Art & Story Blog

I don’t have much time to write this post, so I’m hoping the pictures will speak for themselves. Today I took a Moleskine small daily planner and reloaded it with 90 lb. Fabriano Artistico hot press watercolor paper (according to the instructions posted by Martha at Trumpetvine Travels). This is something I’ve been meaning to do for months, but with Sketchcrawl 15 tomorrow and only two pages left in my current Moleskine sketchbook, today was the day. Some of the watercolored sketches I’ve posted in the past couple weeks have been on loose pieces of Fabriano Artistico already cut and folded with the intention of binding, but I never got around to it. Well, at least now I’m sure I like this paper. It’s versatile. It takes well to pencil, ink, and watercolor. Everything I need in a sketchbook but in the Moleskine format. Anyway, here are the pictures! Sorry there are so many. I’ve sized them down to make them a little more manageable.

What happened? I was posting almost every day for a good stretch there and then poof! Well, some weeks you got it, some weeks you don’t. However, since the start of the year, I’ve been trying to maintain a steady rate of one post per weekday. While it hasn’t been so steady, I have more or less kept up with my goal. That is, depending on how things go the rest of this month. The way I’ve been figuring this is I add up the number of Saturdays and Sundays in a month and maintain that as the total number of non-blog days I have available. I can then distribute them however I like. If I take too many days off in a month, it gets taken out of the following one. At present, with the number of consecutive days I’ve taken off, I’ll have to post every day for the rest of this month and then I will still be one day behind. Too much? Perhaps. Far more posts-per-month than anyone should be interested in viewing? Definitely. But it’s motivating to try to maintain this kind of schedule and it forces me to take the pressure off a little bit. I can’t come up with five masterpieces a week, so anything is fair fodder for the blog. The mindless, the profane, the inexplicable, and the sublime. So, more (most likely of the former categories) to come.

What can it mean?

I woke up yesterday morning with this image in my head. I sketched it out in pencil, inked it with a hunt 102 and waterproof ink, added some watercolor and made some minor adjustments in photoshop.

I paid a visit to my old neighborhood yesterday: Little Tokyo in downtown Los Angeles. First, I walked past my leaky old window. It still has the curtains I rigged up four and a half years ago. They’re looking pretty worse for wear now.

Then lunch at Suehiro. I sat at the counter and ordered the Okonomi Plate. Katsu chicken, vegetable gyoza, and boiled spinach. Along with that comes miso soup, mac salad, and a sort of slaw. I was eating my spinach when I sensed this little japanese lady sitting beside me, laughing under her breath. When I turned to look at her, I saw she was laughing at me. She said, “No soy sauce. Usually, eat with soy sauce.” And she continued to quietly chuckle. I said, “Oh, yeah, I guess so, but it’s fine like this.” She chuckled again. “No flavor,” she said. “No, there’s flavor,” I said. “It tastes like spinach.” I smiled. “Okay,” she said, “but I think, no flavor.” I caved. “Alright, alright,” I told her, and I drizzled some shoyu on the spinach. I have to admit it was a little tastier.

I struck up more conversation with the lady as we ate our meals. She had ordered rice balls — triangular hunks of rice wrapped in nori (dried seaweed), usually with something at its core, such as salmon or dried plum. These didn’t have anything inside of them. She didn’t realize that when ordering. No flavor, she said. I mentioned that I liked rice balls with dried plum and she told me that the best is in her hometown of Mito, north of Tokyo. Best umeboshi. That’s the dried plum. We talked more about where we were from. I mentioned Seattle. She told me her daughter had lived in Seattle. Now she lives in New York where she teaches pole-dancing. I showed the lady my drawing of a soy sauce bottle, miso soup, and katsu sauce bottle. She told me that she paints — watercolor — and that her daughter likes owls, so she paints owls for her daughter. I quickly drew an owl on the page with the other drawings. We laughed at it.

After lunch, I went over to Kinokuniya Bookstore and picked up a few things. Some new Aquash waterbrush pens — small, medium, and large, and some sumi ink. I noticed one of the Aquash sets came with a waterbrush pen already filled with sumi ink. I didn’t want to buy the whole set, so I just got the ink and decided I’d fill one myself. I’ve yet to do it, but am looking forward to experimenting with that.

I also got something I’ve been wanting to pick up since seeing a post on Enrico Casarosa’s blog several months back. Hiyao Miyazaki’s Original Storyboards for My Neighbor Totoro.

I still haven’t gotten a real chance to devour this book, but from flipping through it a couple of times so far, one thing that really stands out to me is how he actually uses quite few lines, yet he is able to really illustrate and communicate or describe what he wants to so clearly. More lines would just get in the way. I think this really illustrates his mastery as a draftsman and is something I could certainly benefit from by keeping in mind.

I’ve just gotten back from a vacation to the South Carolina coast and northern Mississippi and it was gorgeous. A refreshing and tranquil break from the grit and sprawl of Los Angeles, to be sure. I know it’s been a while since I’ve posted, but I took lots of photos, videos, and managed to do a tiny bit of sketching and watercolor while on my trip. I’ll be adding samples of these things over the next few days while I settle back in and clean up this messy desk I left!

Please stay tuned.

Pixar family man John Lasseter was interviewed recently by Elvis Mitchell, of KCRW’s The Treatment. For fans of The Animation Podcast, you’ll find this interview rather short, but it is a real radio show after all and Elvis has to stay within his half hour time-slot. KCRW has listed the interview here. If you have iTunes, use this link. If you don’t have iTunes, you can download it free for Mac or Windows.

I highly recommend you check out other interviews from The Treatment. It is one of my favorite podcasts/radio programs. You get really intelligent conversations with a variety of filmmakers, which are a nice break away from the often superficial dribble and obligatory plugs you get on TV talk-shows.