I am illustrating a children’s book, one of my favorite things things to do. It is a very simple story about a boy who likes to play in the mud. The story is written in Spanish which of course I can’t read, but a translation was provided. I gotta say that drawing all that dripping slurpee mud brings out the boy in me. I wonder what the Spanish word for ewwwww is?

I am also currently working on a website e-commerce site and a set of corporate presentation kits for Intermax, and a POP display for the local library, a logo for a Zen Buddhist fellowship, and of course I have grading falling out my ears that needs to be finished.

My MMORPG has taken a back seat to my real life. I hate when that happens!

I’m not a real fan of tattoos. I’m not exactly opposed to them as a whole, I am just not convinced of the over all benefits of getting one. I get tired of wearing the same shirt too often … so it figures. Anyway. from a graphic art and illustration point of view how cool would it be for someone to love your art so much that they want to wear it always? For this reason I have crossed the line (form time to time) and have created a few flash sheets for a couple of tattoo artists who requested them. So in this vein, I give you something cool and tattoo oriented to look at. My only question is; In 50 years will it be a walrus? Connect the dots?

I did a digital illustration demo last week with my tablet and pen. (Not school related.) One of those watching me asked, “Why are you doing that?” I looked at my hand as I drew and noticed, as those watching did, that I rotated the stylus a quarter turn every couple of strokes. This particular maneuver is a carry-over from my analog days of color pencil work. In order to keep a workable tip edge, it is common to rotate the pencil as you draw. This of course is completely useless in the digital world as your pencil never gets dull. But having no place to put it, my brain was content to keep running on auto pilot rotating my virtual pencil tip, keeping the non-existent lead nice and sharp.

A client asked me “You remember disco, right?” They said it with such conviction. Like one look at me and the leap to faux satin shirts and angel flight plants was a natural presumptive jump. OK, the truth be told, I did own all of Donna Summers albums (those black vinal bones of music past). But honestly, Didn’t disco die an awful death ushering in new wave and techno punk?

Based on this assumption I was asked to create a John Travolta type disco scene. I drew the thumbnail with Autodesk Sketchbook Pro and vectorized it in Adobe Illustrator with custom brush settings. I used my (new — wahoo!) Wacom Tablet for this as my old tablet developed a dipping skipping error that was driving me nuts. It took me longer than I wanted to (5 hours) finish the task because the end product will be 4 feet wide by six feet tall and I felt compelled to clean up the lines a bit.

The girl that I used as scrap for this piece had a weird foreshortened elbow. Looking at it now, It still bothers me. I am hoping that tomorrow it looks better. (The prayer of every artist.) Chances are I will need to come back to this and fix some of the geometries there. Oh well.

All in all, not a bad gig.