A Surprising Illustration

I work for the Mercury News/East Bay Times family of newspapers, and late one morning back in April, I was asked to make a quick illustration for a story about the Oakland Athletics and the team’s potential move to Las Vegas. And as I recall, the story also touched upon the likely inequity of the deals that could be given by cash-strapped Oakland and La$ Vega$ respectively.

This is the final art as drawn in ClipStudio on the iPad.

It had to be a quick turnaround because it was a same-day assignment. We had a brief discussion to come up with an idea and then I sketched the rough, creating my own cartoon interpretation of the A’s mascot, Stomper the elephant.

This is the initial rough. I like the washers, peanuts and comb on the table, symbolic of Oakland's offer being comparable to whatever it is they might have in their pockets! Probably discarded that idea because it might not be a clear message.

It was then vetted and approved. From the get-go the drawing was leaning too far toward being “cute” for my liking but there wasn’t much time to course-correct. And I may have given in to my cheesy inclinations and hammed it up. Obviously.

It was the Sports Page after all, right? It had been a while since I had done a light-hearted illustration for sports, but it wasn’t boldly inappropriate to put a some silliness onto that section front. So i went with it.

I shipped it to the page designer ahead of the deadline — felt pretty good about that — and finished up my shift. Whew.

As it appeared on the front page.
Yikes!

The next morning, before work, I went out for groceries. Imagine my surprise – imagine my loud wheezing gasp when I saw the paper on the news rack. And right there, on the front page — not inside on the sports section but on the A1 front page — was my cute drawing. Ugh!

A1 is prime real estate, the work is the main display on the rack and online for the world. It’s considered a big deal. I’ve done a lot of front-page illustrations over the decades but i’m pretty sure this was the first instance where I was not aware of that fact beforehand.

Although I approach all of my assignments with the same commitment, A1 elicits, for me, a stronger sense of wanting to better represent the work my art is calling attention to.

If I had known would I have done something differently? I shrug and say I don’t know. Maybe I wouldn’t have made his eyes so big, his cheeks so shiny; perhaps I would have muzzled the cute.

Looking at it now I feel like I may have gotten away with something cheeky without aiming to.

Lost Memories

Last month, a villain broke a window on my car and swiped a pouch from the back seat. (The door was unlocked, wretched burglar!) The criminal was likely disappointed by the plunder; they made off with only pens, pencils and a sketchbook of priceless sentimental value.

Alas, the sketchbook held about ten years of doodles, all drawn by me and my kid; drawings at the park, at the beach, at the zoo, sitting in the coffee shop. Here are two drawings of my daughter during her ballet classes when she was six years old.

I’m over it now, mostly. But here are a few of the doodles lost. I took pictures of some pages over the years, but not very many. It had a black faux-leather cover, and if you held it just so in the light, you could see a black sharpie caricature of me, drawn by a four or five year old Evelyn. That was my favorite drawing in the book.

   

Not totally down in the dumps over it, but watch out! There are some real jerks roving around out in the real world.

The End

Where Did 2022 Go?

Totally missed 2022, didn’t I? That’s alright, nobody’s really looking. I’m going to start this up again and pretend like it’s the next day. That sounds familiar (see previous post) but here I go.

2023 has been marked by series of misfortunes and medical concerns that have hobbled just about everything going on in my life. I have hopes that my choppy waters will smooth out and perhaps i can find a nice wave to ride comfortably through the rest of the year.

One of my personal trials has been a detached retina, and i am still recovering from the corrective surgery but I have returned to work and I am trying to carve out some time for personal art. Prior to the uncoupling of the retina I had been drawing cartoon heads on blank business cards and digitally coloring them just for funsies. I wanted to get back to that.

This batch are all one-eyed doodles. I could make a go of it as a cyclopian illustrator — there are minor challenges and discomforts to overcome — but my eye is healing nicely and I should be back to normal.

Now that Twitter is becoming a sewer, I’m compelled to start posting here regularly. One of my goals for this space was to have a written record of what I’ve been doing, and taking the time to put down some of my captured thoughts along side the work. I lost track of that, and I lost interest in doing it only for myself. 

But with a young daughter who is now starting middle-school, this may not be a completely selfish vanity project. Perhaps she will want to see where I was at, and my twitter record may be too tedious and scattershot to wade through; I barely have the patience to look back more than a week my timeline. It’s a hassle! And, at any moment, our twitter archives may be lost to the whims of a wicked billionaire. Hopefully this will be a safer space.

 Hello, Future Evelyn! I sure liked going to the park with you. The hot days, the windy days, barefoot-wading through the creek or watching the squirrels — it was bliss. 

More later! In the next post…

Eighteen Months Later...

Hey, my blog is still up. Might as well see if it still works. I'll just pretend like it's the next day.

I took a week off of work and it was good to have a break. I hoped to find the time (and the drive) to ignite some of the personal projects I've been daydreaming about, but I conjured nothing of substance. Chores and practical diversions chewed up most of my anticipated free time. I did manage to doodle this little collection of characters, though!

Drawn in Clip Studio Paint. Open in a new tab for a larger image.

Most of these figures are out-of-my-head freestyle creations. A few were adapted from photos I saw online, although they no longer resemble the source material. A couple were inspired by people I sketched during a visit to a street fair this summer. 

Drawn in Clip Studio Paint. Open in a new tab for a larger image.

During the process I ginned up the swatches and loosely adhered to the color schemes. I thought it would be fun to limit myself to three or four colors per character and see what I could come up with. However, if I felt I needed another color I’d add another swatch or two. And in some cases I switched out colors that weren't working for me. In the end I used any color I wanted and the swatches were nothing more than a reminder that I shouldn't use too many colors.

I aimed to keep the drawings simple. I began each one using the lasso tool, blocking in big shapes, adding and subtracting as I went along and then waded in with a pen or brush tool to add details. I like the simpler ones better, generally speaking. I overworked a few of them and spent more time than I intended but I was having a good time and that's what this was all about in the first place.

*     *     *

I've made illustrations for work since I last posted but I fell from the habit of sharing them here. I've shown several on Twitter just because it's easier, y'know? I felt the impulse, wrote two sentences and tweeted I them out. But I've stopped doing that, too.

But blurting out the artwork in that manner diminishes the experience for me. I can't even recall the last drawing I launched into the void. Twitter has turned into a ephemeral stream of forgettable fragments. That's okay, I suppose; I guess that's what it's designed for.

I have a young daughter and in my more pensive moments I believe that a blog of my work, accompanied by some of my thoughts about it, would be a more substantive memento than a rat-a-tat spray of tiny images and abbreviated captions lost in a nearly unsearchable database. I might try to revive this blogging habit for that purpose.

Now I'll post this to twitter, too! Rat-a-tat!

Covid-19 comic

This is the first comic page I've done in a very long time. It's nice to make one again. Hopefully this signals a return to that hobby. But I want a cheerier topic.

Drawn and colored in Clip Studio Paint on the iPad.
Open in a new window for a HUGE image.

The end.

Super Bowl 54 Special Section Cover

Cover for the Super Bowl special section.

Clip Studio Paint on an iPad

Here is what it looked like in print:

Fending Off Bio Terrorism

An illustration for a story about bioterrorism

Drawn with Clip Studio Paint on an iPad.

Here is how it looked in print:

asdasdadasdas

Just a Few Doodles

Nothing serious. A casual sketch created during my daughter's ballet class; some heads I invented or loosely based on faces found on the internet.

Drawn on the iPad with Paper by WeTransfer –
my favorite app for sketching out in the wild.

Drawn with Clip Studio Paint
(and I still wish they'd change the name back to Manga Studio)

Drawn with Paper by WeTransfer

That's all for now...

Illustration Flurry

Another small batch of illustrations I've made for the newspaper within recent memory. All art drawn in Clip Studio Paint with a dash of Photoshop.

Pollinating the Blog... With ART!

I update the blog once in a while, just to see if it still sprouts viewers. Surveying the stats, it appears that 5-20 bots look at the blog every day. Once every month or two I'll get a few of days of 200-300 hits as a few people look around after I've posted artwork somewhere else.

There is much more activity when I post regularly, but I haven't done that in a long time. After I make a new post – and get a small charge from seeing my artwork up here on the internet gallery wall – I often feel inspired to make more; and that feeling fueled the frenzy of posts I made in the early years of this blogspot endeavor. I still get that feeling even now, but it has been dulled by the fall of the community that used to revolve around blogspot and by the understandable 14-year itch.

I drew these on my iPad in Clip Studio Paint. Four of the heads were referenced from random portraits
found on the internet, but I discarded the reference after I roughed in the features. The rest I free-styled.

I've mentioned this many times before but I often worry that my working life and the ennui that settles upon most of us as we grow older has dulled the joy of making art for pleasure. When I manage to make the time to draw, I enjoy dragging the pencil across the paper – I don't much care if the result is any good, I'm there for the experience and the thrill of the moment. The drawing itself usually underwhelms me but I feel better for having done it.

So, here are some underwhelming doodles sprinkled upon the dry soil of the blog. Perhaps some viewers will appear, and perhaps more art.

The End