"Hexapod" step one

This is one of those drawings that came out of left field. I don't really know what inspired it -- just that as I sat staring at the next blank page in my sketchbook, I had this vision of some kind of multi-legged creature climbing through tangled branches… and looking up, as if seeing some sight unusual to its eyes.

I still don't know what the scale is -- the creature could be the size of a large beetle, or the size of a Volkswagen Beetle. I don't think it's necessary to know how large or small it is (or is supposed to be).

As I was penciling this, I kind of got stuck about halfway through. I'd drawn the basic shape of the creature, and roughed in the branches that it was climbing on… but then it just started to seem really silly and awkward, and I put my pencil down, disheartened.

It was probably a week or so later that I returned to it, determined not to let it be stalled at that point. There was something about it that made me want to finish it, even if it came out looking as goofy as I feared it might. So I kept at it, and got it to a point where I was pretty happy with it. And it was near the end of the pencilling that I added a small detail which turned out to be one of the things that made the whole piece work for me -- the thorns in the branches. Suddenly, the creature took on a life it hadn't possessed before, as I imagined that it would take some special climbing skills and toughness to be able to walk around on a plant or tree or whatever it is which was liberally studded with nasty, sharp spikes.

(Here's the penciled drawing as it looked just before I started to ink it.)

In "Hexapod: step two", I'll post the inked version. -- PL

Shells

Seashells are almost a cliche in still-life drawing. I remember drawing them in classes at UMass years ago. But there's a reason that they are so popular -- they are very cool to draw. Their shapes are fascinating, often combining strong, sweeping youthful curves along with the crumbling, shadowed edges of age.

While we were in Maine this summer, and I was prowling the pebble beach near the house we rented, I found a number of shells of various types. Nothing spectacular, but some interesting (to me at least) pieces. I gathered up a few and brought them back to the house, where I sat on the deck with my sketchbook and drew them sitting on the weathered arm of the deck chair.

I'm glad I did. There is nothing particularly special about this drawing, but looking at it makes me feel good, for a number of reasons. -- PL

Another sketchbook doodle

I'm not sure what made me do this one, which I drew in my sketchbook around the time I did the last one I posted...

... but I have the feeling that the curling tentacles were possibly inspired by the stylings of my buddy Eric Talbot, who has a nifty way with adding these little curly bits to the ends of things. -- PL

Sketchbook drawing: Tree stump with hidden stone head

This is something that I pulled out of the sketchbook I took to Maine with me this summer, though none of it was done in Maine. I started the drawing a few miles away from our house, where I found an interesting old tree stump that had been pulled out of the ground, and was lying with its roots exposed. (You can see it in the upper center section of this drawing.) For some reason, I didn't finish the drawing.

 

It was actually a month or so later, while waiting in Los Angeles in the airport for our flight home, that I decided to continue doodling on this one and make up some stuff to go with it. I have always been fond of the "ancient city lost in the jungle" concept, so I kind of went in that direction, adding lots of vegetation and a weird, monolithic stone head. It was fun. -- PL

Flight, part2b

As I ease myself back into the habit of flying in airplanes, I am starting to remember many of the details of this activity that I had forgotten over the twenty-one years during which I had eschewed flights. One of most prominent of these is that -- once you get beyond any fears of crashing or exploding or whatever, and let your mind drift away from the mind-boggling fact that you are traveling through the air, thousands of feet above terra firma, in a conveyance which weighs more than approximately ten large elephants, is that flying is pretty boring, for the most part.

That's why you see people listening to music on their iPods, watching movies on iPads, reading, etc. And I remember from those flights of long ago that I would, like my other Mirage buddies, spend a lot of my time in the air drawing in my sketchbook. (I recall that on one flight with Kevin back from visiting Playmates in California in the early days of TMNT licensing, I came up with the concept for "Commandosaurs" and did a bunch of drawings for it before landing in Connecticut.)

On our recent trip to San Diego and beyond, I remembered this activity, but I was really more inspired by observing Jeannine. She has a great work ethic, and makes excellent use of these kinds of blocks of time by working on her writing -- pulling out her sheaf of printed pages to proof or edit with a pen, or hauling out her laptop, once the aircrew tells everyone it's okay to use their computers. (Actually, given that she uses a MacBook Air, it's not so much "hauling" as "slipping gracefully" from her laptop case.)

So I got out my sketchbook and did some drawing. I worked on finishing some inking on some pieces that I'd started back home, but also did some new drawings in pencil and inked them to various stages of completion.

This one I started on the second leg of our journey out to California, on the flight from Atlanta to San Diego. (That's not Ben Grimm's sculptor girlfriend Alicia Masters from the "Fantastic Four" comics, in case you're interested.) This drawing was inspired by the book that Jeannine is currently working on, which is a non-fiction piece about a real female sculptor. For some reason, I imagined her chipping away at a monumental statue of my favorite FF character, the Thing. (Given when this woman actually lived, it's a bit of a wacky anachronism, but what the heck.) I almost finished inking this one on the flight back home.

This other one is something I started while waiting for our flight back home in Los Angeles International Airport. We make it a point to try to leave for the airport a couple of hours ahead of our flight time, so as to be prepared for any unexpected delays -- which is great in one sense, because it prevents (so far, at least) missing our flights, but not so great in another sense because then we have hours to kill waiting in the airport departure loges. In this case, I think we had about three hours.

I'm not sure where the idea came from for this one, though it's possible the huge castings of various Mayan stone artifacts we saw at the Museum of Man in Balboa Park in San Diego could have had something to do with it. But I kind of like the slightly Kirbyesque feel of the giant, vegetation-covered figure -- is it just a sculpture? Or an abandoned war robot? Or a giant humanoid in armor, mysteriously frozen in mid-stride ages ago?

I don't know.

I penciled this at LAX, started inking it there, and did a little more inking on the plane. Hopefully I will get around to finishing it soon. -- PL

Flight, part 2

I'm back home after my SECOND cross-country airplane trip of the year (this could get to be a habit!). Jeannine and I were planning to attend a memorial service for one of her relatives in California, and decided that it might make sense, given that we were traveling all that way, to extend our stay a few days and see some sights.

So we flew off to San Diego, a place I'd not been to for nineteen years, I think. It certainly has changed -- I barely recognized the downtown area, though Seaport VIllage still looks about the same. And the San Diego Zoo is still a cool place to visit -- literally, the day we were there, it was in the low 60's, I think, and the animals were pretty active. Like most of the tourists there, I took a bunch of photos -- here's one of a peccary…

... a koala...

… and a monkey (sorry, don't know the type) on a rope…

… and two beautiful ladies posing with a chrome polar bear.

Emily was going to attend the memorial service as well, so she met us in San Diego, and we had some extra time with her, which is rare these days. (We actually didn't stay in San Diego -- we had a nice room at the Hotel Del Coronado, a place I'd wanted to get a closer look at since my last trip out there.) Here's a shot I took of Jeannine (wearing her "Organically Grown" cap) posing with some dramatic cloud lighting on one of our walks on the beach.

A few days later, following the memorial service, we continued on to Los Angeles, where we spent some more time with Em (including going out to dinner with her employers, whom we'd not met until then -- very nice folks). Em also took us to Griffith Park, a place I'd wanted to see on our visit in July. I was amazed at the number of people there -- I'd thought we would drive to the top and see maybe a handful of sightseers, but we were lucky to find a parking space about a half mile down from the observatory. But what a view! We got there just as the sun was setting, so we had some dramatic views of LA all lit up as the sky darkened.

I spent a good part of the time on the flights out and back peering out the window (Jeannine let me take the window seat)…

…and snapping shots of landscapes with my pocket camera.

They're not as cool as the photos from Stan Sakai's trip to Croatia, but I like them. A lot of the images from our flight over the desert and the mountains out west reminded me of the landscape-building stuff I used to do with the 3D program "Bryce"… maybe I should dig that program out and play around with it some more.

I did try to do some drawing during the trip… and this last photo, taken as the sun was setting on our last leg of the return trip back to Connecticut, shows my sketchbook reflected in the window of the airplane. -- PL

Glimmers

It's a bad weather day here in Maine, good for the trees and grass and ponds but bad for vacationers. I shouldn't complain too much -- we've had more than a week of great weather -- but I am kind of down because the heavy rain and winds are keeping me from heading down to the pebble beach below our rental house, where I have been going pretty much every day since we got here to sketch rocks.

As anyone who has visited the Maine coast can attest, one thing it is not short on by any means is rocks -- rocks of all shapes, sizes, and colors. Beautiful rocks, rocks in fantastic profusion and variety. Harshly-angled, jagged rocks next to sensually rounded rocks, shaped and smoothed by the endless tides.

And I have been having a good time drawing them. My wife has asked "Are you planning on drawing anything other than rocks?" And I do… in fact, I drew a gnarled piece of driftwood a few days ago. But right now, I like drawing these rocks. I enjoy watching an image emerge on the page of white paper as I scratch and scribble, hatch and cross-hatch away with one of the several markers I carry in my shirt pocket.

And the simple fact that I LIKE drawing these rocks is what has given me a new glimmer of hope that the joy I used to feel in drawing anything is slowly beginning to return. It's been a long while since I have spent much time drawing from life, but I am starting to remember how much fun it can be. It can also be incredibly frustrating in equal measure, of course, when you are trying to capture the essence of something real on paper and it just isn't working.

But one of the things I realized, and it came out last week during a conversation with Jeannine after we'd taken a break from eating fried clams, swimming, and gazing at the ocean from the back deck of the house we're renting to travel up to Portland, ME and see the Winslow Homer exhibit, is that I don't need to be so picky about getting everything, all the shapes and textures and other pertinent details, JUST SO. It's something I'd learned a long time ago when I started drawing from life in college, and had kind of forgotten. But as Jeannine in her quiet wisdom so cogently put it, "The world is inspiration, and art is not a mirror."

I'm thinking I will continue this when I get home. There are lots of things to draw in the world, and I am going to try my hand at putting some of them in my sketchbook. -- PL