One

With crow quill:

I'm Still learning how to draw and how to express...

Then he said to me; "Time is the test of all things."

Sketching quickly with the crow quill, trying to get nice and comfortable with it.

Higher resolution version: here

Classical looking old guy with a beard.

I'm finding that the feed back from the paper can turn the crow quill from a fun and free tool to a repulsive, agitating disaster.

This is another sketch from life drawing at the Society of Illustrators in New York.

There's something hilarious and/or ridiculous looking about riding around on a tiny machine.

This is a sketch from life drawing at the Society of Illustrators in New York.

I haven't touched Crow quill pens since college. Lately I've been inspired by work that's made me reconsider this medium.

Warming up with colors on an old sketch.

from the industrial tribe.

I must hate myself to complicate a simple drawing this much. Still shaking my head.

This is a panel on a page: I got to a point where it would pass for complete, which of course isn't good enough. So I started to complete it the way I really wanted it. About halfway through it still looked nearly complete. In fact the subject of the panel took a fraction of the time it took the render the rest. Go figure.

These are always different and fun.

I drew this last year, then I forgot why I did it, and it sat there, almost complete but with no purpose at all.

At much higher resolution and in greater detail, I painted this one using the same process I tested on the same piece before. It's interesting, however, I'm not sure I would work this way again.

I've decided to call this The Canyon. Too obvious?

If there was nothing else to do, what should one do?

Sometimes it's just fun to play.

Play is the laboratory for insight and learning; is it not crucial for all ages?

In the spirit of advice, an acquaintance once told me, among other things, that if I figured out why I created art, everything would change for me and I would become a good artist. At the time, I was struggling with respect to who I was and what I was doing. I found the advice—or maybe his tone—annoying at best, but attempted to take it to heart as beggars shouldn't be choosers, or should they?

Since that time, I've considered the question from time to time with no final answer. I don't think there will ever be one answer, it's like asking why do children play? I feel compelled to create art, so I create it. It's a part of my being and key to my sense of well being; I inhale my universe, and eventually I am compelled to exhale or suffocate. What is may not have a why, and so there was no revolution in that respect. I was not Luke, he was not Yoda; I haven't spoken to this acquaintance in years.

I've written a piece that ventures ever so lightly into the question of why we send people to explore space. Space exploration is usually featured as science and for scientific necessity, but the reality is that sending humans into space is astronomically expensive—pun!—and not necessarily as scientifically fruitful as sending machines. So why go? Is it really for science, or is it another reason else?

I suspect the real reason for putting people in space, on the moon and eventually Mars has more to do with dreams and the fact that we can. We've passively inhaled the stars, the endless night and our universe for centuries, and now we're exhaling lest we suffocate ourselves on our increasingly crowded little blue planet.

A New York Times Op ed from Lawrence M. Krauss 'A One-Way Ticket to Mars'. This got my own thoughts rolling on the topic.

I'm testing a different digital coloring method, it's faster, though the piece is still not in a state i would called finished.

A panel, once upon a time but no longer...

Two years ago, I accepted a job. The job was as a designer for Todd McFarlane Productions.

Basically none of my work was used. None of the solutions I really worked on made it to production. There are stories, but even of I told them in an understated fashion, they would feel like exaggerations. I worked with some brilliant people who were hindered by lesser people. I am thankful because of what I saw, and what I learned. Late nights, weekends, research, revision, revision, ignored, unanswered, rejected; I just don't believe my work was allowed to be useful to the organization. Why I've been asked to continue in a limited role as a contractor, I do not understand.

What's significant about today, however, is that I am no longer an employee of Todd McFarlane Productions.

It can be a smell, a feeling, a gust of wind or a melodic sequence on the air; it's an effect usually unlocked in the night.

I am most awake at night, most conscious of the here and now, then and there, while always surveying what could be. In those frozen moments, something happens, like a quantum particle, I am traveling two paths at once. Here and there, that place where that combination—ever so subtle—took shape waiting to be called again in my future: my here and now.

Suspended in two times, two places, two men yet One. Nothing has happened, but everything has changed. In one of those moments, I am walking years ago, smelling this air, feeling this loss, surrendered to this wind and that floating melody. I walked, looking up at the night, wondering who I would be right now.

Rejected Fantasy art...
I have 10 days left as an employee of Todd McFarlane Productions.