book companies don't hold copyright to deities, as a general thing, anyhow.

And then there's this kind of thing. . .

2010-05-16T21:22:00.000-07:00

I normally don't pay much attention to this kind of thing. But sometimes a piece like this can really have an impact:

The link is http://raph.com/3dartists/artgallery/6686.jpg

Oh, and by the way -- let me pause for a moment of peevish venting, apropos of nothing at all -- "impact" is a noun. An "impact" is a thing, an event, the way a "collision" is a thing. Saying that something "impacted you" is like saying that something "collisioned" you.

"Yah, the recession really collisioned my work as an artist" . . . that's actually kind of a funny way to put it. But it is a way of putting it which is just as lame, ignorant, clumsy, unmusical, ungrammatical, and ugly, as is the unfortunate current form: "the recession impacted my work."

Or how about "blow," as in, "I gave him a severe blow." So we could say, "the recession blowed my work as an artist." Sheesh.

Sydney Sime

2010-05-15T21:38:00.000-07:00

I can't believe I never heard of Sidney Sime. I just now learned of him, surfing:

Sidney Sime (1867 - 1941): Late Victorian English artist, collaborator with Lord Dunsany, now virtually forgotten. There's a good selection of his work at http://www.ideafixa.com/voce-nao-desenha-nada-sidney-sime/

Not quite the master of line that Aubrey Beardsley was, but still amazing work.

Guy

2010-05-14T21:18:00.000-07:00

Attended the SCBWI Oregon Spring Conference today. All about how publishing kids' books works in the real world. Let me tell you, it's a grimy, gritty business. -- Just kidding. Actually, there were a lot of really high quality people in the little room us illustrators were in. And some very high quality art work.

Sketched this during a slow patch. Maybe not a character, but definitely a guy:

Looks really familiar, but I can't place him.

Film Noir Tough Guy

2010-05-13T17:27:00.000-07:00

A different sort of experimenting . . . .

Character creation.

The Joy of Lepidoptery

2010-05-13T16:42:00.001-07:00

Experimenting. . . .

Another Dulac

2010-05-12T20:23:00.001-07:00

Another exquisite piece by Edmund Dulac. This is an illustration for "The Wind's Tale," by Hans Christian Andersen -- someone else I am embarrassed to admit I have never read.

Frank Frazetta, R. I. P.

2010-05-11T07:58:00.000-07:00

Heard yesterday that Frank Frazetta has died. He was one of the twentieth century's greats. There was nobody like him, though a lot of people tried.

This picture was the first Frank Frazetta thing I ever saw, on the cover of a paperback edition of Robert Howard's Conan. It just grabbed me:

He knew how to do babes that you don't want to mess with:

There's a lot more about him on the Web, and there are some good books.

Long Ago and Far Away

2010-05-10T17:24:00.000-07:00

This took more doing than I expected -- gee, what a surprise! It's too soon after completing it, for me to be anything like objective about, but I think it came out pretty good. You'll need to click on it to get a decent view:

This is pen, ink and watercolor. I did one thing in it better than I've ever done it before, which is the gradient of the sky. It's a pretty smooth gradient here. I've never been able to do a sky gradient in watercolor without the brush strokes showing. I owe the improvement here to Arthur Rackham. I read recently that one of his techniques was to superimpose many light washes, to built up tones and textures. So the sky here is three washes superimposed. Each wash is light, so that the brush strokes in each wash are faint, and the gradient is built up much more smoothly.

Easy one

2010-05-08T18:17:00.000-07:00

I think that I'm just going to wish you all an enjoyable remainder of the weekend.

Thalia

2010-05-07T21:46:00.000-07:00

Things didn't go ridiculously well today. This is an illustration from a poetry anthology I did work for last year. This is Thalia, the Muse of Comedy. I like her. Clean, elegant, good design:

Who knows what the real expression is, behind the mask?

A Book Can Take You To Faraway Places.

2010-05-06T20:15:00.000-07:00

Still inking, a little pencil work left. If things go ridiculously well tomorrow, I'll get the watercoloring done.

Chartres Cathedral

2010-05-05T21:05:00.001-07:00

This is moving out of the "trying stuff out" phase, into the inking phase. Some of both going on:

Mental Travel -- it's for young and old!

2010-05-04T20:41:00.000-07:00

This is now in the "trying stuff out" stage, involving lots and lots and lots of erasing.

All! New!! Stuff!!

2010-05-03T20:59:00.001-07:00

There's a conference of the SCBWI (Society Of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators), to which I belong, in a couple of weeks. I need to do one more "portfolio" kind of illustration, to be ready for the conference. This is the initial pencil sketch work. I think that it might actually be the first "kid's book illustration" which I have done, which will use the kind of visual metaphor that I am so fond of. The metaphor is an old one -- that a book can take you to faraway places. But maybe my vision will be somewhat new.

It will make more sense visually, once I draw the landscape spread out below. Today, I mainly just wanted to get the figures right -- especially the hands, the hands:

It ain't much yet, but I have hopes.

Edmund Dulac

2010-05-02T21:06:00.001-07:00

Here's one of my favorites from Edmund Dulac, an illustrator I admire even more than Arthur Rackham. This is an illustration for "The Wind's Tale," a story by Hans Christian Andersen:

The alchemist: "'It's gold! It's gold!' he shouted."

Enlarging Sancho Panza's Head

2010-05-01T22:01:00.000-07:00

This is better. Except that now I realize that I should have messed with the donkey's proportions, too. Oh, well:

Maybe in Photoshop . . .

A Break From Don Quixote

2010-04-30T19:49:00.000-07:00

I needed to give poor Don Quixote and Sancho a rest. So here's something new:

Sancho Panza I

2010-04-29T21:43:00.000-07:00

So I realized something wasn't right with the one I uploaded yesterday. The thing is, if I'm going to mess with Don Quixote's proportions the way I did, I've got to mess with Sancho Panza's proportions just as much. Not necessarily the same way -- I don't think that I want to make Sancho's head the same size relative to his body as Don Quixote's. But if I leave Sancho's proportions too close to normal, then Don Quixote just looks like a stick man with a bizarrely large head. So here I'm trying to push Sancho's envelope a bit farther:

I'll be trying to push it more.

The Knight of the Woeful Countenance, V

2010-04-28T21:14:00.000-07:00

Well, this has been an interesting experiment ...

.... with which I am probably not done.

The Knight of the Woeful Counenance, IV

2010-04-27T21:03:00.000-07:00

This one may have come back to life:

I'm toying with the possibility that the windmills actually were giants.

The Knight of the Woeful Countenance, III

2010-04-26T21:53:00.000-07:00

Well, this is a little bit better:

Color will be nice.

The Knight of the Woeful Countenance,II

2010-04-25T21:15:00.000-07:00

The one I did yesterday, I'm not too happy with. Maybe I can rescue it, but this one's gonna be better, anyway:

The Knight of the Woeful Countenance

2010-04-24T20:37:00.001-07:00

Don Quixote, again:

Needs some work. Completed tomorrow?

The Sprites of Fancy

2010-04-23T22:33:00.000-07:00

Ran out of time... nothing new ... so here's an old one. "The Sprites Of Fancy Dance Airily Upon Our Humble Edifices Of Reason":

I'd rather not be posting old stuff, because I think I'm breaking some really interesting new ground with my new stuff. But sometimes that's how it works out.

Venetians

2010-04-22T21:25:00.000-07:00

Nothing real special here; this is just a very small piece of the current job I'm doing. Venetians, these are, with their Venetian masks and Baroque get-ups. I'm posting it just because I think it's simply and cleanly done (mostly because I didn't have a lot of time to spare to do it):

Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, With The Gypsies in the Woods

2010-04-21T20:41:00.000-07:00

It's amazing, what a difference color makes:

Incidentally, this doesn't correspond to any actual scene in Don Quixote -- as far as I know. Someday, I'm going to actually read that book.

Don Quixote and Sancho Panza

2010-04-20T21:29:00.000-07:00

Done inking. With any luck, I'll get some time tomorrow to do some coloring of this piece. I think it's really going to come alive, when I put in some color:

Don Quixote Takes A Break

2010-04-19T21:40:00.000-07:00

Where this one's going: "Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, With the Gypsies In The Woods." With color.

Today, a start on inking.

Just realized that I forgot to undo the horizontal flip in Photoshop. So this is a mirror image. Oh, well. That's educational, too.

Cartoony Stuff

2010-04-18T21:56:00.000-07:00

Here are some attempts at what I think of as cartoony stuff.

I've noticed that over the last five or ten years I've developed a deep fondness for doing art involving dance. I have no idea why that is.

Don Quixote and Sancho Panza

2010-04-17T21:10:00.001-07:00

Early stage of a drawing, here. Don Quixote and Sancho, in one of the rare festive moments which Cervantes, for some reason, didn't put in the book:

Sketch, For A Bid On A Job

2010-04-15T19:56:00.000-07:00

A short, but nevertheless cocky pirate-type person:

. . . . . . . . taxes . . . . . . . . .

2010-04-14T20:21:00.001-07:00

Taxes

2010-04-13T19:18:00.000-07:00

I took a couple of days off from taxes, but I've got to get back to that. So, here's a promotional piece I did last year, an illustration which might be found in a kid's book. I still find it moderately clever:

Somebody I Think Highly Of

2010-04-12T21:16:00.000-07:00

Arthur Rackham was. really. really. good:

I still haven't found out which book this illustration is from. When I do, I'll update this post.

A Pair Of Gnomes, Dancing A Jig

2010-04-11T21:29:00.001-07:00

Another sketch for the possible illustration job, with a little Photoshop color help:

A Jig

2010-04-10T18:08:00.001-07:00

Another sketch for the possible book-illustration job. This would be a gnome, dancing a jig:

A pretty happy little guy, I think.

Warm-up Scribble

2010-04-09T18:39:00.000-07:00

Because that's what it is:

Yet another Fairy

2010-04-09T17:19:00.000-07:00

Here's another sketch -- a "concept drawing," they might call it nowadays -- for that book I might get to illustrate:

Some Sketches

2010-04-08T16:44:00.000-07:00

A warm-up sketch:

A fairy (sketch for proposed illustration for anthology of poems for kids):

Another fairy -- a shy, retiring one:

Friendly, And Not

2010-04-07T19:24:00.000-07:00

Here are a couple of images, just to help make clearer what I was saying day before yesterday about traditional art being friendly, and modern art being not friendly. This is friendly:

And this is not:

The first image speaks in a user-friendly visual language, it is intriguing, very well executed -- which pays a compliment to the viewer -- and, dare I say it, beautiful. (The artist: Mary Jane Ansell. Google her, she's wonderful.) The second . . .

That Word Again

2010-04-06T20:02:00.001-07:00

Taxes.... I'm a free-lance illustrator, and my wife is a ceramic artist and a day-care provider. So that's three Schedule C's we have to deal with, between us. Did I hear someone mention a Flat Tax?

Why Modern Art Is Horrible.

2010-04-05T17:01:00.000-07:00

In a post a few days ago, I was flailing around, trying to zero in on a certain single quality of Modern Art which, for me, accounts for its general awfulness. I think that whole post could be reduced to the single sentence: Modern Art is not friendly. I'm going to say a little more about that here, and I will try not to overwork the metaphor of "friendliness."

When I say that Modern Art is not friendly, I mean that what I see missing from Modern Art is simple human fellow-feeling, the basic need to make contact with one's fellows, just because they are there and they are human. In contrast with Modern Art, you can tell, when looking at art from the very old days, that everyone who produced it knew, without ever having to think about it, that the viewer of their work was supposed to enjoy it. Or be moved by it, or touched in some other way. "Touched." That's a metaphor, too, isn't it? "Touching" is one form of "making contact." For some reason, I'm imagining a group of people on a train, who tell stories to one another, to while away the hours. (Chaucer comes to mind here.) Each story-teller wants those who listen to enjoy the story. I think that artists, way back when, operated under a similar imperative. Art was, it had to be, friendly. It was one of the many ways which we humans developed over the millenia, of telling one another our stories, as a way of making more pleasant for one another -- and perhaps more meaningful -- the hours and the years of our earthly journey.

So WTF happened with Modern Art? This is a Really Big Question, and I will look very much like a Really Big Fool, if I claim to have The Answer. But when I look back on the twentieth century, the era of Modern Art, it looks to me like the human race went completely bonkers. As in, utterly, barking mad. Sitting here in the aftermath, here in the rubble, we forget how different the twentieth century was from all previous history. I mean, look at it. For starters, millions die in the four years of World War One. That's a new thing under the sun. Single battles in that war take more lives than whole long wars did, in previous centuries. Then, roughly one hundred million people are killed by the State, in the Gulag Archipelago in the Soviet Union, and in Mao's China, and in various other socialist experiments (never let it be forgotten that "Nazi" is short for "National Socialist"), millions die in World War II, the atom bomb is developed by "the good guys" and used on civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the hydrogen bomb is developed, and, meanwhile, these big insanities are being supplemented by a bazillion other "small" insanities (any one of which would seem quite large by the standards of previous centuries), in Cambodia, and Viet-Nam, and North Korea, and Cuba, and Afghanistan, and many other places -- and hey, let's face it, in the competition for the most murderously insane century, the twentieth century wins. There really is no competition, there's not even a slight gesture anywhere towards competition. This is not a victory to feel good about.

Why? Why did we go nuts? I wish I knew. I have no idea. I wish that more people asked the question, and tried to answer it. Some insight might be gained. We could use it. But going back to my metaphor, you could say that, in many respects, the twentieth century was, for those who participated in it, a spectacularly unfriendly century. Basic human fellow-feeling was forgotten, on a scale never before witnessed. Again, I have no idea why. So, it would be surprising -- would it not? -- if the art and music and drama of the era did not reflect that insanity, and that unfriendliness. Or is it possible (he asked rhetorically, setting up a future post), that rather than passively reflecting that unfriendliness, they contributed to it? Helped to shape it?

Same single plural noun

2010-04-04T21:00:00.000-07:00

Taxes.

Just One Word

2010-04-03T22:19:00.001-07:00

Taxes.

Kittens and Cute Little Bears

2010-04-02T22:03:00.000-07:00

When I posted my drawing of Lilith, last month, I said I thought my next drawing would be something involving kittens, or cute little bears. Well, this doesn't have a kitten, really, and there's no bear. But this is a possible illustration for a projected anthology of poems for children, by an author I did some work for last year. This is an illustration for a poem about a little guy who likes to make boats out of leaves, and a hungry cat.

The interesting illustration problem here is that I need to make the cat look like he's looking down. But cats' eyes aren't like human eyes; aside from the obvious difference in the shape and behavior of the pupil, cats' eyes do not move in their eye sockets the way ours do. If we need to look downward, we can tilt our head forward, or we can roll our eyeballs forward inside the eye socket. If you watch a cat sometime, you will see that the cat only has the option of tilting its head. So I have this cat's eyes rolling forward a little, which isn't really natural.

So I think that the cat here looks like he's looking down. But I might need to tweak the drawing a little tomorrow, to make it clearer.

Homer

2010-04-01T21:20:00.000-07:00

About ten years ago, I taught myself to read ancient Greek. I read all of Homer, both the Iliad and the Odyssey, in the original Greek. My belief, after having experienced Homer that way, is that one of the minor tragedies of the twentieth century was the decision by the American educational establishment to abandon the teaching of Greek and Latin in the public high schools.

In any case, while I was reading the epics, I also did some illustrations for the Odyssey. Partly for my own pleasure, partly as promotional work. (That actually did get me a job, illustrating the audio books which Parmenides Publishing did a few years back, with readings by the Classics scholar Stanley Lombardo of his translations of Homer. Still available on Amazon.com, I think.)

Here's one of the illustrations: Kyklops, the one-eyed giant, has been blinded by Odysseus and his men. They escape in their ship, but Odysseus is unable to resist taunting the blinded giant, once he thinks their shipe has reached a safe distance from shore. Kyklops makes a good guess at the position of the Greeks' ship, from the sound of Odysseus' voice. He rips the top off a trifling little hill, and flings it after the fleeing Greeks, and almost succeeds in capsizing them:

Words; or Why Modern Art Sucks

2010-03-31T21:12:00.001-07:00

I just thought of something: since I don't, still, have new drawings to post, what about doing a post where I just put down some words, and there's no image? Whoa. OK, how's this:

What's Wrong With Modern Art

A thought occurred to me a few days ago, maybe late one evening, in bed, while I was somewhere in that strange zone between waking and dreaming. I thought, "reams of paper, hours of rants, gallons of ink, have been expended in the effort either to defend modernism in art, or to say exactly what's wrong with it. All a waste. It's actually very simple. It's ...." and then I drifted off, and I haven't been able to nail down what that simple thing was, that occurred to me right then.

These are pieces of it:

Traditional art is warm. Modern art is cold.

Traditional art is considerate. Modern art is rude.

Traditional art extends a welcome to all. Modern art asks to see your ID.

Traditional art is art you can have a beer with. Modern art wants to lecture you on your bad habits. If it is willing to talk to you at all.

Traditional art cares about who you are. Modern art cares about who you know.

Traditional art respects you, or at least gives you the benefit of the doubt. Modern art considers you guilty, until proven innocent.

Traditional art knows how to connect with you. Modern art doesn't know how to connect with you, and thinks you should be embarassed about it.

Traditional art is willing to take you as you are. Modern art will never, ever, ever, take you as you are.

When I say "Modern Art," I'm talking about Picasso, Willem de Kooning, Joseph Bueys, Christo, Jackson Pollock, their legions of fellow-travelers, and anything and everything Post-Modern.

When I say "Traditional Art," I'm talking about the good stuff: Vermeer, Michelangelo, Raphael, Giotto, Constable, Blake, Wyeth, Eakins, Winslow Homer, John Singer Sargent ....

Sokrates Rockets Past A Field of Stationary Philosophers

2010-03-30T21:53:00.000-07:00

Almost to the end of the current free-lance project. Looking forward to having a few slivers of spare time, to do new stuff to post here.

Also, I'm still checking things out at WordPress. There are pros, there are cons, to moving my blog there. Maybe, after I make up my mind, I can post something here, about the pros/cons, which might be useful to others.

For now, more old stuff: a drawing from 2005. Pen, ink and colored pencils:

WordPress?

2010-03-29T12:05:00.000-07:00

All of a sudden, when I loaded this blog page this morning, half the images were missing. So I'm having a look at blogging over at WordPress.

Besides, Blogspot is now a piece of Google, right? Google is getting a little too ubiquitous for my taste. I begin to fancy that I'm hearing disembodied voices, saying "Resistance is futile." Non-Google things, like WordPress, start becoming very attractive.

Illustration Work

2010-03-28T19:46:00.000-07:00

This is a 2-page spread from a children's book I'm illustrating right now, under a deadline. The story is an African fable, about a blacksmith. He is a strong man, but he envies those whom he thinks are stronger. But then, through magic, he gets to be any powerful thing he wants -- a king, the sun, a great storm cloud, and so on, each thing stronger than the last -- until he finally learns that the most powerful thing he can be, is just himself. This drawing isn't quite done, but here he's the storm cloud:

It's actually a pretty cool story. Oh -- yes, it will get colored -- but that's actually not part of my job for this book.

Someday I'm Gonna Run Out Of Old Stuff

2010-03-27T22:06:00.000-07:00

End-of-month deadline crunch-time. Ergo, and forsooth, I've nothing, absolutely nothing, new to post. Woe. Hence, more old stuff. Here's a *really* old one (late 1980s), a two-color woodcut. Title: The Unexpected Bird of War:

This was done using a piece of found scrap plywood, from a neighbor's re-modeling project, the sort of plywood pieces which are sometimes used for concrete forms. These have one side waterproofed, I'm not sure how, and quite smooth. The smooth side became the black image side. The other side was rough and unfinished, with a nice knot-hole. That made for a good flaming-red sunset sort of effect.

Illustration work

2010-03-26T21:32:00.000-07:00

No time today for new stuff, so here's some old stuff, that I still like:

This is another chapter illustration done for Neil Harding McAlister's poetry anthology, Rhyme and Reason, published in 2006. I was using a book illustration design motif which has been around for probably centuries, in which the text is worked in one way or another into the illustration image.

Alice asks Thor for directions

2010-03-25T21:37:00.000-07:00

Yes, that's Lewis Carroll's Alice. I thought this might work a little better if the names belonged to story characters that are better known.

Having a little fun here mixing styles -- drawing styles, and styles of fable.

Little Susie Asks Megalotron For Directions

2010-03-24T21:14:00.000-07:00

Just a sketch, so far. Megalotron needs a lot of work, and maybe a different name (Large Larry? Enormous Ed?), and I'm not sure I'm happy with his pose just yet, but it's a decent start:

Blinding of Kyklops

2010-03-23T20:32:00.000-07:00

Well, I used up some juice, getting Lilith done yesterday, and spent most of today trying to get caught up on a free-lance job. So, here's another old piece. This is the Blinding of Kyklops, an illustration for the Odyssey. It's an end-grain maple wood engraving, which I did ten or so years ago:

You know, I have this sneaking suspicion, in the back of my mind, that I've already posted this piece on this blog, last summer. Oh, well. In any case, this is a higher-resolution version.

Lilith; or, You Probably Shouldn't Try To Pick Her Up.

2010-03-22T22:15:00.001-07:00

Here she is:

I think tomorrow I'll draw something involving kittens, or maybe cute little bears.

Lilith, III

2010-03-21T21:42:00.000-07:00

Still not quite done. Almost:

I'm looking forward to doing something without antlers.