Colored Ink and Watercolor



I'll stop saying work is nuts...because it is and will be...but I did these today. The colored inks and acrylic ink are really fun to work with. With black ink I have to be careful not to bleed too much or I lose too much of the image. With these colored inks, you get all kinds of interesting colors and textures from ink mixing with watercolors.

Work Much. Fun Little



Working a lot lately...very tired, but it was fun to squeeze in this life drawing session. Just playing some more with ink. The three poses in the second image and the three poses in the last image were all 1 minute poses. The rest were 3 and 5 minutes. Off to bed...

Wednesday Figure Drawing


This week I tried out some new art supplies. My friend Cholki suggested I try different line widths a while back, so I picked up some dipping pens with various nib widths. It's a little tricky changing tools when you're doing very quick sketches, but for this session I used one thick and one medium nib with red and black waterproof ink. It completely changes the way you think about adding color with red line versus black. It'll take some practice to get more out of it.

Thank You

I Have a Dream

"But there is something that I must say to my people, who stand on the warm threshold which leads into the palace of justice: In the process of gaining our rightful place, we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds. Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred. We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline. We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence. Again and again, we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force."

Beyond Vietnam

"This I believe to be the privilege and the burden of all of us who deem ourselves bound by allegiances and loyalties which are broader and deeper than nationalism and which go beyond our nation's self-defined goals and positions. We are called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for the victims of our nation and for those it calls "enemy," for no document from human hands can make these humans any less our brothers."

Thank you.

Wednesday Life Drawing


Here are this weeks life drawings. Being able to spend a couple of hours in the middle of the day doing these is great. It's just enough time to warm up and start getting somewhere. It gets tricky to find space for these to dry as I'm cranking them out during these sessions. I like laying them all out on the floor at night and choosing the best ones to post. I culled about half of what I painted today, which is pretty good and even the stuff I cull keeps getting a little better each time.

Santa Monica Tree

I spent most of the day out in Santa Monica, wandering about, enjoying the weather to try and get away from working in front of the computer. I ran into my pal D'Lo who was wandering about as I painted this tree. Later I picked up some more inspirational Ralph Steadman books and visited my pal Gary.

I could have done so much more with this one if I hadn't painted in the darker values on the second layer of branches...oh well. I tried to use some blue and red to get that sense of depth back, but it would work better if it wasn't as dark. Those trees are amazing!

Watercolor Faces



Here are some more practice faces. This time, some are from photoes of Afghan refugees (taken from the internet) and others are from photoes I took in Pakistan in 2005. These are drawn straight in ink and then painted.

Peshawari Faces



So, I'm back to working on faces again. Here are a few Peshawari faces from some great photoes I found on flickr. I prefer to work from life, but capturing a likeness is going to require some stillness. See if you can figure out who's who. These are all really quick and straight pen sketches. I want to bring more looseness into faces while still capturing the essense of the person I am drawing.

Wednesday Figure Drawing


Here are this weeks Figure Drawings. The last for this year! If you look at the first two sketches, you can see that they are the same pose. Some of my previous posts have examples of this too. Often, after finishing a sketch, if there's time left on that pose, I'll do another quick sketch before time runs out. It is easier to bring out the pose in simple lines. When I put detail in, it quickly reduces the overall energy. Of course, you can't get that energy in detail without being able to do so with very little line either. That's one of the things I'm working on here.

Wednesday Figure Drawing




Here are this week's figure drawings. Wish I had time to go out and do some costumed figures as well...trying to simplify complex clothing would be a great thing to work on. Also, it would be interesting to see how much of the underlying movement I could bring out in the clothes..hmm.

Wednesday Figures



Here are today's figure drawings. I tried a few with more line. It's really tricky drawing a complete figure in ink straight away, but it helped that the two closeups were 10 minutes instead of 5. It takes me at least double the time to think out these lines if I start caring about making it a little more "refined". I've got to start moving somewhere new with this stuff...too busy with animation stuff lately, but eventually I'll do some more watercolors with a clear mind, hopefully for a few hours straight and things will start going somewhere from here. That's why I have no shame about stuffing my pockets with art supplies wherever I go...I've got too much to do and too little time to do it! Don't we all...

Saddle Ranch and Backstage Cafe



Two Birthdays. One night. Tons of new faces. The Saddle Ranch sketch kind of became a mess of color. I lost the structure and depth of it. I got too caught up in the details. The second sketch, from inside the Backstage Cafe turned out a bit better. I'll have to keep working out how to simplify all that detail into something that gets the idea across. Either way, it's fun, and people are always asking where all that stuff (art supplies) came from. My pockets are always full :).

Wednesday Figure Drawing


Here are this weeks figure drawings. Why so much green this time? Well there are many deep philosphical reasons for the use of this particular shade of green...but mostly it is the color I've used the least in my slowly diminishing watercolor set. I lay down the ink for these by drawing as if I really don't care what it looks like. Kind of like when you were a kid and your teacher forced you to write or draw something you didn't want to do and you made that pouty face and scribbled some stuff out of spite. Aww yeah. Except I'm not all pouty about it. I just don't care too much whether it looks good or not. I look at the figure, and make quick mental notes about where all the parts are, but when I lay down the line, I just let it be messy and don't try too hard to make it clean or correct. Then I add the color in much the same way. I put an almost random color down and then push a bit of contrast with some more colors, check out the shadows and light on the figure and finish it up. I think it's time to start reaching for that next step.

Kahani


I've put a lot of time into my personal animation work these days, so not much in the way of new paintings. I did however do 4 illustrations for the Fall 2006 issue of Kahani. It is a quarterly short story magazine for children.

If you'd like to see the work of other talented artists as well as the rest of my illustrations, you can order this issue. Visit the site for details about the current issue as well as contributer bios.

It was a lot of fun to work on, and nice to see the results in print.