Abstractin'

A few years ago I found an old folder in the attic full of post-it notes stuck on sheets of typing paper. Hundreds of post-it notes with head drawings and abstract doodles. Looked a lot like this:

Drawn in MangaStudio. Click to enlarge, altho they
probably won't be improved by closer examination.


The other day I ran across a video on YouTube where an artist was drawing abstract stuff as an exercise for coming up with ideas for more realistic work. I'm not pursuing that goal here. I enjoyed watching the abstractions appear as he drew and thought they were just fine. I want to play, too!

I decided to turn off the thinking machine and just doodle. Draw a line or two, spin the page 90 degrees, draw more lines, spin the page again, draw more lines; and so on, until each one looked right. Well, they don't all look right to me but, at some point, they looked "done."

Drew three pages of them this evening and stacked them in the order I drew them, top to bottom. You can tell by the third page that I desperately wanted to get back to drawing something that wasn't an abstract doodle!

It was a lot fun to focus on composition and not craft. But now I seriously want to draw real stuff, like dogs playing poker, or something like that.

Family Harmony

Here is my latest illustration. It ran on Sunday, Sept. 25 in the Bay Area News Group family of newspapers (Mercury News, East Bay Times, etc.) and online. You can read the excellent story by the always excellent Michelle Quinn at this link.

Drawn in Clip Studio Paint and Photoshop

Below is my first rough. 

I didn't have a clear idea about how to show what was going on in the cloud so I just put an old iPod up there before showing it to the editors. It's the same idea, same concept, but I needed a better symbol. Otherwise there wasn't much change from the get-go.




Here is how I tweaked it for online presentation:




Below is how the great Daymond Gascon used my scribble on the biz front. 



The End.

P.S. Yes, I put that shirt on him on purpose because . . . shhh . . .  (whispering:) I really dig KISS.

Keeping You Safe

This is a piece that ran in the Mercury News on Sunday, Sept. 4. The excellent story, by biz writer Queenie Wong, can be read here, at this link.


This is the reconfigured format for online presentation. Open in new window for a HUGE image.

Here is what it looked like in print.

Design by the always wonderful Daymond Gascon.


That is all!

Blue Tooth At Home

I did this a couple of years ago for a story about blue tooth devices for home and car... I think. It's been a while and I can't find the story online, but that sounds about right.


I'm a bit rushed today so I don't have time to do all the usual legwork, but I'll update this later if I get around to finding the story, the pdf for the printed page, etc.