sketchbook 02/27/09

I can't say enough about the gentleman who sat across from me. He sat still, just read his book and I happily sketched him.

A riddle…

I found this image I did a few years back based on this riddle:

A wolf, a goat and a cabbage must be taken to the other side of the river. You have a boat, which is not large enough to take more than one of them.
If you leave the wolf with the goat, the wolf will eat the goat.
If you leave the goat with the cabbage, the cabbage will be eaten.

How to get the three across the river?

I really liked the austere effect the final image had and I think I've been trying to recapture that feeling since...

sketchbook 02/26/09

I think every time I visit the museum, I'll start off with a sketch of the Vairocana statue.

sketchbook 02/23/09

I'm a big fan of Star Trek Voyager. So I thought I'd try sketching some of the characters from this show.
(Screen capture is a great tool!)

Ana collage

My good friend Ana has turned 38. This year, I thought I'd give her a birthday present, with a personal touch.

The following piece was based on a typographic experiment I tried in an earlier sketchbook spread. My feelings are a bit mixed about this piece. It's the first piece of art I've produced that will be put out there to the general public for them to judge (and I'm kinda nervous about that). Secondly, just from a technical point of view, some of the spacing is a bit off and that's what I see when I view this piece.

Any thoughts from the blogosphere?

(I hope Ana doesn't see this before our Saturday get together.)

I've also included some process stages (I really liked how this looked just in black ink, actually).

sketchbook 02/19/09

IF: Celebrate

Everytime I do a watercolour, it's a high wire act.
Here's my submission for this week's Illustration Friday theme of, Celebrate.

sketchbook 02/17/09

I've been sick for the last few days so I didn't have the energy to sketch that much. This spread is from a few days ago when I think I first caught this bug.

sketchbook 02/13/09

sketchbook 02/12/09

For some reason I prefer and feel a lot more comfortable sketching in a Coffee Time, rather than a Starbucks or Second Cup... and I don't have to mortgage my non existent house for a coffee.

IF: Time

As a child, whenever I had the winter blahs I'd try to find a golf tournament on TV to remind me of the coming summer. The hyper greens of the golf course and the blue skies reminded me of warmer times...

sketchbook 02/10/09

sketchbook 02/08/09

I'm happy today. My bread starter is bubbling and my sponge is rising! Hopefully I'll have some sourdough bread for tomorrow!

Update: Bread came out blah. Too flat and I forgot the salt. Baking on…

Sir Charles

My sister's cat. He definitely rules my sister's place.

sketchbook 02/07/09

Every time I go to the museum I have the intention of doing quick sketches to loosen up. But as it happens so many times, I'm afflicted with "detailitis". I start off with the quick outline and then I realize that this or that needs a bit of shading or a bit more definition. And before I know it I've spent an hour on something that should have taken 5 minutes. This, I'm afraid is something that's been with me since university.

As I continue to draw in my sketch book, a reoccurring thought that I've read from some where comes into my mind: Get the 1000 junk sketches out of my system so I could get to the good one. I'm not saying that my sketches have been junk, because for the most part, I've been happy with what I've produced but I'm still struggling with that elusive "style". So here are a few more pages out of the way and hopefully when I reach the 1000th image I'll have arrived at a place I'm happy with.

IF: Flawed… judgement

Some might say bungee jumping shows a flaw in judgment or one fry short of a happy meal, but others might think it quite reasonable. Despite my image for this week's Illustration Friday theme, bungee jumping is on my bucket list.

sketchbook 02/03/09

In aikido, suwari waza, is a term used to describe techniques executed while on your knees. By doing it in this stance, mistakes in execution are amplified, so doing a technique has to be done cleanly to make it effective. I sort of viewed this spread as my suwari waza. All the objects were drawn with line. No shading. No colour to hide behind. Just line. Imperfect circles in perspective revealed. Sometimes a pretty good one was achieved.

sketchbook 02/01/09

I was told by an old art teacher that if you could draw the human hand, you could draw pretty much everything... or was it the human figure? (It's been a few years since high school, ok?!)