Fruit Bat Vampire! Some old comics from 2010.

They are all absurd notions. That's the only kind of notion I really entertain.

So if step one is to have an idea, and somehow the last step is to get published, then somewhere in there like step 437 or 438, right after draw all the pictures and then Redraw half of the pictures, is make a felt doll of the main character, to include in the proposal.  Is that an absurd notion? Probably. But if it gets this story off of my drawing table (kitchen table) and onto a book shelf at powells or Elliot Bay books someday, than the last fifteen hours of felting will have been worth it. 

Credit where it's due, my little man helped a lot, especially on the leaf cloak, and also climbing the tree to pose him.

Before and After...why is good work never easy?....ugh.

Before

After

I don't even know if it's an improvement but I just have to go back and fix it so it's consistent. Twelve hours later. Seriously can you spot ten differences?

One a day is my new speed. How to live the dream part two.

Two years ago I broke my leg and without work or anything beyond the reach of the couch to distract me for a couple weeks, I got serious about working on my long brewing children's book. 

The stories came from my own childhood and were honed in my adulthood, by retelling them to my kids. So they are very much a part of me and can be hard to let into the world. My huge insecurities come out in spades when entertaining the notion of producing something this big. I'm fine with doodling some space cats or robot sharks for no reason but this is my life's dream here. I have always been working towards one day becoming an illustrator, and despite being light years away from an actual career, this is really the closest I have ever been. 

So, I really did just spill beer all over three pages of this finished work while trying to show it off to the neighbor kid, and through some miracle it totally is beer proof. Thank the gods! 

This is an illustration I finished maybe a year ago, followed by the one I did this afternoon. One great thing about taking this project on is that I have gotten much faster and more confident in my technique ( if you can call it that). I know the steps well enough that I don't have to second guess myself as much. It's just pencil sketch, colored pencil sketch, erase, paint and finish with colored pencil outlines. So what took me maybe two days last year and ended up needing to be touched up and eventually totally scrapped, took me a couple of hours this afternoon. That kind of improvement is even more satisfying than the product. 

Here's the before and after. I chose to redo because the line work and shapes were awkward and also because the characters looked flat and bored, like they couldn't make eye contact. Also I keep looking for ways to sneak fun stuff in, like the squirrel stuffing his face. Yay cookies!!!

How to draw for a living.

This is, no joke, my life's work right here. This story has been told and retold to and by me for three generations now and needs to finally be part of the world's story. This summer I am tracking down publishing leads and finally becoming slightly more than just a middle school math teacher and summer science educator. Dream with me now folks. It has to be possible.

egoist, street art enthusiast, beercolor painter and dork...in that order...today.

...pronounced TIP-dog.

Kevin Woida's awesome painting hangs above the turntables to inspire thorough and relieving scratching.

 There is the huge question that  wonders me to sleep some nights... "what happened to all the stuff I painted?"  Granted a lot of it is in the garage. That is a problem I think a lot of painters face, but even looking through the paintings I managed to document for this blog "project", which represents less than half of the paintings I have done in the last eight years or whatever, the fact is almost everything I have painted in my life is gone. I would estimate that I retain less than five percent of my own work. So where the hell is it?

I was visiting my dear frienddd (long tangential run on here) whose nickname I recently realized is not even "Greazy DC" but "GC" which does make sense since those are his actual initials and he's not form the DC area, hes from the KC area as the hat (backup hat not pictured) would suggest, (back to the  important sentence) AAAAnd realized that some of my art is in his house, along with the art of more talented and interesting painters like Kevin Woida. So I started a new "project" (just these three photos really, in all likely-hood this is the end of the "project") to track down art in peoples lives and homes.  How does it share the space with the rest of a persons important things? Does it play nice? I do this because I am an egotistical wretch and need to know that my passing through this world will leave some kind of mark. If not a bruise, a ripple. I am really exited to see how far this "project will carry me. (I have decided to abandon the project just now, because it is too much work and not interesting)

 But something that does interest me is this awesome memorial? to a guy with a beard who may have only been a year old. Found on the top of Black Butte fire watch, where I left my second annual vampire Jet Jet.

 I leave these tiny hastily done paintings around when I travel because I am too old and allergic to jail to do real street art, but part of my job here is to keep up on whats going on in the streets by way of the creative class. This is what I noticed the arty types throwing up on the walls of Portland this month. As well as a big shout out to my favorite dive bar, the epicenter of my love story, and the home of what may well be Portland's best fries.

best snail style!

acupuncture study guide? on the 8 market on Belmont

Can you guess where this is?

It's the bar I met my wife in.

The bathroom mirrors are not even mirrors really.

House across from Nuestra Cucina, So good!

Then finally because I am actually turning into a quieter more respectful and observant being with every breath, I continued my watercolor practice. It is so nerdy and makes my brain hurt while I do it. But I am starting to enjoy the flood of considerations that I have to meet as I priorities light, color, shape, distance, perspective, butt pain, bug tolerance and the difference between painting with water or beer. Yes at least one of these is technically a beer-color painting.

Beautiful lake, secret location, can't tell.

Respectable pond, at Black Butte.

Towels, BBQ, Trees.

 

Just Trees.

Clinton St.

The Great Harrison Cady, Expert Animal Smithy!!

There are so many illustrators who I just love and imitate often. Sometimes as I'm looking through the book shops I see some I don't recognize, and that may have been overwritten by history.

A couple years ago I had this experience with the work of Harrison Cady and then after seeing his amazing illustrations that once, I have been running into them everywhere.









The stories of "Reddy Fox" are one of those free downloadable stories I ended up with on my phone and my son listens to them over and over. Then I realized that the handwork teacher at my school reads these books to her students while they work quietly.

I am just floored by this guys illustrations. Super balanced and full of form. This kind of confident, clean line work and quick hand that is so typical of newspaper illustrators of his time, similar in some ways to George Herriman or  Winsor McCay, and even Dr Seuss started working this way under the constraints of deadlines. It was a rich environment to bring up talented drawers in. I sometimes wish I could enforce that kind of pressure on myself to push myself.

 You can really see how a guy like this had learned from observing nature and field drawing, and then how well he crafts these perfectly proportioned and dimensional little characters is astounding. Each one is so readable and if you squint looks as perfectly balanced as a yin-yang.

Harrison Cady had a long association with Thornton Burgess, illustrating the writer's books, including Happy Jack, and his daily newspaper column, "Bedtime Stories". Their partnership spanned five decades, beginning with Baby Possum Has a Scare (c. 1912), The Adventures of Reddy Fox (1913) and Buster Bear Invites Old Mr. Toad to Dine (c. 1914), The series continued into the 1950s with At Paddy the Beaver's Pond (1950), followed by the reprint The Animal World of Thornton Burgess (1962).

Sketch Book Update. Becoming the old woman I have always been.

front stoop

 There was a  time when I was feeling like I had given up on art. When being a dad, or trying to have a teaching career had made the idea of sitting in the garage and painting for hours seem like the most ridiculous waste of time. I left the paint and the garage alone for most of two years I think. But when Audra came back from Bali after helping out with a Flora Bowley art adventure she bought a couple of canvases and made the whole family start painting again. A lot of thinks became clear to me when I began creating art again.

Firstly I recognized an emotional debt to the task of creating art. I saw that it had been there for me when I was a emotionally retarded high-schooler, drawing anorexic long necked nudists, and gangster rabbits and crap like that. It had gotten me to and through college and helped me make almost all of the important and lasting friendships I still count on now. Not to mention I use it to gain street cred with students and barflies alike.  So I felt for the first time that I owed art something.

I realized also that through art I am not only just enhancing my experience of awareness in the moment of drawing or painting observationally, but even just sketching from my imagination, or painting a sunken landscape full of prehistoric monsters, I am constantly seeking to understand the shapes and forms of the world as it is. My mind is always at work to make sense of space, distance, botanical structures, geology, anatomy, architecture, weather and atmosphere, shadow and light. Drawing and painting becomes a scientific task to recall how things fit together and appear to the eye. To use your sense of sight to recreate the images of your experience is a way of practicing your understanding. Each sketch, drawing and painting is a tiny thought experiment, in which you are literally measuring the dimensions of the world around you. There is no end to the insights that loom out of the fog of a blank page.

Sauvie Island

My Dog, french for werewolf.

And out of this rekindled desire to seek out artistic practice and strengthen my network of art friends I called up Greazy DC and we went to what I'm certain is not the most awkward life drawing session in the world, because I'm sure it gets weirder on a daily basis somewhere, but the most awkward pony themed life drawing session I have ever walked out on.

But we didn't give up and the next weekend we hunted down the Urban Sketchers at Palio on Ladd's Circle and I saw what could be possible with just a small watercolor set, a sketchbook and a Saturday morning. It was mostly a crew of lovely ladies and I felt for the first time in a while that I had found people who could teach me something valuable, without the ludicrous tuition costs I had come to expect, because Urban Sketchers is totally free (monetarily and otherwise).

Of course I am failing to express my point here, but what I am really trying to say is Thanks, to everyone who ever hung out and drew. I have a worthwhile task I can grow old with, and friends to join me in the task.

Stretch of river bank across from Oaks Park.

One of the least interesting views of the back fence and the woman who came to do the census at our house for five hours.

Road Trip Jet Jets. Littering...Lettering....Letting go.

A town called Beaver. It will grow up to be stronger for the name.

Salt Lake City...goes on forever.

 While Audra drives I get to paint some little Jet Jets to deliver to the stops along the way. It has gotten to the point where any time we go on any kind of road trip I'm packing my little art set first and putting hanging wires on some scrap wood...then packing my clothes.

Before I started posting them here I had put up maybe a hundred around town over the years. Now it is more of a traveling exhibit. I get the feeling like many of them must just get disposed of lickitty split, but hold out hope that somewhere someone like me is finding these little guys and taking them into their life somehow, maybe to adorn the walls of their bathroom. (Where most wierd little artends up, lets be honest.)  It has lately felt like the kind of project that will take years and years before I really know if it is working, or what working is for that matter. Is it reverse shoplifting, or artful littering? I don't know.

Downtown Boise

Boise Idaho right outside the Fork.