Design & Execution

One afternoon, Tucker and I were drinking percolator coffee and avoiding errands, when he suggested that we take a look at  his collection of photos from his academically-guided trip to Israel and other areas near the Red Sea. What followed was a Spielberg-like  tour through Petra  (a.k.a.  the end of  Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade ) in Jordan , and a kibbutz* in Israel on Tucker’s monitor. Amid the comedy, danger, and sand, this shot of the city of Jerusalem struck me.  It shows the eastern, or Arab side of Jerusalem, an area of relatively new development.   The buildings and their glinting windows and green mosque lights coat the side of the hill like bright scales. Urban landscapes appeal to me, especially ones where space seems so precious that every inch could be the subject of a possible dispute. This interest may be tied to my upbringing in Alaska, where the land is so plentiful, people get tired just looking at it, let alone deciding what...

I recently picked up some stellar drawing advice from the Shouting from the Basement , blog of Green Arrow comics artist and writer, Ande Parks.  Inking Made Easy Here, in my semi-humble opinion, is what makes good comic book inking, in five not-so-easy steps: Draw, don't trace. You don't have to be Frazetta , but you have to know what the forms are and how to contribute to them. Always. Make confident lines. We don't want to see you tentatively feeling your way around. Make every line like you know it's the right line. Vary line weights. If all your line weights are the same the work will be flat. Fat, bold lines next to razor thin lines makes stuff POP. Texture. Develop & consistently apply visual shorthand for textures. Complex or simple, they must be convincing. Wood, steel, cloth, etc. Saved the most important for last. Help tell the story! Spot blacks. Separate visual planes. Keep things clear. Story > pretty lines. There. Now you can all g...

My recent drawings  have been part of a three-part installation for Buffalo Exchange Colorado. The other two pieces are open-ended, topic-wise. The second piece grew from my mental image of the Buffalo Exchange store in its new location on Broadway in central Denver, which I have never had the pleasure of seeing in person, so it remains an object of surrealism for me. If any work of art inspired the subject matter, it is probably the giant tiger roaming New York in Jonathan Lethem's novel Chronic City . Not to worry; the tiger doesn't really affect the story in any substantial way. Whatever anybody says, comparisons to Catbus from Hayao Miyazaki's animated film  My Neighbor Totoro happened only after I had finished the drawing and began showing it to savvier anime consumers. I can't help but wonder whether Catbus, in Japanese, is also a bad pun that gets funnier beside the word for Pop Tarts.  I wish that Miyazaki could design my breakfast...

I began a draft of this project years ago when I was living in central Denver, a region that naturally keeps its finger on the pulse of Buffalo hipsterdom. This was really more of an emo buffalo. My grasp of hipsterdom during the making of this sketch was as tenuous as it is now. Where was I going with that spiked wrist cuff? This never quite blossomed into a finished piece, but Buffalo Exchange fished it from the archives a few months ago and suggested I put a bow on it. I was overjoyed, but my zeal was soon tempered by the realization that hipsterdom of all kinds might have been redefined during the period between drafts. I decided to crowd-source my research on Facebook.  Some comments have been censored due to requests for buffalo nudity. From this thread, I gleaned that a fixed-gear bike would be an unavoidable accessory. Try though I might, I knew I wasn't going to find a photo of a buffalo riding a fixed-gear bike on any Flickr album to serve as a model...

Black Wolf of the Glacie r, my most recent children's book project, is about an almost-black wolf. Colors eyedropped from a photo of Romeo revealed saturation levels ranging from 8 to 42%. While I didn't have an eydropping tool while I was mixing my wash colors, I tried to keep this in mind. On the cover, Romeo will be charcoal colored with 10% saturation. Of course, part of me thinks: mythology doesn't give a rat's hindquarters about your point samples. An archetype is an archetype; he should have been licorice-flavored, a wolfish essence of a sumi-e ink drawing.   In the end, though, my reasoning became practical; several of the author's illustration descriptions called for more detail than a silhouette, which is what Romeo might have become had he been much darker. I had to create internal contrast somehow. I chose to use a little bit of brown color rather than including solid whites. Romeo had to be a blend of colors for visibility's sake, bu...

Sometimes I wonder how the pictures alone would work as a story. Of course, pages 4-5 give away the aesthetic ending. These are the wordless layout sketches for Black Wolf of the Glacier , which will shortly be printed on watercolor paper and painted in an aqueous wash. The first page will most likely compose the cover art. I have tried to maintain consistent appearance of the characters throughout the story. The girl and her dog now have names compliments of Deb Vanasse : Shawna and Buddy, respectively. Black Wolf is a story of the rich life, death, and incomplete resurrection of a wolf in the form of an audio tape of Romeo howling, perched on a rock near the edge of Mendenhall Glacier. When the watercolors arrive, I might convey the howling sound somehow using emitting shapes in all the negative space surrounding the moon. Or perhaps I'll just leave it negative; maybe that's what a howl sounds like, anyway: a...

This installation of Black Wolf of the Glacier drawings should probably appear in black, a tone of mourning. Since I last posted illustrations, I have lost the company of my generously-sized Intuos3 Wacom, the drawing tablet I used to complete all of my illustrations for Lucy's Dance . I never went as far as naming it, but its flat grey countenance had borne the tracing of some of my best current line drawings. It weathered my dropping it, tripping on its cord, and sullying it with foodstuffs enough that like the Velveteen Rabbit, it became real. Then a loose power cord did it in at last. and I watched its blue connection LED flicker away like a fairy, and yes, I did try clapping it back to life. When hope seemed distant, I also resorted to prying it open and looking inside, but it was no use. My new wireless Intuos4 is pulling its slight weight. The smaller 8x5" surface doesn't feel restrictive, considering I draw primarily from my wrist; rather, it makes each movem...