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

Fast and Furious

Here's an illustration for the April 21 Sunday front of the Mercury News and East Bay Times newspapers. Here is a link to the story about the lawyers behind the tech industry's H-1B visa boom, written by Leonardo Castañeda.

Drawn and colored with Clip Studio Paint.
Open in a new tab for a larger version

The concept was provided by the editors and below is the rough sketch. The wheel barrow was the first idea but it was superseded by the other one while I doodled.

The illustration did not stray from the rough, did it?

And here is what it looked like in print:

This is a pretty spare blog post so here'a a little something extra. Animated cupcakes!

The end

Want Out of the Bay Area?

This illustration ran in the East Bay Times and Mercury News a couple of weeks ago. It appeared with an excellent story by Louis Hansen online and in print. It's nice living in the SF Bay Area, but it's also pretty hard. Expensive for the middle class, crowded, the worst traffic in the world, portions of it burn down every year... etc. The story clearly hit a nerve; 1,000+ dumb comments, which is pretty high for our site.

Drawn in Clip Studio Paint and mostly colored therein.
Also, a bit of Photoshop.

For this assignment I was encouraged to cartoon away. Forget the fancy illustratin'. Just doodle and slap down some color. Lots of fun!

Here's how it looked in print.

Below is the initial sketch. Didn't change much along the way, obviously.

The End

Pandora's Box is in the mail

This illustration ran on the Bay Area News Group website and in print in their family of newspapers – Mercury News, East Bay Times – on Monday, March 4.

So, gene synthesis companies pretty much police themselves when it comes to who they send their product to. Sounds scary, but it sounds even scarier after you read this story by Lisa Krieger at the Mercury News website.

I created the illustration in Clip Studio Paint. We put the label across the bottom because we were uncertain the average newspaper reader would get it – Greek mythology might not be as in the mainstream as it used to be.

Seems the aging newspaper crowd would get it, while the younger readers might confuse it with the music streaming service. Why would they call it "Pandora" anyway?

The End.