woman of mystery

Who is she? What message awaits on her cellphone?  Is that carpet she's sitting on really clean?


I'll never know the answers, but she was at the airport and stopped moving long enough for me to draw her for what may be my last drawing of 2010.

a recliner in the park

Another outdoor excursion, trying to figure out colored pencil technique.

Illegal dumping in the park... now immortalized in art.

There was probably more to this tree at one time but it must have gotten knocked off in a storm.

Sunset over tree tops.

Post in water.

Colored pencils have a bit too much texture for my taste, and what a hassle when you have to fill in a large area!  However, you don't need to water them.

bee on a flower

I've been reading a book on Monet and how he liked to paint en plein air, outdoors, rather than in the studio. No paint here but I had these colored pencils sitting around and took them to the lake to see what i could do.  The results were pretty lame. This is the only one I dare show.

I'm not color whiz.  At my old job in corporate video I went thru about a year of doing everything in shades of gray just to see if anyone would notice or care.  Nope.

animals are such poseurs

About 13 years ago I was taking a drawing class and the live model didn't show up so we all got on the train and went to the Dallas Zoo to draw animals.

I didn't get back to try it again until two days ago:

That's either a penguin or a killer whale.  The signage wasn't clear.

It's difficult to draw a termite mound and make it not look like a "marital aid".

 

This Blue-Bellied Roller perched on a twig just a couple feet from me.  Probably waiting for an opening to peck the flesh off my skull.

I don't know why the Ibis has such a long beak.  Something to do with opening envelopes.

Mr. Gorilla struck a nice figure drawing class pose.  I'd say this is my double-plus good drawing of the day.

The Dallas Zoo did a big expansion to give the large animals more roaming space. The down side is that they tend to loiter at the farthest away reaches of that space.  I should have brought binoculars to see the elephants.  The giraffes would come up close, however, because you could feed them lettuce at a special station.

Andean Condor doing a Bela Lugosi impression.

This tortoise barked at me. 

The Barton Springs Salamander has no eyes.  This saves money on mascara.

By this drawing my 2D brains were worn out.  Thus ends a day at the zoo.

10 short sketches about standing on an escalator

They're only on the escalator for about 20 seconds so I did this to practice observing quickly and then drawing from memory.

just skip it

Skipping rope is twice as fun with half the body parts.



Yet another one-afternoon wonder for an 11 second club animation challenge.

run, ball, run

I scratched this out this afternoon. This is a "rough", not a finished clip.

fat and flat

From my latest excursion to the mall, more quick sketches, inked in Flash this time.

no stopping

For International Drawing Day 2010 (I think) I tried two things I haven't tried.

Drawing with a ball-point pen (no way to fix mistakes) and never lifting the pen once I start drawing. So they're going to look rough.

slow moving targets IV

More sedentary mall-goers. Even the duck was dogging it.

I was a dallas jury foreman

I just came back from jury duty. A DUI trial. If you ever get arrested for DUI, do it in some previous decade before the invention of the police car video camera.

Here are some sketches from the two day event. These are NOT desperate criminals, these are Dallas County juror candidates.



The guy on the bottom ended up on the same jury as I. I found it difficult to not stare at this body shape and wonder how it worked.




A big chunk of the first day is spent waiting idly for things to get going.





OK, this guy was a desperate criminal



Our court reporter:



Mr. Prosecutor was hot, but I didn't draw him that way: