Posted by: pa (146 posts)
May 3, 200810:00 PM

Testing out a new Lamy pen.

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Posted by: pa (146 posts)
April 30, 2008 7:12 PM

Recently broke out one of those watercolor sketchbooks that Moleskin make and did a few draintings (just made up that word) of Alaska using GoogleEarth as reference. Volcanoes in the Aleutian islands and the Kenai mountains, rendered with watercolor pencil.

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Posted by: pa (146 posts)
April 23, 2008 8:39 PM

I made this pattern to use as texture and background for this year's siren illustration which I just completed. The sea hag of my dreams makes an appearance in up there. Congrats also to my fellow invisibleman and invisiblewomen as this marks our 600th post.

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Posted by: pa (146 posts)
April 17, 200811:24 PM

In past years I would get a bit morose come springtime if I hadn't gotten enough snowboarding under the belt. This is not one of those years. From the deep drifts of Utah to the hidden stashes of Vermont's woods it's been a splendid year of riding either solo or with Kristina and Keith. The pattern image at the bottom was part of my entry to this years Salomon board art contest. I didn't have much time to put anything together so I quickly plundered some of the patterns I've been recently working on

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Posted by: pa (146 posts)
April 3, 200810:53 AM

I've been listening to a lot of audiobooks and podcasts while working on illustrations lately. A great resource for this is LibriVox which features readings of works which are in the public domain. A great one I recently toiled to was The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells which was written in 1897 and is an absolute sci-fi classic.

The image above of The Invisible Man (who is also a co-founder of this website) was done in my sketchbook a while back and tweaked digitally.

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Posted by: pa (146 posts)
March 18, 200810:21 PM

A recent illustration for WSJ.com regarding economists current view of our economic standing. I usually have around 24 hours to turn these illo's around and in this case I wish I had a bit more time to work on the drawing.

Just found out that the great Arthur C. Clarke has passed away. This past fall I came across a dusty and yellowed pile of his books in The Stone Soup Bookstore of Camden Maine. I began to quickly digest his amazing stories and man were they in my wheelhouse. The Times has a great obit. I'd recommend Rendezvous with Rama, Childhood's End or Against the Fall of Night if your interested in a bit of grand sci-fi.

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Posted by: pa (146 posts)
March 11, 2008 9:46 PM

Here are a couple characters for the Anteism road trip I whuped up. And a couple others.

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Posted by: pa (146 posts)
March 5, 2008 7:54 PM

Recent illo for WSJ.com. There's something rather timid looking about that googly-eyed congress.

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Posted by: pa (146 posts)
February 19, 2008 9:44 PM

The NY Press is doing a story about a city labor leader who's proposing that vehicles pay double the current rates to enter the city and mass transit made free. So for the cover illustration I created this image of the NYC subway under some Mumbai-esque crowding conditions. Click the image or here for a larger version.

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Posted by: pa (146 posts)
February 13, 2008 6:22 PM

Last weekend I created this illustration for The Riverfront Times of St. Louis highlighting an article they did about The Clowder House, a local cat retirement home (for when the owner gets too old to care for the kitty). It was fun showing the details like the cat meds, the pajamas, the rubik's cube and the Wii. Click the image to see a larger version.

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Posted by: pa (146 posts)
February 7, 2008 8:50 PM

I've been keeping a small moleskin sketchbook in my pocket to augment my bigger, badder sketchbook. This group was sketched on the NYC subway in recent weeks.

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Posted by: pa (146 posts)
February 2, 2008 3:04 AM

This is second in a series of pattern-like illustrations I've been working on. This one is based on New York City. The first in the series was based off a ghost story.

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Posted by: pa (146 posts)
January 29, 2008 9:22 PM

This was a quick Wall Street Journal Online illo for an economic forecast survey. Whether our intrepid donkey and doofus elephant are merely navigating some rapids or careening towards a deadly waterfall is the question I guess. I do like that the pachyderm has carelessly lost his paddle.

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Posted by: pa (146 posts)
January 17, 2008 7:25 PM

It had been a while since my last figure drawing session and thus it was invigorating to draw and paint these images at the Society of Illustrator's Jazz & Sketch this past tuesday. One fellow in front of me was drawing on butcher paper with charcoal and white pencil and I couldn't believe how good he was... humbling.

The fellow on the right is an 89 year old illustrator who was also making some great sketches. I chatted with him briefly as we walked out and he told me how last winter he got a pair of the new fat ski's and how they were really fast. He also lamented that he was just a bit too old to start snowboarding.

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Posted by: pa (146 posts)
January 7, 200810:50 PM

I sketched my brother while we were lounging about our parent's home in Pittsburgh a couple days before Christmas. A few days later my girlfriend Kristina and I headed to Utah for a week of snowboarding. While Solitude and Brighton were great mountains we were really taken by the Snowbird resort which you can see a few views of below. Everything I'd heard about Utah being the home of the lightest snow on earth was true.

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Posted by: pa (146 posts)
December 13, 2007 9:43 PM

This past weekend I created this illustration for The Riverfront Times of St. Louis. The paper was highlighting an upcoming lecture by one of the scientists who discovered a diminutive, fossilized skeleton in a cave on the Indonesian island of Flores which was dubbed 'The Hobbit'. As for the scientist I was going for the academic version of Indiana Jones. This was a particularly fun job as I'm a bit of a Lord of the Rings nerd. Click the image to see a larger version.

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Posted by: pa (146 posts)
December 3, 2007 9:47 PM

The easiest subway sketching situation tends to be when commuters are either sleeping or reading. The downside is that your sketchbook fills up with renderings of people with their eyes closed or at best, downcast. Though I find more often then not people get off the train before you complete a sketch and I've got many disembodied ears, eyeglasses and hands floating around the sketchbook to prove it.

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Posted by: pa (146 posts)
November 20, 200711:42 PM

Third in a series of fed-chairman Ben Bernanke drawings for the Wall Street Journal Online. Below is one of the quick sketches which precede the final illo.

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Posted by: pa (146 posts)
November 10, 200712:29 AM

"Merry Second-To-Last Christmas" is written on the inside of the card above. It's fun illustrating for the likes of The Onion. Both Christmas cards can be bought here.

I can imagine the kid crying and breaking crayons.

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Posted by: pa (146 posts)
October 28, 2007 8:06 PM

This is another illo created for the Stowe Guide, a magazine in Stowe Vermont. The humorous article deals with the phenomenon referred to as the 'Dude Patch' in which a group of snowboarders move about a mountain in a tightly packed posse. Click the image to view a larger version.

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Posted by: pa (146 posts)
October 16, 200710:26 PM

I recently worked on a project for the Wall Street Journal Online which tracked the rate at which the arctic ice cap has melted over the last quarter of a century. Click here to see the astonishing rate of decrease since 1979 - with the past six years or so of particular worry (you may have to turn your popup blocker off for the link to work... sorry). The magenta line is the median ice extent and is an average of where the ice would normally be on September 1st of each year (around 7.5 million sq miles). As you can see above this summer only reached 4.4 million sq miles. The graphic also covers how arctic tourism industry is booming as visitors want to catch of glimpse of the environment before its gone.

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Posted by: pa (146 posts)
October 12, 200711:41 PM

About 10 years ago I did an illustration for the Vermont weekly 'Seven Days' about a couple getting caught in a blizzard while hiking up to the Stone Hut which sits atop Stowe. The hut was built by the Civilian Conservation Corps in 1936 and is a special place; perched as it is atop the famous Nose Dive trail. Recently the Stowe Guide contacted me about reusing the art though I recalled having sold the original (pre-computer days: no scan). But I had a few sketches and drawings stored away and thus did a Dr. Frankenstein and stitched, spackled and redrew the drawing above. The original story by David Healy is a great tale and can be read here.

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Posted by: pa (146 posts)
October 4, 2007 9:22 PM

I just finished creating these designs for the Village Voice media kit (the packet they give out to advertisers and clients and such). It was fun working up this subway tile theme, though I underestimated the amount of effort doing all these little tiles would take. I seriously dreamt in tiles for quite a few nights.

As part of the project I also created this logo which adorns the front of the media kit and various other promotions.

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Posted by: pa (146 posts)
September 25, 2007 6:49 PM

A drawing in the sketchbook made of the mountains of northwest Montana as seen through Google Earth.

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Posted by: pa (146 posts)
September 12, 200710:19 PM

I completed this illo of Ben Bernanke earlier today for a Wall Street Journal economic forecast interactive. The spooky atmosphere may be influenced by the Algernon Blackwood book I've been reading as of late.

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Posted by: pa (146 posts)
September 3, 200712:57 PM

Growing up my family did lots of camping and the highlight of every trip was always the ghost story told by my father once the fire grew low. He was a master practitioner of the art. I made his always bone-chilling stories the theme of this pattern drawing I just completed. Click the image above for a larger version.

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Posted by: pa (146 posts)
August 21, 2007 9:12 PM

This is an illustration for the Riverfront Times in St. Louis which highlights three upcoming events: a viewing of Troll 2 (rated worst movie ever by IMDB), a charity foodball game and a sumo and sake event. Click image for a larger version.

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Posted by: pa (146 posts)
August 12, 2007 1:08 PM

A drawing from the sketchbook. Further analysis can be found here.

Continue reading "Chu-Chu-Chupacabra"
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Posted by: pa (146 posts)
August 11, 200711:52 AM

Lately my thoughts and daydreams have been dominated by snowy hillsides and sliding down them on a snowboard. This has been a bit excruciating since we're here in dog days of summer. I took these photos above while riding at Montana's Big Mountain with my pal Paul Clark (aka Blixie). I hope it snows soon.

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Posted by: pa (146 posts)
August 4, 2007 9:58 PM

Astro-Gato and Sharky McBeast are two of the six characters I drew for the rad folks at Anteism and their iMyGrate project. For this project Ryan Thompson and friends put out a call for character submissions and are now in the midst of a roadtrip from the Pacific to the Atlantic dispursing these characters along the way. They're going to track the character's destinations and are hoping some will migrate their ways back to their home base of Pender Island B.C. Good luck Astro-Gato and Sharky McBeast, I hope you make some friends along the way.

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Posted by: pa (146 posts)
August 1, 2007 9:31 PM

Some of the lakes and mountains of southern Chile sketched from Google Earth.

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Posted by: pa (146 posts)
July 21, 200710:30 AM

I had a really fun time working up these Harry Potter illustrations for a The Wall Street Journal Online interactive. Click here to see the infographic, complete with floating scrolls (ala the Marauder Map) and animated owls. I haven't read the books but I really dig the films and was very enthused to illustrate within that universe. The entire time I worked on these the Harry Potter theme music was swirling through my head.

And really, I'd be remiss if I didn't address the best feline actor we have today and the true star of the entire Harry Potter series: Crookshanks the Cat. (As you can see from the illustration he is first in line to get his paws on 'The Deathly Hallows'). When I saw the new film 'Order of the Phoenix' and saw the work that Crookshanks had done, the type of cat actor he's become... well, I wept openly.

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Posted by: pa (146 posts)
July 15, 2007 3:45 PM

A drawings that came out of the sketchbook and then was digitally reworked of various sculptures at MOMA and Rockefeller University, including 'The River' by Aristide Maillol and Herbert Ferber's 'Homage to Piranesi' among others. Click here or on the image to see a larger version.

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Posted by: pa (146 posts)
July 14, 200710:45 PM

More sketching done on the New York subway - the ever fruitful place to draw people who are staring down or sleeping. Click here or on the image to see a larger version.

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Posted by: pa (146 posts)
July 9, 200712:08 AM

Drawings in the sketchbook made over a few days riding various subway lines.

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Posted by: pa (146 posts)
July 8, 2007 7:02 PM

My moon globe on a wooden pedestal and yet another back-of-the-head drawing.

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Posted by: pa (146 posts)
July 4, 2007 5:53 PM

Drawn in the sketchbook while there was still light.

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Posted by: pa (146 posts)
June 25, 200711:50 PM

This past spring Salomon Snowboards had an artwork contest for some of their 2008 boards. While I didn't come away with the fame and prize money it was fun working up this illustration as an entry. I had a feeling it might be a bit too messy (and perhaps spooky) for their tastes but its a color palette and style I've dug working in lately.

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Posted by: pa (146 posts)
June 24, 2007 8:57 PM

The Queensboro Bridge is undergoing some rehabilitation lately and is partially wearing a Christo-like shroud. The sketch above I drew from York ave and the photo below nearby.

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Posted by: pa (146 posts)
June 2, 2007 5:08 PM

This is an illustration done in flash for a Wall Street Journal Online infographic highlighting the big business behind superhero movie franchises. It was really fun to work up some old friends in a comic book style, though I was lobbying for Hellboy to be in there rather than the ninja turtle. Alas I was overruled. Jon Keegan and Mei Lan Ho-Walker worked on the awesome animation and design aspects of the infographic. Check out the handywork here (Safari's popup-blocker might thwart this link).

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Posted by: pa (146 posts)
May 5, 200712:00 AM

I came across these eight guys playing some incredibly tight New Olreans jazz in Washington Sq park a few hours ago. The tuba especially was blowing out.

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