Who Draws the Drawers?

Yes, we can chatter on about grinding our own pigments and mixing our own medium and archival inks but sometimes you just have to grab a crayola colored pencil and go to town.



The girls were drawing at the kitchen table after dinner and I joined in, drawing my own little studies of them as they drew royal families and dinosaurs. Soon after it was bed time and we finished reading The Animal Family by Randall Jarrell. What a beautiful, poetic book. It’s a pleasure to read aloud. I had never even heard of it before Anna brought it home from the library (she had read it as a teenager); it’s a hidden gem. And as a bonus it is decorated by Maurice Sendak at his finest. RECOMMENDED.

Drawing or Just Reading About It?

I’ve been doing a lot of pencil-and-ink-wash pieces lately. Here’s a snippet from one featuring a princess:



When drawing this one I did something i hadn’t done for some time: I pulled out an old drawing book. The one I looked at was Drawing the Head and Figure by Jack Hamm. I’ve had this one for almost as long as I can remember and, while it doesn’t really “make drawing easy” as it says on the cover (nothing makes drawing easy), it’s still a handy reference for the illustrator working in pencil or ink.

The other thing that I’ve been working on is the story for the second Zita the Spacegirl book. This means drawing stacks of thumbnail pages in an effort to get the story all out on paper in rough form. My thumbnail pages are scribbly and have a sort of manic quality to them, so I’m always tempted to scatter them all over the room and pretend like I’m a reclusive mad inventor.

Little Girl in the Rain

Process Post

I drew this great bird yesterday.



Once in a while, the stars align and a picture turns out pretty good without a lot of fuss. When that happens drawing can seem almost effortless. It would be cool if it happened more often.

Normally for illustrations or comics panels I do a thumbnail sketch first. These range from pretty detailed to almost illegibly simplistic. It’s the simplistic ones, though, that I think are the most fun to go back and look at along side the final pictures. Here are a couple:







Moving along... It’s been a jumbled mixed bag of a week here at Haus Hatke, not to mention a busy one. At least this week I can rest assured that we’ll be bringing home the bacon because we slaughtered our pig on Tuesday.

Anna is doing a masterful job with the different cuts. As a neophyte, I had NO IDEA how much bacon you get on just one side. We’ll be smoking and curing ours (as well as making sausages, etc) and when it’s done Sunday brunches are going to be looking pretty sweet.

Piena di Progetti -or- Projects Aplenty

That’s what I’ve got these days!

Back in October I helped some friends tear down an old barn. The barn was in an abandoned apple orchard which was strangely beautiful, with it’s hulking, rusted-out cider press and piles of old crates. Places like that I always file away, meaning to come back with a sketchbook or camera. Well, for help in pulling apart the barn I got a share of the wood, which cleans up beautifully. Now I’m far from a master woodworker, but this stuff was pretty forgiving so I started chipping away on this window bench. Not quite finished, but it’s coming along:




I’m also starting work on the second Zita the Spacegirl book, which is starting to take shape. I’m sure Ill have a lot of comics-related posts here in 2010. In the meantime here is a chameleon that I drew yesterday. He... he looks at me.

In a creepy way.



Oh and finally, I added a link to Kevin McEvoy’s blog. He’s a nice young artist that I met in Florence a few years back. He’s doing some fine work.

NEW YEAR POST

Happy New Year, readers! I see by my sidebar that I have 20 followers. This is a little surprising and a little more surprising because there are many of you I’ve never met. Thanks for looking at my little postings. I’ll try to make this all worth your time.

I have had to enact comment moderation because of spam, but don’t let that stop you genuine human beans from posting! If the Spamoids stop trying I’ll go back to the free for all.

Here is the last bit of work I did in 2009. It’s a snippet from an unfinished still life featuring a pair of pomegranates:

Sadly, this painting was, ultimately, a failure. After an hour or so I realized that there was no saving this little piece and I scrubbed it all out. But the pomegranates have not defeated me yet! I’ll try again in this sparkling new year.

And speaking of that, It seems that the internet has decided that 2010 is the official start of “the future.” Here’s a post by Tony Cliff about that. And a Beartato comic. Expect good things from 2010. I do.