I know, I know. It’s ME – not you. I have been unavailable to post images here for the past month due to being out of town without a scanner. But it doesn’t mean that I’ve been sitting on my thumbs. In fact, the pages of my sketchbook have been filling up with muses and musings while on the road – well, I mean that metaphorically. Some were drawn while in the air.
That being the case, I thought I’d start with a selection of sketches of people drawn in airports. While waiting for flights, some people read, some work on computers, others just sit there washing out reality with earphones. Me? I embrace the world around me by documenting it in my sketchbook. Where else (besides jury duty) can you find a real cross section of humanity than in an airport? People are coming and going from all corners of the earth carrying with them their customs, their costumes, and their quirks. I love it.
So enjoy these airport doodles. Some were drawn in Los Angeles, some in Dallas, and even more in Virginia. All total, I was in five different airports in awe of the diversity of society.
I thought this lady was interesting. Her chin seemed to stick out like her belly.
This past Monday night I returned from a trip to New Jersey for a last visit to my childhood home that my parents are moving from this week. Traveling from California to New Jersey generally requires the use of an airplane, an experience I generally dread. No, I’m not afraid of flying. You see, the issue is more that of comfort. I’m a large lad, and airplane seats are made for children.
My mode of operation is to snag a window seat. I’m not one to usually get up during a flight, and I hate to be awakened for someone who needs to scoot by. So a window seat was ordered for the trip to Jersey – a trip that was, for me, the rare direct flight from Los Angeles to Newark. Wonderful! Five hours and it will be over.
I quickly found my seat and settled in. Who would be my seat mate for the trip? Was it that pretty brunette I spotted out in the concourse? Perhaps that professional gentleman with the laptop? Who knows?
There are a few seat mates that for me would be less than ideal. There could be A.the crying baby, B.the annoying chatterbox who regales you with tales of absolutely no interest whatsoever, and C. it could be a fellow large person. Two large people side-by-side can make a plane lopsided, and altogether uncomfortable for all involved. Nah – I’ll probably get that brunette, in which case bring on the five hours! However, I forgot about the D choice….
Yes. Good ol’ D. D never did me any favors in school, and it certainly wasn’t going to do me any favors on this flight either. Letter D was, in fact, a young mother who held a child on her lap (that looked entirely too old for airline policy) for the entire, excruciating five hour flight.
Thankfully, the child was not much of a crier. He held his peace pretty well. In fact, both mother and child slept for most of the trip. One might think this was a good thing, right? No. That smallish woman found a way to spill over into my seat in her sleep, and boy, was she warm! I reached up to adjust my air only to find that the plane was not equipped with personal air blowers. Thanks American Airlines.
Despite the lack of a cooling agent, I managed fo fall asleep. That’s about the time the sweet, innocent sleeping child began to have bad dreams. I assume they were bad. I don’t know what else would have inspired the random kicking he proceeded to take out upon my person. Yes, he was sleep-kicking. Five-hours-of-kicking.
A sketch of my experience getting kicked by a child throughout a recent flight.
Oh wait, I take that back. There are now weather issues in New Jersey. We circled Nebraska for awhile, then had to circle Pennsylvania. Still unable to land, we set down in Washington’s Dulles International to refuel because we circled too much. By now, I had plenty of my own circular bruises on my side as that kid seemed to sleep at least six of what became an eight hour journey.
I’m not complaining mind you. The seats were, after all, intended for that child. It was I who was invading HIS space. Silly me for having other expectations.
A few weeks back, my friend Allison Garwood (known to online comics fans as “Big Al, the gal”) experienced something that, as an artist, I fear all the time. She hurt her drawing hand. Something about torn ligaments. Not pretty. What does this mean to an artist? It means you have lost your ability to hold and control a pencil. That’s right, instantly you lose your opportunity to draw anything. This is never good when you have deadlines. Most of us do NOT have our hands insured by Lloyds of London, so we’re up a creek without a paddle. Come to think of it, if we had the paddle, we couldn’t hold it anyway.
Al is a cartoonist with a regular deadline. She started a web comic with GoComics.com not too long ago called “Haiku Ewe”, and she has built up a decent readership in that time. You don’t want to penalize the audience in a situation like this, so what does she do? She A. holds a contest for readers to submit to win a chance to draw the strip. (It’s the old “Tom Sawyer whitewashing a fence” ploy), and B. she invites her friends to help her out. I fall into the latter category.
So, I have stepped in to draw “Haiku Ewe” for a week. My five days of comics will run on July 20-24. I do have them done already, but I’ll slowly show you snippets here and there leading up to their debut on GoComics.com.
So, my first snippet for you – character sketches. I did a few doodles of her lamb in my own style just to get a little feel for how to approach the character. I hope you like them.
Some rough pencil character studies in my own style of Big Al’s Haiku Ewe character.
As I said, in the coming days leading up to my July 20-24 run, I’ll show you some of my “Haiku Ewe” artwork in various stages of the process. In the meantime, if you’d like to see Big Al’s “Haiku Ewe” comics as she regularly creates them, please CLICK HERE. Her concept is to write a fun haiku poem, and then she illustrates it with her lamb character.
A quick watercolor sketch of Frankenstein’s monster.
The other day as I sat at my desk, I had the inspiration to doodle another Frankenstein head. True, I explored a few approaches to this character which I chronicled in detail here on this blog, but the possibilities are endless, and my fascination continues. Frankie just couldn’t be contained.
So I grabbed some scrap paper, and with a brown ink line and some quick, well-placed brush strokes of watercolor paint, this little guy has come to life!
“A friend is very different from an acquaintance. The former is tried and true; the latter only a casual shadow in one’s life.”
– Anonymous
Sometimes when I open the pages of my sketchbook, I start the pencil down on one part of the page not sure of what is about to come out. In this case, it started with the head of the big guy, and the imagination just kept wandering from that point. Eventually added the little creature in his shadow, and put a more final line on everything with a brush pen and some other tech pens.
As every artist should, I often have a sketchbook handy for those idle moments that pop up now and then quite unpredictably. It is tough to pinpoint when inspiration will strike, or when one might have a surge of boredom. Nothing quite fills these voids better than having a sketchbook to launch yourself into another time or place, or sometimes just to document the time and place in which you find yourself. It is the latter of these two that I have been remiss in sharing with you. You’ve seen some of my imaginary doodles, but sketches from real life have been elusive on this blog.
I am about to take off on a trip, and to pass the time in airport waiting areas, there is nothing better than having your sketchbook by your side to draw the crazy characters that undoubtedly surround you at any given moment. There are folks of any shape or size, there are people with strange behavior, there’s a child acting out with an exasperated parent not doing anything about it, there’s the airport worker sweeping, there’s the elderly person being wheeled by in a wheelchair, and if you are looking, you may even see the casual celebrity walk by like Don King, Carlos Santana, or even Jerry O’Connell and Rebecca Romijn as I have.
So, today I am sharing with you a few airport doodles pulled from my sketchbooks. I’ll be adding to them this week, some of which may be worthy to share with you later. Sometimes you don’t get more than a moment to capture someone, so you have to be quick. And the real trick is to do it when they aren’t looking. You never want to get caught by your subject. They tend to not enjoy the scrutiny.
However, you have my permission to scrutinize the following doodles of regular folk all drawn from real life. Feel free to click on the image to see them larger.
Here are a few sketches of random people I’ve seen in airports.
“The one effective method of defending one’s own territory from an offensive by air is to destroy the enemy’s air power with the greatest possible speed.”
– Italian General Giulio Douhet (1869-1930)
Boy Scout Sean Sturrock being proudly promoted to the rank of Eagle Scout.
Well, this is the first time Drawn & Quoted has featured a full color sketch. It is actually a piece I did as a gift for a friend this past week. Sean Sturrock is a teenager I know who was just inducted into the rank of Eagle Scout with the Boy Scouts last Saturday. I have been friends with his parents, Beth and Walt Sturrock for twenty years. It has been neat to see Sean go from birth to Eagle Scout. Of course, as a long-term friend, it was my obligation to poke a little fun at his fantastic achievement! Congratulations to Sean, and to his family including sister, Emily!
Once in awhile, the opportunity to do a really fun, and completely unexpected, project comes along that I just have to be a part of.
Sometime later this year, Maurice Sendak’s 1963 classic Caldecott winning children’s book Where the Wild Things Are will be making a splash on the big screen in a live-action movie. Because of this, the original book has really been drawing a lot of attention again – not that it ever fell out of fashion, mind you. In over 40 years it has never been out of print.
My friend (and terrific artist) Cory Godbey has a website called TerribleYellowEyes.com that is in tribute to this great work by Mr. Sendak. He has invited some artist friends of his to contribute tribute pieces for the website, and I am very happy to be doing so! So, for the next week, I’ll be posting progress reports here on my work all leading up to the reveal of the final piece on Cory’s site next Friday, May 22!
In my quest to figure out what exactly to draw, I needed to look at the original book. I turned to my personal library only to discover I only had The Art of Maurice Sendak and not the full original story! My local library is just around the corner, so I utilized its resources and started sketching ideas in my sketchbook.
Here for your perusal are some preliminary thumbnail sketches and some quick character sketches of how I might want to interpret the Sendak characters. Just this short jaunt into the project so far has been a blast!
Some thumbnails and a character drawing created in the planning stages of my “Where the Wild Things Are” tribute illustration.Some rough character sketches based on Maurice Sendak’s characters.
Come back for my next post to check out Wild Thing Part 2 to see the preliminary drawing! It’ll all work its way into a watercolor painting by next Friday.
