Categories: Art

• Sketch Crawl 2012 – the Zoo

  Well despite the chilly, damp weather, my friend Ann and I braved the San Francisco Zoo yesterday for what was for me, the first sketch crawl in at least a year. It wasn’t easy keeping the lines under control while shivering but we did our level best. One up side to going on a day like that – the place was empty! My favorite animals of the day? “Cynthia and Zakary” – a mother/baby koala combo who were adorably cute [...]

• Superheroes: Icons of Good, Evil and Everything in Between Exhibition Photos

  As of last weekend, the art show I co-curated in Albuquerque is closed but the fine folks at 516 Arts sent me some gorgeous exhibition photos and I just had to share a few of them. The show was great in person, but these photos really do an amazing job of making the setup look good. I can’t figure out why WordPress doesn’t want to include all the captions/credits on these photos… “Mr. Bends” – Esteban Bojorquez “Bik’eh Hozho” – [...]

• Home made holiday cards – ten years and counting!

  Yup, it was ten years ago I started making my own holiday cards. Originally I thought it was the kind of thing artsy-fartsy types exchanged with their artsy fartsy friends. The problem is, there never was much of what you could call an “exchange”. Year after year, I mailed out stacks of cards and got nothing back and then it occurred to me – my friends while artsy-fartsy, are also lazy, tech-saturated bastards who can’t be bothered to answer an [...]

• Once more…with felting.

  Well, my latest goofy attempt at being creative involves lots of dyed raw wool and a host of very, very sharp needles. I saw a talented young guy at a crafts fair in San Jose, selling the cutest little felted animal sculptures and determined that I too, needed to felt. I bought one of his little kits (an owl) and made my first felted sculpture in a felt-by-numbers kind of way. Having had a modicum of success with that, I [...]

• The Superhero Art Show is a Success!

  One of the best things that happened to me this year was working with 516 Arts on an exhibit entitled: “Superheroes: Icons of Good, Evil and Everything in Between” and in a blatantly tacky piratization of the 516 blog site, I’m re-posting here a piece I wrote there called “Notes from a Co-Curator”. The show is up until January 7, 2012 and if you are in the Albuquerque area, you should really check it out.

• Design Drawing – Work Day 4

  Today’s exercise utilizes tone AND line to approach the rendering. I felt certain things about this were successful but as usual, when I scanned the thing I saw all kinds of tonal imbalances I couldn’t see before. Whew….almost done with this scene. Only one more rendering of it and I’m glad because I’m sick of it. My back will thank me too since I won’t be sitting on the floor for hours anymore.

• Design Drawing continues! Work Day 3

  Well, after being gone on vacation for 10 days I’m back to the drawing project. This one made me revisit my horrible undergraduate days in my one design class where I unfailingly managed to make a crooked, blot-filled mess of every technical pen drawing I was asked to make. Some of us are just straight-edge and T-square challenged and some of us also have been cursed with unsteady hands. For some reason today my hand’s shaking more than usual even [...]

• Design Drawing – Work day 2

  I knew today would be painful and I was right. My biggest weakness (aside from perspective, still life, architecture and composition) is seeing tone and so it took a lot of courage to get through today’s exercise. The point was to again draw the same scene as the first two drawings but this time, use nothing but tone to render it using a black Prismacolor pencil. The tone is applied in strokes going the same direction as the plane it [...]

• Design drawing: work day 1

  Well, true to my word, I went out to Office Max today, bought my nifty little technical pens, dug out the ol’ T-square, and started work. The following are my first attempts at design drawing, warts and all. The first exercise is to draw the same environment multiple times, employing different techniques. The first is a basic line drawing with all line weights the same. Being self-conscious of my inability to render architecture, I figured I’d stay inside where no [...]

• And so…it begins.

  After seeing “Julie and Julia” this weekend, I’ve decided I’m starting a little blog project of my own. I suffer from the same disability as author Julie Powell did – that is, the inability to finish anything I start and so in the interest of becoming more artistically productive, I thought I’d take a page out of her book. After all, wasn’t it Picasso who once said, “When you see a good idea – feel free to rip it off”? [...]