Small, Bigger, Biggest

9"x12" Graphite and Acrylic on Wood Panel

I painted this as a test for style and technique for a project. It was fun, and this size is much more manageable than some larger things I've done!

Operari et Parasiti

Finished this painting for my brother Friday. Acrylic, 24x48". My work room looks kind of lonely now that this big canvas is gone. I've been working on this one off and on since I finished the Hay Gusy painting in May.

Illustration Friday : Hats

Saddam, known for his hat collection and his use of body doubles, poses for a group shot.

Another Thursday, another meeting

Yesterday's Pumpkin

Illustration Friday : Trick or Treat

Quickie for Illustration Friday

Here's an early morning Flash doodle.

Wooden Tail, Glass Eyes!

I relish the older tales for children, when the skin of civilization was not so fat, and the grinning skull under the face was more plain and evident.

One of my favorites is "The New Mother" by Lucy Clifford. Here's a summary on Wikipedia, but the story is short, and you can read the whole thing here.

And here's a sketch I did about a million years ago of the new mother.

Interesting Stories

"Say, Anne, won't you tell me a story 'fore I go to sleep? I don't want a fairy story. They're all right for girls, I s'pose, but I want something exciting . . . lots of killing and shooting in it, and a house on fire, and in'trusting things like that."

Thus says Davy in Anne of Avonlea, by Lucy Maud Montgomery. Much has been said about violence in video games, but the mistake is hand-wringing over external influences. Davy here expresses a core principle of manliness in a novel written by a female in 1909. As long as there are boys, there will be cops and robbers, cowboys and indians, rough-housing, horseplay, violent videogames, and all around general trouble.

Jack-o-Lantern

This happy fellow was carved Saturday evening.

Photoshop Workspaces Location

So the other day, Doug was migrating his files and settings to a new computer. When it came time to move his Photoshop workspaces he had carefully customized, he had a little trouble finding the actual file, since there's no 'export' option and there are no hints internal to the application. So, based on a suspicion and a hunch, I dug around and found where they live.

Unless you've done some serious customization to the places Windows keeps things, your workspaces should be here :

C:\Documents and Settings\USERNAME\Application Data\Adobe\Photoshop\9.0\Adobe Photoshop CS2 Settings\WorkSpaces

Replacing "USERNAME" with the name of your user account.

The sinister plans of a Senior Yeti

Saucer Saurian

Meetings are a great time to draw.

National Glory and King Krok

Our room at work was playing around with Hero Creator 2.5 one day when we decided that each of us would be required to make one hero. Then, each hero would be printed and affixed to the door of our room, as a warning all who enter. Craig's hero "National Glory" disturbed everyone.

Godzilla

This sketch is the beginning of what became this design.

Inspired by Dwight Schrute.

The question of ham

Mr. Elephant works on an engine.

I'm in the process of acquiring a remarkably pristine 1990 325is. It's not a convertible, but this monster wouldn't fit into a hardtop!

Snapping Turtle

On the way home from work yesterday, I saw David and Ray stopped in the middle of the road before you exit the business park. They were out of their cars, looking down at something in the road. It was a large turtle! I stopped and got some gloves out of the trunk and we tried to move it off the road. David explained that he had already tried but the turtle stuck its neck out and tried to bite him. So after some experiments with a stick, we were finally able to grab the back half of him and stay out of his beak's reach. We moved him off into the woods.

HAY GUSY!
I was so inspired by Alamo's guide to playing the druid class in World of Warcraft, that I decided to make a painting to memorialize his hysterical post, especially after he returned to teach us all about Burnin Croosaid.

Here's a color study I made after a few initial sketches.

Here's a more detailed drawing that I transfered to the canvas with a projector.

Launchy

On the topics of applications, one of my new favorites is Launchy, a keystroke launcher. Sometimes typing is faster than pointing and clicking. That's the idea here - press ALT+SPACE or whatever combination you set in the preferences and a little window pops up. As soon as you begin typing it begins guessing what you're looking for based on the items in your Start Menu or whatever watched folder you've assigned.

It's especially handy if your Start Menu is a mess, like mine used to be.

LAUNCHY

ColorPic

ColorPic is a handy color grabber. It'll pick colors from any window, wherever your mouse pointer is pointing. Not perfect, but handy and free. Unfortunately it doesn't seem to save the palettes in any conventional palette format, but in the app's directory there's an XML file if you need some portability for the palettes you create in ColorPic.

Get it here.

On the topic of palettes though, Adobe's Kuler Flash app is great.

KULER

Snowmen Rest Their Frosty Feet

Here's a drawing I started on paper with a prismacolor pencil, and finished in Photoshop. I wanted to make a Christmas card, and when I started thinking about snowmen coming in from the cold to warm up by a fire, the irony of the situation was too compelling to let the idea wither on the vine.

A full res version is on my flickr site.

Out of Place

While at the beach last summer I saw a man on TV with an unforgettable face. I paused the show for a few moments to sketch him. I tried to paint him at the beach, but it didn't work. It wasn't until I revisited the sketch on a 16x20 canvas that he started to come back. Here's an early look at the painting.

---

And here's a little more progress. The face is coming along, but I'm not sure what I'm doing with the shirt.

---

And here's the final version. For the text, I used Clarendon as a reference, because it matched the TV show. There's some glare on the canvas though from the lights. I need to fix that. The small version kind of clips out the darks.