ArchivePage 3 of 16
Okay, so this post does not contain a comic strip/page like I said it might, but I had to post these car sketches. I happened upon the old Caddie yesterday and the Model A today. That’s some good luck in carspotting! The owner of the Model A told me about an upcoming car show. On Feb 23rd at Huntington Beach High School, there is a show of 1967 and earlier VW Busses. This is pretty much my fantasy car. Might be fun to attend. We’ll see if I can get my butt out there, though.
This is a sketch based on the crazy lady I recently met at my local diner. Maybe I’ll tell the story of our conversation in my comics at some point. I’m working on the first page/episode of my comics series now. It ain’t much, but it’s a start. Anyway, enjoy this sketch for the time being. Maybe my next post will be a comic! How about that?
Today is the 2nd anniversary of my blog! And now a review of the year past:
I know I’m a total dweeb for saying this, but I’m excited that Lost is back. Sure, they treat each episode like a carrot on a string, and I’d be harder pressed to explain Lost to someone than I would Quantum Physics. But I guess, kind of like a longer length novel, I’ve grown attached to these characters and the character of the island. I love the imaginativeness of the show and the mystery and I love seeing how they can twist and spin it out even farther. Despite a frequent lack of answers, some corniness, a mishandling of extras/incidental characters, and plot lines that at times just never lead anywhere, Lost’s makers have one great skill and that is to create something compelling. I actually get kind of giddy when I remember Lost will be on later that evening. I’ll pop some popcorn and get glued to the set.
I know… dweeb.
On Monday, Jan. 21st, MLK day, it was rainy and cold. I didn’t have anything planned for this day. No coffee dates, no lunches, no meetings. And I was trying to fill my time in San Francisco, doing creatively inspiring things. Sketching, meeting sketchers, looking at art, meeting people in Bay Area animation. I needed to find something to do to keep the juices flowing. This would’ve been a good day to go to the Cartoon Art Museum. I wanted to see the Mary Blair exhibit they had showing there. Alas, the Cartoon Art Museum is closed on Mondays. In fact, it seemed most museums are/were closed on Mondays. So I just decided to get out to the café and huddle over a glorious coffee and my sketchbook. Ritual Coffee was calling my name. I drove out to the spot at 1026 Valencia. It was crowded. I shared a table with someone. My latté arrived and it was indeed glorious, with its lovely “Rosetta” made of coffee crema and foam. I pulled out my drawing materials and I decided to play with inks today. No smudged or smeared graphite, no losing of the line when I go in with watercolor, no erasing. I used a #0 Rapidograph technical pen and Kuretake brush pen and I stuck with smooth, plate-finish papers that the ink would glide onto nicely. First, in a Moleskine Sketchbook and then on a pad of smooth Bristol. Both surfaces are a joy to ink on and the Bristol takes watercolor okay. I also dedicated myself to drawing people on this day. Really, that’s about all there was to draw in this place, anyway. Lots and lots of people in various sizes, shapes, and fashions. This was a really great place to observe and sketch.
I went to my local polling place today and cast my vote in the ‘08 primary election. My neighborhood polling place seems to be in a different location every time. Once it was in a barbershop on Pico called “The Headmaster.” This time around it was in someone’s junky old garage. It smelled musty, it was loaded with different kinds of weird junk and what space was left over had everyone just short of being shoulder-to-shoulder. One of the funniest parts, though, was this sign hanging outside the door. Now, you’d think they could maybe take this down on election day. I mean, what kind of message is this sending to potential voters?
In case you can’t make it out, the hand-painted portion of the sign reads:
DO NOT DISTURB!!!
YOU AIN’T BEEN
COMING BY
DONT START NOW
The day after Sketchcrawl 17, I met with Martha of Trumpetvine Travels for a mini-crawl of sorts. We met up in North Berkeley, an area that Martha knows well and one I was interested in getting to know a little better. Even though I grew up in the city of San Francisco, I didn’t venture outside of it very often, and so it’s only in more recent years that I’ve gotten much of a feel at all for areas like the East Bay. There’s still plenty more in the Bay Area that I haven’t explored, but my brother lived in Berkeley for a while and my visits there helped me begin to get a sense for it. I like the slightly warmer weather (vs. the city of SF), the spacious laid-back feel, and the craftsman-style homes.
Martha introduced me to the area of North Berkeley known as the “Gourmet Ghetto” — primarily a one-block stretch of Shattuck Avenue lined with several restaurants, a.k.a. “Foodie” establishments, the star of which is Chez Panisse. Apparently, you have to book about a month in advance to dine there, so we went to the Tapas bar one door down called César. We spent about an hour chatting and sipping Cava (Martha knows how to start lunch right!) and munching on beet salad and little salmon sandwiches. Everything was quite good, but the little dish of olives they brought out shortly after we sat down was quite possibly the most delicious part.
At some point, and after ordering a couple cappuccinos, we figured we’d better get to sketching. I took a somewhat slower pace than at Sketchcrawl (it helped that I was mellowed by sparkling wine and good food and wasn’t freezing) and just completed this one sketch looking toward the bar:
The sketch was done in my “Frankenskine” sketchbook, pictured here:
…a Moleskine daily planner which I gutted and converted into a Watercolor sketchbook. The construction of this book was developed by Martha. She’s filled many of these modified Moleskines with her beautiful sketches. Detailed instructions and samples of her sketches are available on her blog. Here’s my account of the project.
Update: Martha has posted her sketches from our lunch over at Trumpetvine. Be sure to take a look! I love the way she uses negative space in her sketches and simply leaves things out. I have a hell of a time doing that (in case you can’t tell from my sketch, above). Her approach can lead to some interesting results. Organic sorts of compositions and non-rectangular framings. They’re not overladen with detail, and so they are very relaxing to look at and leave a bit to our imaginations. In that way, they can help transport us to the scene being depicted all the more, because life is like that. We tend to look at just one thing at a time, and often in an impressionistic way, feeling it, rather than looking at the minute detail, and objects in the periphery are frequently either vague or almost non-existent in our experience/memory. Also, another effect of her use of white space is the quality of light. Take a look at the second sketch in her post and you get the sense there’s bright light shining through the windows.
Also, more sketches to come from my visit to San Francisco…
I just saw Ice Age on DVD last night. It was my first time seeing it since its theatrical release in 2002. I remember enjoying it then, but there was a lot I forgot and a lot of new things I think I noticed this time around. The thing I remember enjoying about it in 2002 is its cartooniness. It has a goofy playfulness I love that hearkens back to those Saturday mornings, savoring every second I could of Bugs Bunny and Daffy. It’s character-driven comedy, most of it physical. Some of that is pure slapstick (guy-steps-on-a-rake kind of thing) which isn’t too specific to the character, but the majority of it is derived from and defines/reveals the character in its unique circumstance. Though the comedy may be physical, it’s really telling us something about the mind of that character — something funny.
Which character am I thinking of in particular? Sid, of course! The sloth (pictured above) so geniusly voiced by John Leguizamo. He’s the star of the picture. Not only is he the primary source of comedy in the film, he’s the one driving the whole story forward. What a goldmine of a character. He’s the most manic sloth you could ever imagine, which gets a tad annoying at times, I’ll admit, but heck that’s one of his key character traits. He’s incredibly annoying. The thing is he’s just so funny and endearing while he’s being annoying that we tend to forgive him for it. Also, thank goodness, he is tempered by the cool and down-beat qualities of Manfred the Mammoth and Diego the Saber-toothed Tiger (voiced by Ray Romano and Denis Leary, respectively — wow, Denis Leary down-beat. Who knew?). Also, Sid starts to even seem a bit normal set against the character and running gag of impossibly-manic Scrat the Saber-toothed Squirrel (voiced by the film’s director, Chris Wedge), who is thankfully used just as a sort of seasoning, appearing only for brief periods throughout the film (and making it all the more hilarious).
Leguizamo is so terrific in this role as Sid the Sloth. He seems to really understand what it means to act for a cartoon and the animators really eat it up! I can’t remember what scene it was, but there was this one awkward kind of nervous laugh he does that had me cracking up. There’s so much in the sound of that laugh alone and the subtle little head and eye movement the animator provided are just the perfect micro-storm example of the kind of collaborative performance you can find in animation. Mo-cap has nothing on this stuff! I mean, this is magic. This is the power of raw imagination and talent and a lot of hard work! It’s a joy to watch.
I spent the most recent Sketchcrawl (#17) in San Francisco’s Chinatown. It was one of those tricky days in SF. The sun was out and shining brightly, but everything was cold everywhere. If the sun’s rays hit you directly, you could get a little toasty, but as soon as you were in the shade… brrrrrrrr! I sketched as fast as I could, trying to keep my hands warm. The plus side, I suppose, is that it was not raining.
So here are my sketches from the crawl.
The gamers/gamblers were a popular subject:
Little comps:
One of my favorites from the day is the one on the left here with the lanterns:
I really slapped this one onto the page fast. Not too happy with the colors, but I do like the way it looks in grayscale!
And of course, Chinatown would not be complete without Peking Duck.
The crawl was great. There were about 65 sketchcrawlers there, in all. I finally got to meet a few people whose blogs I’ve been following for a while. Namely, Pixar artists Enrico Casarosa and Ronnie del Carmen, and Martha of Trumpetvine Travels. There were new people as well, and lots of great sketches from everyone. Many different tools, techniques, and styles, and lots of inspiration.
Visit the forum to see work from others at this sketchcrawl and crawls all over the world.
This photo was taken with my crappy camera phone. I had a grueling drive back to L.A. from San Francisco yesterday. Left at a little before 11am and got into the Grapevine area of I-5 just shortly before it was closed due to snow. I was trapped on a snowy and icy slope alongside cars and big rig trucks for over 8 hours. The snowplows and evacuations finally made it through the 20-some miles of stopped vehicles and reached us at almost 2 o’clock in the morning. I went through a wide range of emotions while stuck there. First it was panic, which gave way to caution, and finally acceptance mixed with a whooole lot of patience.
A caricature of PJ Harvey based on a photo in today’s LA Times (Oct. 26, 2007).
The blog took a long nap! Now I’m posting this, just a couple of doodles
to let you know I’m still around. More next week.
This is my latest masterdoodle. I call it, “Falling Asleep Watching Television.”
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