Artist of the Day!

I posed for the super talented Harper Yu Mei Geddes as she created this masterpiece during lunch today!

When she was younger she couldn't say "Jimmy" properly and it came out sounding like "Dzimmy", though she spells it differently than I do. Looks like I need to shave my forehead again. Darn!

National Dog Day

Apparently yesterday was National Dog Day. So in honor of that auspicious occasion here are some more sketches of Jambi.

And lest I forget about the current head of the house, I've included some of the lovely Bijou as well.

Pig-dog

My dog Jambi was something of a chimera. He was part Shar-pei and part something short. His feet stuck out at a weird angle giving him a flippered look. His nose was pink, his tongue was blue, his forehead wrinkled. He had yellow eyes ("I swear to God, yellow eyes!"). His fur was course and when he'd shed, it worked it's way into car seat and couch cushion material making it near impossible to vacuum out. Yet his ears were soft and velvety. And when he lay on his side to sleep, with his short little flipper-feet sticking straight out, he resembled a piglet, curly tail and all.

Cowboys and Katt

Girl & Pup

Sketchy Redux

Here's an alternate version of JJ Plush that I did during lunch today.

Dr. Sketchy is Four!

Here are my sketches from last night's fourth anniversary of Detroit's Dr. Sketchy, featuring models Sassy Katt and JJ Plush! Thanks goes to Sean Bieri for continuing to put on a great program time after time. He pulled a marching band out of his hat for half-time entertainment. A Marching Band! Cool.

Dogs

Woo! 2

Same girl in the sketch from a few posts back. She looks weird to me. I think it's because her chin's the wrong shape. The paper texture in the background is from a first grade school assignment that is 38 years old! I found it in the same box as Speed Racer.

She kinda looks like my sister.

Here Comes Speed Racer

I don't remember drawing this, but I found it in a box of other stuff I scribbled off when I was a runny-nosed kid. I'm not sure what's going on with the train. Looks like it's about to run head on into a tornado. I figure I drew this when I was five or six due to the rendition of Speed Racer's Mach 5 down in the right hand corner. The writing in the upper corner remains a mystery.

Woo!

This!

Which is a remake of this:

Which is a remake of this crap:

More Sketchbook Stuff

Another Lautrec and a caricature commissioned by my mom.

That Too-Loose Low-Trek Guy

Last week Azucena and I visited Philly to take in some family, food, and museums. Family and food were both wonderful, and so were the museums. One nice surprise at the Philadelphia Museum of Art was almost an entire room dedicated to prints by one of my very favorites, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, painter and poster-maker in fin-de-siècle Paris. Henri used to hang out in brothels and dance halls, portraying dancers and prostitutes from the Montmartre neighborhood in which he lived. Sadly, he died young from drinking too much and complications from syphilis. So, you know, take that as a lesson.

The first sketch is my final version of Henri. I also did a few of the people he knew in Paris: Emile Bernard and Carmen Gaudin. He knew Vincent van Gogh as well.  I recently watched an excellent documentary on van Gogh and  he really comes off as a mal humorous, irritable, self-absorbed jerk, which is why I drew him that way. I saw another documentary by the same people on Lautrec that is equally entertaining and illuminating.

We also spied this fine example of American artistry whilst at the PMA:

I see spots

This here is a little exercise I picked up from someone (probably Stephen Silver). I made a bunch of little watercolor spots in my sketchbook and then picked out faces in the swirls and inked them. Some turned out better than others, and some not at all, but it makes for a lot of fun!