I used to go to a lot of art supply stores. You know, to browse.

I would look at the foamcore, and expensive watercolor paper, and acrylics, and fancy pens, and exotic inks, and lust after them. Oh, and the exotic “letraset” sets. Man there were some really cool things that I just /knew/ would help me make the best thing ever.

I definitely made some cool stuff. But items like this, it’s like I’m working on the behind-the-scenes work that needed to be done to create a comic, or an animated film or a painting. Why do we need to see the monster and see that he’s 18 feet tall compared with the man, who is 6 feet tall.

There’s something about my mania for architecting things, rather than really building things. It’s a habit I have that I have great and interesting ideas, and sometimes even say things that are visionary, but I never quite do anything with them.

In 2000, I started saying “the web is not a screenshot” which some people on mailing lists thought was insightful. For a long time I intended to write an insightful essay about how the web works, and what makes it great, and that we should not be so fixated on pixel-precision when it comes to the web. I regret never having put these thoughts down, because it was something that needed saying. The needs of the web its users have moved on, but I wish I had contributed that.

That said, I am very proud of my contributions to websandiego.org and to the web standards project. WebSanDiego, after all, still lives. I have built many cool things and I am happy to have worked on them.

I was talking about the piece here. So I /like/ this piece very much. Though I feel it represents the incompleteness problem I have with finishing what I start, I do like it. I like the look of the monster here. He has a quality I like.

But as you’ve seen in the drawings so far, I have many individual figures, and not so much in the way of complex compositions and interactions between those figures. This is a shortcoming I hope to rectify in the years to come as I develop as an artist and illustrator. I do consider myself to be those things, although I do not claim to be great at either. I do intend, though, to continue along the path of development in these talents. I mean, “art” is my middle name, no? It’s also the front half of this domain.

It’s 11:30 at night. It’s been a long day, I’m tired. Thanks for listening. Have a great weekend and Fourth of July Holiday.

It’s a beautiful morning.

I really like that 7-year old self of mine.

Princess Leia smiles, though I think she only smiles one time in that whole Star Wars movie.

I saw that movie 5 and a half times, by the way. I mean, in the theaters, that Summer.

Kids did indeed keep track of that.

I might update this entry later, or I might not. It’s time for breakfast.

(Yes, I will)

The one half of Star Wars part was I went one time with my Dad after he got home late from work. I have no idea /why/ we went, but in those days, kiddies, if you went in for part of one show, you could stay for the next. Granted, this was 28 years ago, but I think we went in around the time that the Millennium Falcon was being dragged into the Death Star by tractor beams. We sat and enjoyed the movie. We stayed to the end, and saw it again. My father is very proud of having taken me to see Star Wars at Graumann’s Chinese Theater in Hollywood on the first day. He had read the buzz, or heard the buzz, and knew it would be cool. I am thankful he did this, as it was perfect for a 7-year old kid with a big imagination. Thanks Dad.

You see, kids, in those days, there was no such thing as a VHS cassette, or a DVD, or buying a movie. You had to go to the theater, or see it on a plane, or see it on one of the three tv networks. And believe me, it was a big deal when a movie you liked showed up on TV. I think I remember thinking it was a big deal when The Rescuers showed up on Wonderful World of Disney some Sunday night.

It’s a whole different world in terms of media consumption. I guess you knew that already though. I mean, to those of you who read this blog, I’m like, another media producer. That blows me away, that in some sense I’m broad-narrowcasting some entertainment out there to people. Am I performing? Am I just keeping a diary? I guess the answer to both those questions is yes, which is a bit crazy. It reminds me of reality TV, which is voyeuristic for the watcher and exhibitionistic for the participants. Some of you may remember that I auditioned for one of them a year ago. I have no doubt that there’s exhibitionism in me. It’s not one of my better qualities.

So this morning was great so far. It feels very much like a vacation. Hey! It is!

A lovely lazy languid morning. Tony helped with breakfast. I started this post. Then we all enjoyed a good breakfast. Tyler mowed the lawn. Put a pot roast in the Crock Pot for later. Then everyone got their showers and dressed for the day. Leah wore curlers this morning and looks amazing. She’s so beautiful.

The unexpected thing I did today was hand the laptop to Ali and said “Hand this to your older brother, Alex”

What was I handing her to give to Dev? Why, it was a web browser opened to Why’s (Poignant) Guide to Ruby, which is a wonderful book about programming, of all things. Ruby is a computer language, and a peculiar and interesting one at that. And that book, free online, is funny and witty and instructive. Dev was riveted, and was giggling at it immediately — quoting passages to me and Leah as he would find funny bits. Like this one

An array is a list surrounded by square brackets and separated by commas.

[1, 2, 3] is an array of numbers.

[‘coat’, ‘mittens’, ‘snowboard’] is an array of strings.

Think of it as a caterpillar that has been stapled into your code. The two square brackets are staples which keep the caterpillar from moving, so you can keep track of that end is the head and which is the tail. The commas are the caterpillar’s legs, wiggling between each section of its body.

Once there was a caterpillar who had commas for legs. Which meant he had to allow a literary pause after each step. The other caterpillars really respected him for it and he came to have quite a commanding presence. Oh, and talk about a philanthropist! He was notorious for giving fresh leaves to those less-fortunate.

Yes, an array is a collection of things, but it also keeps those things in a specific order.

Those are some seriously silly words there. I dug it. And Devon dug it too. It’s moments like this I really treasure, to share the little bits of ephemera in my brain.

Sometimes one is just right on, and a link pops out to me to share. Sharing something that I enjoyed with someone else.

A few hours ago we went up to the EATM at Moorpark College. It’s small, but it was a lovely time. I thought of two people, Meg, and my cousin Jessica, who aspires to a career veterinary care. They have these beautiful mountain lions there. Even in cages, they are majestic animals.

The boys loved the monkeys, with their expressive eyes, inquisitive nature, and colorful butts.

Later, I finished this post.

Meta

I changed the tagline on the site. I’m making my goal one scan a day. I did some scans this morning so I can post at least one a day. So, you loyal visitors have that look forward to.

Okay, have a great Holiday!

I mentioned before always seeming to draw the same hair on these women / girls. Here’s a morose-looking woman. She sure is androgynous. Much more androgynous than I remember. At the time I was inspired by the work of Patrick Nagel. His work involved beautiful women, rendered in a graphically austere way. I _think_ I aspired to doing work like this. Though looking at his work now, the feeling I get to the work is detachment, ennui, and coldness. I suppose those were points in their favor to my teen self. These days I prefer a bit more _joie de vivre_ in the art I like. Well, at least the art depicting beautiful women.

About the drawing: people would often ask me, then, “who is this” — the answer then, as now, is “it’s not any one.”

There’s an impression people have that drawings must be of someone in particular, that they must have a subject that they can link to to in the real world. In truth, the muse was inside my head, and the drawings were not based on anyone.

I believe I was taking a drawing class at the time of this paricular drawing, but it concerned itself with still-lives: fruit and baskets and vases. I have never taken a figure drawing class, and I suppose the naïvté about the human body shows that.

I don’t have a burning desire to take a proper figure drawing class, but I suppose it’s something I want to do more of. I think the beauty of that is that is that all I really need to do to _do_ that is get a pencil and a pad and just go out and start drawing.

Last year, or perhaps the year before, I picked up a nude drawing reference at Comic Con. Con is coming up, by the way. I may go, but just for Saturday. I have other priorities these days. If there were a way to do it for all four days and not have it impact work, I would do so. However, I want to save my vacation days for some San Diego time in August, when my family will be in town. I also want to save some for the Holidays as well.

I did some scanning of some objects into my flickr account yesterday. These are objects about which I want to write more.

Time to start the day. Be well.

This is a hard drawing to look at for me. It bespeaks pain. The man is on fire, or covered in smoke. It could be interpreted as anti-smoking, perhaps, as many in my family smoked and paid dear prices for it.

The style is so fast, so confident, but not so much deliberate. It’s part of a style of mine to just keep making strokes and gradually an image appears. The idea was to draw fast and deliberately, to feel the emotion, and put it down. Often this resulted in horrible messes, and I threw lots of scribbles away. But occasionally it resulted in work of which I’m proud.

I can feel a kinship with the 19-year old self who drew this, perhaps I’d give the kid a hug. But I don’t think I savor feeling so _burned_ as I once did. Moroseness and nihilism might be, at times, entertaining, but they are not really great ways to live life.

Leah commented about Dog Nowhere that it seemed to be about an emotion, rather than an image of a dog. I think that’s an interesting insight. Smoldering Man is much more explicit I think in being an image that tries to instantiate an emotion.

I like this one. Most of the work I’ve ever done with a science fiction feel was in a cyberpunk vein, but one of my favorite books was Difference Engine, (mentioned before in my book post)and the idea of alternate history is very compelling to me.

I think what I was thinking of with this piece, with a British helmet, and a gas mask, was the Alan Moore comic book V for Vendetta, a wonderfully British (with a capital “B”) rendering of a futuristic dystopia.

Here’s a synopsis of V for Vendetta from Wikipedia.

The series is set in a future Britain where, in the chaos following a limited nuclear war that left the country mostly physically intact, a fascist one-party state has arisen. It resembles the Nazi regime — including government-controlled media, secret police, and concentration camps for racial and sexual minorities — but with a British cultural flavour, and a greater reliance on technology, especially closed-circuit television monitoring in the mode of George Orwell’s 1984. (CCTV had not yet become common in England at the time Moore wrote the series.) When the series begins, political conflict has ended, the death camps have finished their work and been closed, and the public is largely complacent, until “V” — a terrorist and self-proclaimed anarchist, who wears a Guy Fawkes mask and has an improbable array of abilities and resources — begins an elaborate, violent, and theatrical campaign to bring down the government.

Even the premise is wonderful. It’s still in print, and you can usually find it out at the larger chain bookstores, or even via Amazon.

Anyway, back to the drawing: It’s minimal and was done fast, on notebook paper. I think this is a “classroom drawing.” For posting I’ve removed the blue lines underneath the drawing itself. I am not doing raw scans for most of these things, I’m doing cleanup.

What I might do with the drawings down the line I have no idea. I have thought about doing an online comic or comic strip, and I’ve considered what kind of licenses might allow others to use these drawings as raw material, but for now just scanning the things is very enjoyable to me. It allows me to revisit my artistic past, and explore the possibilities of my artistic future, as well.

In 1992 I was working in Charlottesville, and would come home to my folk’s house in Roanoke. My Dad had bought a Mac IIci, and I would fool around with it interminably. It was a handy machine, for its time.

I think at the time this was a large image at 532 x 388 pixels.

_I will write more about these drawings. But not right now._

After High School and before moving to Virginia, there were a few times I went and visited my friend Chris at Cal State Fullerton. This drawing was done from memory of whizzing by it on the 15 Freeway on the way to Fullerton. Why I took the 15 I don’t remember, I don’t _think_ of it as that much faster than the 5, but I’m sure I had my reasons.

There’s something about discrete objects, and drawing them, that I enjoy. Not people, or living things, but objects.

I did take a drafting class in 1988, but it was rudimentary, and all pencil! Drawing objects that I saw was a good habit for my powers of observation. I mean, I say that, but I’m not 100% sure that I really _have_ keen powers of observation. I think I try and pay attention, but there are definitely times I miss out on things because I’m distracted or tired or otherwise engaged.

Andy Warhol has been on my mind recently. I have an ink drawing from years ago that’s in the on-deck circle for posting here. When I was in High School, I thought Andy was a genius. His famous-forever statement that “everyone would be famous for 15 minutes” was inspirational, and his knack for plugging into the zeitgeist with his art was great as well. Pop art inspired me in a way that abstract expressionism didn’t. It was tacky and silly and could be very witty. It was “the in-crowd” I was concerned.

Since I was an ironical young man, it fired my sarcasm and irony neurons very well.

This piece, from 2000, was all digital. A collage featuring various objects I found from around the net. It was hand-made, which is to say it was made in Photoshop using those elements. I surely used an image search to find the pieces.

Thing is, it’s rather dull. A piece like this can be found instantly on WebCollage, which crawls the net and semi-randomly creates a collage using the pieces found. It works like this:

This is what the Internet looks like.

WebCollage is a program that creates collages out of random images found on the Web. More images are being added to the collage about once a minute, so this page will reload itself periodically. Clicking on one of the images in the collage will take you to the page on which it was found.

It finds the images by feeding random words into various search engines, and pulling images (or sections of images) out of the pages returned.

This kind of instantaneous art is beguiling. I think it makes a piece like mine, which seems to have, sort of has, a point of view, and says _something_ about consumerism, obsolete. I still like my piece, but the randomness of WebCollage has much more staying power precisely because it’s always changing, as the web is, all the time.

I mentioned before my appreciation of things Japanese. I think of the character in _Breaking Away_ who is obsessed with the Italians and even speaks in Italian. I was not that bad, but I did put a an imperial flag on my wall in High School. It was a bit more than being just a Francophile. I was trying to learn as much as I could. I accidentally ended up reading a lot about Japanese business processes. I learned what a _zaibatsu_ was and what a salaryman was. And ninjas. You can’t go wrong with ninjas.

A bit sleepy this morning. Time to start the day!

Speaking of Dave Letterman…

I had particular wants when I was a teenager. For example, at Christmastime I would ask very specifically that any t-shirts bought for me have no logos whatsoever. I still prefer blank t-shirts. Though the kids recently had the totally original idea of getting me a “Joe Cool” T-Shirt. Dude, I would so accept a Joe Cool t-shirt from my stepkids.

Anyway, one gift I got was a workbench. It was assembled by my paternal grandfather with screws. It was phenomenally awesome for me. I would draw on it, paint on it, overspray on it, experiment with fire and glue and paint and ink and carving and stencils (not all at the same time) on it. It was like having a garage in my room.

Well, David Letterman, with his “Late Night With David Letterman” show was a godsend to me. I stayed up far too late and watched Dave. This usually caused me to wake up late. But Dave was funny. Late Night was dadaist, silly, ironic, observant genius. There was no equal. I still have a large collection of Dave-oribilia that I keep meaning to auction off on eBay. It’s mostly magazines and such, but they’re lovingly preserved out in that garage.

Anyway, this drawing was a quickie. Dave would do this as kind of a “take” after a gag. I called it his “Alarmed Look” and after he did it a few times I drew it on some paper I had lying around. And somehow, over the course of 20 years, I managed to hold onto it.

I keep meaning to write an essay like “How David Letterman Saved My Life” — about my teen years and how his sense of humor reminded me to keep my darn chin up. It makes a great title, though it is misleading. A lot happened in those years.

And since then too.

Hey, onward!

Here’s that androgynous girl again. A minimal bit of brush and ink and there’s an image of a girl. This is an earlier incarnation of what became Leather Jacket Girl 1989. I like that a lot is conveyed with a very few strokes.

With the space afforded by my big workbench back then, I was very free to experiment with various media. Without a doubt I enjoyed and was frustrated by ink and brush the most. It’s absolutely unforgiving of error. So the zen challenge, and I did very much look at it as a zen challenge, was to get all the strokes out and have it be coherent and beautiful and have no errors.

Anything else was not perfection. I suppose this is a kind of perversion of zen. The idea is not to be manically perfectionist, rather to be one with the medium and with your emotions as you embark on the artwork.

I threw out a lot of pictures. I did try to learn from them, but there were a lot of discards. I think I might have learned more perhaps had I done more pieces with a pencil underdrawing and then inked over that. But then that spontaneity I was seeking could be lost.

I had read a lot about Chinese and Japanese Calligraphy at that time, and I very much liked their quick brushstrokes that evoked an image and emotion. I still love that work.

One stumbling block I do set up for myself is that I want to be inspired and have the work flow out effortlessly. The block is when I let that prevent me from doing more experiements. My “good student self” has diligence to pursue something even when I fail repeatedly.

I find that goal hard, but I do try and pursue it to improvement. I suppose the story of this, my second marriage, is of working to improve even as things are difficult. Not that my marriage is so difficult, but it is a marriage, and as such is the blending of two egos and persons in a partnership of love.

As M. Scott Peck says, in _The Road Less Travelled_, “Life is hard.” He also talks about how marriage is the institution which smooths our rough edges and lets us have a view of life from a view of love and acceptance of the essential hardness of life.

Anyway, I digress. So let’s digress some more.

Yesterday, on websandiego there was something of a flamewar. While it’s nice to see activity there, it is frustrating that it is so devisive. Hurt feelings are _so trivially easy_ to evoke in the context of a mailing list. And a strong criticism can feel like a personal attack on someone and on their business. The fact is, in this world one will be exposed to people they disagree with. A person’s reaction to such criticism shows the “content of their character” I think.

Looking back on the thread, I do not regret my words. There is much to learn from that thread for me. Not the least of which is the reminder that I have allowed websandiego to drift somewhat, and that perhaps I can, even from this distance, do things to foster that community.

On Sunday Leah watched _Nicholas Nickleby_, which was not bad at all for a costume drama. There was a speech at the end that does not seem to appear in the actual book to the effect of: “All lives are a tragedy; happiness is not to be expected, but the key is to recognize happiness when it comes and to delight in in.”

Wild, colorful, out-of-character. Red Blue and Yellow only. My 16-year-old self was in a “primary colors” phase and was trying to stay focused on that.

I don’t think it’s great, but it sure looks like I had fun, dripping goache on the page the whole way through.

Pretty colors!

This is a bit more polished. Notice the careful cross-hatching on the body of the dragon. There’s a literalness to this rendering that I quite like.

I mentioned before that I never was much for sword and sorcery stuff., but dragons are fun to draw.

The Wikipedia article for Dragon has some silly stuff in it, but amongst the dross are:

Chinese dragons (among others) are generally seen as benevolent, whereas European dragons are usually malevolent. However, malevolent dragons are not restricted to Europe, and also occur in Persian mythology (see Azhi Dahaka) and other cultures. The malevolent dragon is a prominent figure in Christian myth and iconography. Some Catholic Saints are depicted in the act of killing a dragon: for instance, Saint George, or, in Italy, Saint Mercurialis, who was the first bishop of the city of Forlì.

And also:

Dragons are often held to have major spiritual significance in various cultures around the world. One example of them in religion would be some biblical references that seem to hint that the dragon is a type of archangel, one of which by the name of Lucifer, rebelled against God to become known as the seven-headed red dragon called Satan. Some take this as a sign that dragons are an evil force, however other parts of the Christian Scriptures (depending on the version) seem to indicate that God created multiple dragons, not all of whom rebelled. In many oriental cultures, they were, and in some cultures still are, a being to be revered, and were representative of the primal forces of nature and the universe.

I like dragons. I’m reminded of the significance of the dragon in the film _Excalibur_. I really like that movie. I wish it were less violent and sexual than it is, but I suppose as a powerful myth, it does need such *substance* to “flesh out” its messages. Given that my middle name is “Arthur,” I was probably drawn a bit to Arthurian Legends. Mage, a comic series by Matt Wagner, was one such legend. I remember reading it (heh) religiously. Such beautiful work in that first series. I distinctly remember reading it during a break at my driver’s ed classes. The comics shop was just 2 blocks away and I devoured “Mage” for its’ contemporary and cryptic retelling of the Arthur saga.

Magic is green.

I’ve always liked this drawing of mine, by my 16-year-old self. Just a marker on paper if I remember correctly.

It’s definitely a drawing that was made with the aesthetic of “do it fast and do it now” — I think I may have been sad at the time given the melancholy of the pose. I’m not sure what is going on with her arm though. I just had no concept of anatomy and I was not trying to be realistically physical.

Anyway, after scanning this morning I thought I’d try adding color using PhotoShop. It works. Very rough, but it gives a bit of depth lacking in the original.

I need to work on patience and flexibility this week. I’m feeling especially impatient and inflexible this week. Well, maybe just yesterday.

These are not my best qualities.

Noodling in PhotoShop is rather calming though.

The day begins soon. Good morning.

Made with the same marker as Girl With Flower Top, a nonetheless much darker image. Menacing, scary, aggressive.

I wonder what would have happened if I could have gotten the melancholy and the aggression to work together.

Then again, maybe I did.

I did a lot of drawings of vampires when I was in my teens. The myth of vampirism is yet another powerful myth to play with. Vampires definitely fall into the category of “melancholic aggression.”

I’m 5 years old and I loved Snoopy.

My mother worked in an academic library when I was even younger than that, and when I would visit her library I would go find the Peanuts Treasury. And I would read and read. And Snoopy was my favorite.

I like very much the variation of the lettering here. I would call is “typography” there, but it sounds grandiose.

I _think_ it was done in 1975, but I’m not really sure, it may have been 1976 or 1974. I’m somewhere around 4 to 6 years old. It’s not like I was including copyright information on my drawings at that point.

Unlike the various Star Wars drawings I did, which I remember were done at the kitchen table in our apartment in Alhambra, I’m not sure where and when this one was done. Again, this makes it difficult for me to date the drawing.

Feeling better today than yesterday. It’s going to be a great day.

Take care, y’all.

And it’s been a while, so….

*Onward*