Today was a perfect steamy summer day to take a stroll in Prospect Park. The pooch and I went for a nice long walk, with a few stops for some sketching. You first walk out onto the open lawn, and the wave of moist grassy air laced with sweet barbecue washes over you. EVERYONE is out enjoying the best spot in Brooklyn. I am still finding cool little paths to walk through. You can actually get lost in there. Since I am still obsessed with Google Earth ( Click here to download ), here are the placemarks of exactly where these sketches were drawn:
Top Sketch: ProsParkSketch1.kmz – Google Earth Placemark
Bottom Sketch: ProsParkSketch2.kmz – Google Earth Placemark

Central Park dairy house, Wash Sq Park fountain and the boathouse in Prospect Park.

About a month back my bro Jamie and I were sitting in the dining car of an Amtrak train on route to Pittsburgh. There was a handlebar-mustachioed Amtrak employee (right) doing some paperwork across the way and I took the opportunity to do a quick sketch and watercolor.
Right as I was finishing up, a second Amtrak employee asked me if I’d gotten permission to draw him. I told him no, I never asked people if I could sketch them. He said if I were in south Philly and someone caught me sketching them, a beat-down would ensue.

Cheerios has a bee, Frosted Flakes and Exxon, a tiger. Hostess has a vulture and racoon, Mastercard, a zebra, Geico, a gecko, and you gotta love that Chucky Cheese rat. But it’s the stallion that seems to speak to young men specifically, seducing them to work hard and drive fast with a smoke dangling.
These pictures were taken in Greece, inspired by the artist Richard Prince.

Here’s a few faces from my latest sketchbook…been slacking on the posts.

One of the items on my to-do list recently has been to expand my ‘texture library’. Since I have moved over to doing all of my color on the computer, texture is more important than ever. If there is a large area of flat color, and it is just ‘paint-bucketed’ in Photoshop, the flatness screams “Computer!”. The look I am trying to achieve is one that is more hand-made. I try to use custom brushes with my Wacom tablet as much as possible, but sometimes an area needs a bit of real-world texture to break the flatness…
The swatches above are from a few of the textures I worked up this week. They will be much more subtle when included in my work, sometimes only a tiny corner of one, but having a variety on hand is a valuable part of the illustrator’s tool-belt.

A few years back Stephen Antonson, Jon Keegan and I created this video. Then James Antonson and Patrick Macintosh supplied the music resulting in this piece.
Chance Griswold is an anagram for Clown Discharge which nicely illustrates the nature of the video:

With the help of Photoshop, I’ve been transforming some photos and doing paintings of them. This one is 24″x 36″.