Topic: Studio Notes

I’m lis­ten­ing to The Art & Sto­ry pod­cast, Episode 004 «The Big Style». Mark Rudolph and Jerzy Drozd are reach­ing back into their ear­ly com­ic influ­ences. Com­ic artists are absolute­ly the first illus­tra­tors that inspired me to copy them and do what they do. It’s got­ten me think­ing about who my ear­ly influ­ences were — and when I say «ear­ly» I mean cer­tain­ly before art skool. I’m look­ing back rough­ly at ages twelve to sev­en­teen. This is who I … Read the rest

Last night I stayed in the stu­dio until after mid­night when I real­ized I was parked in a street­clean­ing zone and was risk­ing a $35 ticket.

I worked on a few drafts of the back­ground of this Rotring Art­Pen and Vis­con­ti ink bot­tle and did­n’t come upon a solu­tion, so I went in to the bot­tle to do the first lay­er of hatch­ing. That’s as far as I got before remem­ber­ing I was parked on the Mon­day side of … Read the rest

I was­n’t able to spend much time in the stu­dio today, but I’m forc­ing myself to keep adding to this, even if it’s a small por­tion at a time and the draw­ing real­ly isn’t yet tak­ing shape in my head. I can’t afford to sit around wait­ing for the muse to throw a brick at my head; the name of this game is just to keep mov­ing forward.

I have a lot to do over the next few months, so … Read the rest

I don’t know where this is head­ing. I’m run­ning right up against the lim­its of my ren­der­ing vocab­u­lary here and I feel like I’m fum­bling around in the dark. I’m find­ing myself wish­ing I was work­ing larg­er so that I’d have more room. At this scale I don’t have much room to use tex­ture with­out mud­dy­ing it up and mak­ing it too dark. That leads me to rely on out­line, and that way there be monsters.

I’m not sure how … Read the rest

Look­ing at this scan I’m hav­ing a lot of trou­ble see­ing the good in here, so I offer this in my defense: the image to the right is a sec­tion of the draw­ing in progress about two inch­es wide. So all the slop­pi­ness is exag­ger­at­ed by the amount larg­er the image is shown on screen than on the draw­ing table.

I do think I’ll have to touch this up after I fin­ish the rest of the draw­ing but for now I’m … Read the rest

In the long-stand­ing tra­di­tion of launch­ing ecom­merce web­sites with incom­plete fea­tures, min­i­mal con­sid­er­a­tion to user expe­ri­ence and inad­e­quate test­ing, I bring you the new incar­na­tion of the old Paroxysm.com.

Sad­ly, you won’t find the adven­tures of ‘Zoop’ Dubin, Pri­vate Eye there any longer, but maybe that can be added at some lat­er date. What you will find is a col­lec­tion of my pen & ink draw­ings, pho­tographs, and lux­o­graph­ic prints, and a shop­ping cart for pur­chas­ing prints … Read the rest

A recent debate/poll in The Econ­o­mist end­ed with a tal­ly of 71% to 29% declar­ing that copy­right laws do more harm than good. While I’m the first to admit that there are seri­ous prob­lems with the exist­ing han­dling of intel­lec­tu­al prop­er­ty, I’m appalled at the seem­ing­ly wide­spread notion that cre­ativ­i­ty should not be legal­ly pro­tect­ed and encouraged.

Last year, only the $700 Bil­lion bailout dis­tract­ed the House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives from pass­ing the Orphan Works Act, which would … Read the rest

I’ve spent the bet­ter part of the after­noon in the stu­dio work­ing on the sec­ond in my series of draw­ings of San Fran­cis­co land­marks (if I’ve start­ed the sec­ond it’s offi­cial­ly a series, right?) I’m in the ear­ly pen­cil phase, doing a lot of study of ref­er­ence pho­tos and cre­at­ing a lot of out­lines, not attend­ing to ques­tions about texture.

One of the fas­ci­nat­ing things about the human mind is its capac­i­ty to cre­ate con­nec­tions from total­ly dis­parate fields, and … Read the rest