Skywhale

Ahh. Two in the morning, and I can hear a train going by outside my window. We're only two blocks from the train tracks, and I really love the sound of it. Sometimes when I'm half-woken by the sound of the whistle, it sounds like singing... I don't know why, but trains are big and loud and comforting.

Whales are also big and loud and I would imagine comforting. They're like underwater trains, only they can go wherever they want to and aren't all tied down to the tracks. Here's a whale that can REALLY go wherever she wants to - in reality she only looks like a whale, and is bloated with helium or whatever it was that they put in blimps to make them explode. She circles above fields and then descends to eat blackbirds like plankton.

Also there are whalewatching trips, only they're in biplanes.

yeeeup.

Kids and mushrooms

Went and got a watercolor notebook, because I've been feeling like ripping my sketchbook watercolors into a million pieces and scattering them to the winds. They've been really messy recently.

Here's a couple of shroom people and a couple of kids from today. Getting up more than a half hour before I have to go to work may actually be working out for me... I can get a lot more done.

Really very tired of meat. All my pants except for a pair of really dressy ones smell disconcertingly of salmon, even after multiple soap-filled runs through the washing machine (which incidentally is still gone; I wonder if the property managers are going to send us a ransom note or something).

Weekend Update

You can tell it's my weekend when I actually post pictures twice in a row. Right now I'm getting everything together to scan it and paste it all together into a portfolio - and then I get to go try and find somewhere to print it.

Went down to the equestrian center again today, played with a big beautiful grey horse, and drew some others.

Watch where you're going, or you'll fall down a hole...

Tried watercoloring this and got some really nice thumbnails but it got too messy when I tried to do an actual what, 3x5 inch painting. Got all chewed up because I was thinking with the brush which is BAD, kids. I'm sure it won't look as bad in the morning as it does right now.

Bats often have rabies.

A hound on his horse...

Someone on the Drawing Board posted a bunch of sketches from George R. R. Martin's fantasy series, Song of Ice and Fire. Reagan did one a while ago, which is awesome and worth checking out, but I haven't really messed with it yet - though I love the books and the characters and am absolutely and totally in love with everything about the series.

Anyway, that's a sketch of Sandor Clegane - The Hound - and his horse, Smiler. Or Driftwood. Whichever. You can tell I was more interested in drawing the horse than the guy...

And here's another. Arya, from the same series.

Fiddling with Photoshop

Working on finishing things up. More updates (and sketches) in the semi-near future...

Laundry... and handlebar moustaches.

What a title for a post.

Our apartment complex's washing machine was abused with a hacksaw by some guy (or, I don't know, girl - just to be equal opportunity) who wanted the quarters that we the tenants had dutifully fed to our trusty washing machine. Unfortunately, in his quarter-lusting fervor, he got a little carried away and basically hacked off the entire control box for our washing machine. All that was left was a bunch of chopped off wires.
Now, I should have been able to take that bunch of colorful wires and figure out a way to hotwire that sucker... but sadly I am not Wesley Crusher or R2-D2. Or James Bond - he'd probably have some gadget to make a washing machine work if there was some booty in it for him somewhere.
Then the people we lease from came and took the entire washer away. A week and a half ago. No sign of its replacement...

I fell back on my old college rule: If it's at the bottom of a pile and you don't remember wearing it, it's as good as clean..
But eventually even I must fall to the evils of laundry. Lugging a backpack stuffed full of fragrant clothing, I trekked the three blocks to the laundromat... and sat there, guarding my belongings from the terrifying empty laundromat which might at any moment decide to steal all my clothes. And I drew stuff. Which follows.



And this guy was about the awesomest person I've ever seen, except maybe for the chick with the red, bleached white, and blue dreadlocks. But she didn't have a handlebar moustache.



Tomorrow it's back to San Francisco for WONDERCON! Where I'm undoubtedly going to blow all my money on comic books in French, which I can't understand but I think Stuart Ng books has got Pierre Alary's Belladone, and I'm sure there are other awesome books too. Plus there's a Pixar panel and a Terry Moore FAQ (... Strangers in Paradise is a guilty pleasure, because it's basically a romance drama in comic form, but!!)... lots of great stuff.

Pages from the sketchbook

One of the problems that I keep running into is that I like sketching. I like sketching more than I like having a finished picture staring beautifully up at me. Once you've finished a sketch for a painting, and you've got motion and emotion and atmosphere and everything, there are so many nasty little things that can happen to it in the process of becoming a finished painting. I love looking at other peoples' sketches, because it's a window into their mind, and because sketches are just raw energy. I like watching the story reels on animated movie DVDs better (most of the time) than the actual animation; and forget the storyreel if there's ROUGH ANIMATION in the special features.

Somewhere in the refinement of the image, of the idea, it loses something. Unless you're Craig Mullins or Carlos Fonseca, who somehow manage to retain that energy but channel it into color and a beautiful end product.

Anyway, my favorite thing to watch is rough animation, my favorite kind of book is the sketchbook of somebody else, so here are a couple of pages from my book. Drawn today and yesterday night.





Hope you enjoy. ALSO: Sketchcrawl #8 is coming up on the 19th! Apparently! In Tokyo! And other places. Sketchcrawl #8 for me will be at my parents' house, drawing a bunch of craaazy teenagers at my brother's birthday party.

Sketchcrawl the Seventh

Saturday was the 7th worldwide Sketchcrawl, so we (myself, Casey, and Erin) drove down to San Francisco to the DeYoung museum. The Hatshepsut exhibit was really something - not to sound like a yokel, but those Egyptians knew what the hell they were doing. So often when I think of ancient art, my mind brings up all the crap that was in the works from Europe in the middle ages, and I forget that there were people before that were truly masters.

I'd like to go back sometime soon and wander around the rest of the museum, since all I got to see was the Egyptian exhibit and the Precolombian Mesoamerican wing. I guess they had some tribal art upstairs, but we started fading fast after lunch...

Then back to Canvas, which is a great way to end a crawl (imo), for the customary passing of the sketchbooks. It's always awesome to see the variety of styles that people have got, both in their style of drawing and in their style of filling up their sketchbook - some people fill up every inch of blank paper with seperate little drawings, some people use up the whole page with one, and some people put a little drawing in the middle of the page and then move on. Some people draw on both sides of the paper, some people on only one... I think you can tell a lot about somebody by looking at their lines. Sketchbook reading, or something.

Dog space

Back to dogs again.

And, because I know you want to read about my weird job...

I tried raw meat today. See, this is a kind of running gag in the meat department (as in, it kicks in everyone else's gag reflex). In every other area of the store, the people eye us suspiciously and whisper, "I hear they eat raw meat back there."
Well, it's true. Everyone's got their thing: one guy is especially fond of spreading a gob of raw hamburger over a piece of bread and eating it like a sandwich (for breakfast); another guy will chew on slivers of chicken, and has been known to catch turkey hearts - in his mouth. Some guys will only go so far as to eat filet mignon, or the meaty bits of bacon, which isn't technically raw. Me, I'll eat raw fish, as long as I know how long it's been out.

I got curious today, and while one guy is chewing on a piece of ribeye steak - left over from the side of beef he just cut - I, out of morbid curiousity, asked if I could have a piece. It was not tasty; it was not delicious. It had all the flavor of... I don't know, a potato, or rice, but the most awful texture. I can't imagine wanting beef of any kind - cooked or uncooked - in the near future. Every time I look at a steak, I think of the cold, chewy, nasty little piece of beef...

I'm sticking to fish from now on. Sashimi. Yum.

Ladybug boots

Work was really, really slow today. When I got there the guys were making sausages, and put me to work in the middle of the production line, where I'd help pull the long meat-string out from the pump so that it didn't get all tangled and twisted, and then I'd spin the sausages and dump the string of finished sausages into a big bin. It's neat 'cause the only place you see entire strings of sausages is in cartoons, when a dog is running off with them - or at least, that's the only place I've ever seen them. Aside from work.
It's fun: you have to spin the sausages so they're not too loose, the right size, etc, but if you spin them too much they'll blow out and you'll have a wrecked sausage and meat on your pants. Also you can poke air bubbles with the spikey end of a sausage knife.

ANYWAY. Once we'd finished the sausages, and cleaned out the meat grinder (dump soy protein powder, 40 something eggs, four bottles of wine, and some 100 pounds of pork and run it through a couple times, your meat grinder gets STICKY)... there was nothing to do. At all.

We stood around for most of the day, cleaning stuff where we could, but it was slower than molasses running down a snowman's face in outer space.

There WAS a cute little girl with the best outfit ever, pictured below:



Pink and purple striped shirt, pastel polka dotted pants, and ladybug boots.