Just a little something from my sketchbook today. And no, it is not a self-portrait.
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Animals Art: Colored Pencil Art: Drawings Character Designs Random Doodles Sketchbook
Today is Star Wars day. May the Fourth be with you.
Welcome to the month of May!
Hopefully spring is happening all over the country by now after a prolonged winter in many places. With spring comes a renewal of life. Grass grows, flowers start blooming, and babies are born.
Well, maybe that last one isn’t true for all. But it is true for a friend of mine who is about to have her first baby. I did this little watercolor Pooh for the impending little one. Spring abounds!
Today in the United States we have a little known and even lesser celebrated holiday called Arbor Day. It usually is superseded by the more popular Earth Day that came earlier in the week this year.
Arbor Day is all about trees, and folks are encouraged to plant a tree to mark the occasion. There are so many holidays on which people celebrate with a greeting card, but never for Arbor Day. This is strange to me, because cards most often come from trees giving up their lives to become greeting cards. So it is high time that there is a greeting card celebrating the trees that cards come from!
So, this year I sent these out to close friends, family, and business contacts. While more trees probably wanted to get in on the deal, they are too late. You now get to enjoy the card digitally!
So, all that to say, a very happy Arbor Day to you and yours. I hope you get lots of great Arbor Day presents, and enjoy the many Arbor Day parties you no doubt have lots of invitations to tonight! Stay safe!
I had a super fun time this past weekend drawing for the kids at a fundraiser at Walt Disney Elementary School in Burbank, CA. I know, it sounds like the Disney company is running a school now, but no, it is a public school just named after Walt Disney the man, just as schools are named after Thomas Edison or Abraham Lincoln.
Tom Caulfield (director on the Tangled TV series) and I spent a few hours sketching whatever the kids asked for. Somehow, I got schnookered into drawing the Leviathan from Disney’s Atlantis for one boy. Now, I did work on Atlantis, but I reminded the young art patron that the Leviathan had been animated on the computer because it was so complicated. People didn’t draw it in the movie. Maybe this statement from me caused him to be extra worried that I wouldn’t do things right, because the whole time I was sketching it from an image on a phone, this kid was art directing me making sure I was drawing it correctly. It was pretty funny, and daunting.
The event itself was centered around a screening of Disney’s Big Hero 6, so we had lots of requests for Baymax drawings. And just about anytime someone asked for Rapunzel, I sent them to Tom! Kids kept asking for all these things I hadn’t drawn before, and I was itching to draw something I knew – specifically, Goofy! I kept asking each kid who came up if they would like me to draw Goofy. “No” was a common answer as they asked for Miguel from Coco or Belle from Beauty & the Beast or Pikachu from Pokèmon. Finally, towards the end of the night, one kid surprised me by saying “yes!” So he got a very exuberant Goofy.
My friends Jennifer & Bert Klein (check out their Pups of Liberty animated shorts on YouTube and Amazon Prime!), who I’ve known since my days at Disney Feature Animation, organized our part of the event. Jen even got into sketching with us for a little while! It was a fun evening!
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Back in December of 2017, I shared with you a new and improved version of Captain Traffic, a character I created about 16 years ago for ComedyTrafficSchool.com. There were even more poses I did of the courageous Captain, and now that Comedy Traffic School is using a few of them on their website, it was time to show you a couple more here on the ol’ blog!
Originally conceived as a humorous comic book type of character all those years ago, the whole approach to the good Capt. this time was to create him without the typical comic book lines. It kind of gives him a more modern look now, with a hint of nostalgia and a whole lot of whimsy. And who doesn’t need to experience a little bit of whimsy when they have to experience traffic school, am I right?
If you’d like to see the previous Captain Traffic illustration posted last December, feel free to CLICK HERE!!
“Success is most often achieved by those who don’t know that failure is inevitable.“
– Coco Chanel (1883-1971)
Sometimes when I do these Drawn & Quoted pieces, I find a quote and do a drawing based on it. This time the drawing came first (ink in my sketchbook), then the search for a matching quote came after, which is usually the tougher way to go about it. I saw this image as having possible business applications, and started looking at quotes with that in mind. I also thoroughly enjoy utter silliness, so when this quote surfaced (pun intended), it made me laugh in the context of the drawing.
Why? Because the quote probably was meant to inspire someone to greatness by having them not be afraid to try something. However, it seemed to fit perfectly the goals and achievements of these two characters as they both attempted their goals in tandem. The bear achieved success at the price of the fish’s failure. Funny, right? Pain is often funny.
I finished up a sketchbook the other day with a page full of dragons. Sure hope they are housebroken.
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