“Oh please don’t go— we’ll eat you up— we love you so!”

I am honored to have worked on today’s birthday doodle for Maurice Sendak.  One of my very first memories as a sentient organism was of Where the Wild Things Are.  My pre-school teacher read the book to us kiddies and held a staring contest like the monsters in the forest.  I beat all the other students and my teacher.  This is still one of my greatest accomplishments.

Many thanks to Corrie Scalisi and Mike Dutton for engineering and art collaboration!

shimmy and shake, page 2 draft, digital

i’m an awful character designer.  hopefully this project will force me to think more carefully about my forms…differentiating among 6 women all wearing similar styles of clothing is a challenge.

shimmy and shake, page 2 study, digital

i’ve passively worked on an old “children’s book” idea since 2008 about King Henry VIII and his wives.  i figured that finishing it off could be a good exercise in shapes and composition…and make me feel like i’m generating a consistent body of work.

i’m really out of my comfort zone by stylizing my figures so heavily.  though this approach is proving very time-consuming, i hope it all works out in the end :-/

this is also keeping me from drawing embarrassing amounts of sherlock fan art…i can’t promise benedict won’t creep his dashing way onto this blog though.

earring, ink on paper, flash

putzing around with a quick drawing…somehow the axis of rotation slid a little off to the side while processing in photoshop.  c’est la vie.

this is the last of 25.  i try to sneak in a quick self portrait every year before i suddenly age.  

i don’t feel any wiser, but i feel more compelled to fake it.

an experiment in strutting

not knowing what you’re doing is both incredibly exciting and frustrating. 

but his voice, sketch, digital and pencil

experimenting with a few new brushes and thinking about white.  this is also my favorite bit of verse from christine.

hourly comic day, digital and ink

i decided to subject myself to this torture— for every hour you’re awake, draw a comic.  well i didn’t do every hour, but i managed to crank out ten. most of them just document my descent into madness.  it’s funny, but an hourly deadline was stressful enough to give me palpitations.  maybe i am the weak artist-type after all.  

the last comic doesn’t relate to the others at all.  that part of phantom just makes me giggle every time i hear it.

box 5, digital, pencil, ink

i’ve been living in my own head for a few weeks— flipping between recordings of john owen-jones and hugh panaro with almost as much ferver as my 15-year-old self.

this the is first piece of legitimate phantom art i’ve done since i was a teenager.  (that was a sepia watercolor of hugh and sandra joseph that i actually gave to hugh at the majestic theater stage door.  i wonder if he still has it.)  working on this makes me wonder how much i’ve actually changed in the last decade.

anyway, i started this as an experiment in fuzziness and textures.  i found that i stopped rendering for a reason:  it takes too damn long.

erik, sketch, ink and digital

sometimes i really, REALLY miss being in back in NY.  broadway/hugh panaro/the phantom of the opera are a small example.  i don’t often draw fan art, but i WILL draw the hell out this guy.

it’s also quite apparent that i’m making/testing out some new textures.

youth, drafts, digital

i’m clearly a person who can’t make a decision.  i’m not sure if i want the graphic clarity of a sparse background, or the narrative of a full scene.  i’ll probably end up wasting my time by coloring a couple of these…

i originally wanted to keep my shapes very simple and kind of blocky.  alas, the drawing ended up, er, fairly detailed.  i think i need to come to terms with my primitive need to control every last curve.

in case anyone was wondering why i disappeared for a while, i was in japan for a couple of weeks.  i hung out with robots, ate at Jiro’s, ran through temples, and had my life changed for the better.

gif - lady on the run, color pencil and digital

animated gif.  oooh la la.

lady on the run, color pencil and digital.  queen elizabeth I, paper, tape, cardboard, pencil.

a few drawings of bouncy, running, squishy ladies.

also a night of paper-fueled psychosis in the office.  i decided it would be fun to make a quick bust of queen elizabeth I.  

floral dress (final, draft, and concept), digital, print here

i hadn’t made much art for myself (at all actually) in recent months.  this came out of a boredom sketch— i was originally going to make a simple animated gif where the petals fall on her lap, but it got a little carried away.  this was also inspired by a picture of a 1910 maxi dress i had open in a tab for weeks.  

i’ve been trying to work in a looser style …but unfortunately it becomes really rigid when i zoom out (a large part is probably that i used straight vertical lines and small brushes).  

my personal work has slowed down significantly in the last year, which is kind of a good and bad thing.  talking to my coworker, kevin, a few weeks ago, i asked if he still thinks drawing is “difficult.”  he said yes— not necessarily for technical reasons, but for a lack of inspiration.  it’s hard to draw something that’s meaningful— which is exactly why i’ve hit a wall.  i have nothing to say anymore.  considering, though, that all i had to say a year or so ago were mopey, whiny things, my lack of drawings might be good.

Google is celebrating the great Winsor McCay’s “Little Nemo in Slumberland” with an animated, interactive comic.  above are the final static image of the comic and an early sketch.