Design & Execution

A little over a year ago, two friends of mine purchased a house encircled by sumptuous Japanese landscaping. Cloud-pruned evergreens and spiritually-positioned rocks abounded. So when my friends decided they wanted a paved courtyard and a privacy fence in one portion of the yard, an exquisite specimen of a Japanese maple had to move. We're talking a lacy, 9-foot-wide cascading affair with, as it turned out, a surprisingly robust root system. I was recruited to assist with the transplant on the understanding that I would receive the tree after it had been removed. The reader is spared the expense of watching the moved tree through winter, March, and (painfully) April with no sign of leafing. I eventually admitted failure, though the maple retained an air of majesty with its tangled grey arms, refusing as they did to issue buds. By late April, I had despaired of running outside after work to stare at the branches and will them to bud, so I decided to represent them in paintings inste...

 A sketch of Victoria Street, an adorably elbow-shaped thoroughfare in Edinburgh. I enjoy when streets make me feel like I'm indoors. I feel like this one could swallow me permanently. There's always a bit of falsehood in sketching architecture in a locale one hasn't actually visited, so I'll have to remedy that someday and walk it.

Scientific name:  Clavicorona pyxidata , or the Coral Fungus, known for its boxy shape and crown-tipped branches. Drawn digitally in Photoshop with a Wacom Intuos tablet.

While sheltering at home, I've become fascinated with shade gardening. This lovely has not graced my backyard as yet, but there's time. Technically they're called "oyster mushrooms," and I don't think I need to explain why. Creature combo! Sketched in Photoshop with my Wacom and Kyle's Fountainia Soft brush.

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...