Click to grow trees

Some sketchbook buggies to honor our nation’s birthing!

Happy Fourth of July!

I like Old San Juan. It’s old. This is in the town square where the taxi drivers sit waiting for their next fare.
The fort has been around since the 1600’s and everything else around it was ancient too. I did some paintings on the bus that are some of my favorites.
On a painting… I take notes on the back of the art, note colors, details etc, and then paint it in the hotel room or when I get home. I use a dip pen, and sepia india ink. Sometimes with a pencil sketch underneath or if I feel confident, then right to ink.

A quick full pager to accompany an interview with Carl Shipman, one of the first British skaters to ever make it big in America. If I got to draw “RAD” stickers for every illo job, I’d be much happier. This one was a bit of a challenge to draw; the editor wanted a straight up portrait of Shipman, but didn’t have any sample shots for me to draw from. We both spent far too long trawling the internet searching for any photo portraits of him, but to no avail. In the end I had to resort to climbing up into my Dad’s attic to rummage through my extensive childhood sk8rat mags until I found a few snaps of him. Elusive.
And if you really want to know more about what it’s like to be a pencil pusher, go to the July issue of Australian based readersvoice.com for an interview with me.

Some photos of a mural I painted on the walls of Projekts MCR last week.

Illustration for Prana Yoga Journal

Last week I was lucky enough to attend the inspiring “An Event Apart” conference up in Boston. If you are a web designer / coder and don’t read the invaluable A List Apart website (which created the annual multi-city conference), start today. Lots of great talk about CSS, Javascript and web design issues.
Luckily for me, this means two days of near-motionless models to draw in my sketchbook from a row in the back of the room. The models did a great job, holding their hour-long poses with a minimum of fidgeting. Thank you An Event Apart attendees, for allowing me to draw your bald heads and wrinkled shirts.
Believe it or not, the act of sketching lets me focus more on what is being said, and I do believe the ideas ‘take’ better than if I was just sitting staring at a tiny person on a stage.