sketch and a haircut, two bits

Things are so crazy right now, I had to squeeze in time to do a drawing while Alia gave me a haircut in the kitchen. I used one of those Copic pens with a brush point... pretty fancy. They work really well for producing a variety of line thicknesses and quick pools of pure black.

mother of all comebacks

Well, after an unusually long hiatus I have decided to start drawing again. It's not that I haven't been posting, I really haven't been drawing. With my new job taking so much of my time, the lack of a dedicated studio space, and launching a new business venture, I haven't had time to draw daily, much less post and blog about my drawings.
My wife and I started a letterpress business last December, Darling Press, and this is a sketch for a Mother's Day card idea I had. Alia and I are both strongly influenced by the aesthetics of Art Nouveau. This drawing was done after spending four or five hours researching borders, fonts, imagery, and artists. It's a slow process, but looking at art is always fun. It might be obvious to see Gustav Klimt's influence on me.
I am leaning towards a four color card, we'll see what happens!

a mildly surreal wedding reception

jer gives eric good advice
alia ponders paper folded
and annelise knocks three times

nadir malfunction

Well, I got the extension.
This is what I came up with.
I hope they like it. These last two drawings were pretty complex.

lovejoy looking west

I was commissioned to draw two images over the weekend, but I spent so much time on this one that I haven't started the other, yet. Now it's too late to start. I hope they don't mind if I ask for a day's extension to do the other one. I mean, look! It's gorgeous!
The problem was, I used too small of a pen, so it took too much time to fill in the detail. I had too much room to work with, I guess.

big head little girl

This is a portrait of my wife and daughter,
and, believe it or not,
the source photograph looked even weirder.

cephalopod

This is Simon B'diddley.
Borne in the winds,
he's my new protagonist
a one-legged elephant.

by Wednesday

Technically, there is no drawing in this piece, but I just made it, and I wanted to include it here, too.
The real piece is blue ink on white paper, but for some reason, when I uploaded it, it came up as brown on Blogger... I don't mind so much. Originally, I'd wanted to print it in brown, but changed to blue when someone in the studio had some extra blue ink and someone else had some extra black. I don't know why it's brown here other than some synchronistic happening to allow me to see what I missed.

sometimes a great notion

I just finished reading Sometimes a Great Notion, by Ken Kesey, who is now my favorite author (sorry J.D. Salinger), and which is now my favorite book (sorry Franny and Zooey). I have recently been trying to meet friends out and about so that we can sketch each other and talk drawing talk, but, somehow, things never work out, and we never meet up. I don't think it's because I am overly flaky. It's just hard to coordinate between people when life is so fluid.

birds of a feather

Alia's Birthday Card

I barely got this one done in time!This is probably the weirdest thing I have ever drawn..

frank and bertha

Someday, long after I'm dead, I'll be a famous artist, and people will have portraits of my obscure relatives on their walls...

three-and-a-half

I was freeze-framing a video of a film-strip of the countdown number sequence so I could screen-grab a number to draw when this guy popped up.

number nine, number nine, number nine

The lure of the open road

Well, the wedding took all my creative energy, but the wedding is over now. It was beautiful and wonderful and perfect and all that, but now my drawing is all rusty.

This is a commission for a friend.
He will be riding his bike from Seattle to Portland, and he wanted a "goat dressed as a cowboy riding a bike."
This should make him happy.
Now, part two, I need to learn to screenprint so I can slap this on some shirts for him....

alia and little turtle

I wish all of our chickens were as personable as Little Turtle is. We just got some more baby chicks -- a buff orpington and a gold laced wyandotte -- and i've been trying to handle them more than i did our first batch of chicks. i've never really been a bird person, and i didn't realize that chickens, especially, were so social.
I really like this analogy:
chickens:us::parrots:pirates

the view *outside*

I did another drawing of my view at work today. This time I sat outside and stared at the REI building. I wish we had more public art and less public advertisements. From what I gather -- and I must gather this information, not only as a public record, but because the building was finished before I moved to Portland -- the REI building sits on the site of the original Dignity Village that the city moved out by the airport so people in their condos wouldn't have to look at a city of tents beneath the overpass.

another idea

It's just an elaborate doodle, really.

nice view

the text at the bottom reads, "i worked in the art gallery all day, and this was my view."
I'm not complaining. I'm just saying.