Invisibleman was a collaborative group blog which ran from 2004-2014, featuring original illustration, drawing, photography and design. This site is now archived.
I'm originally from Stoneham, MA. Learned about the illustratin' at Syracuse University. Left there in 1995. I've been living in Brooklyn, NY pretty much since then. I got myself a lovely wife Julie, and a loyal pooch Logan. I enjoy the drawin', codin', travellin' and listening to the music.
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.
A few years ago while visiting friends up in Phoenicia, NY we stopped in an amazing antique shop, where I came across this stack of 4″x5″ black and white negatives. They seem to have come from a firehouse’s collection or something. One packet was labeled “GAS EXPLOSIAN JAMAICA N.Y. 11/25/46” and the other indicated that it was firemen in London, England, though no date was given. You gotta love the British firemen’s roman helmets. I am always excited to find such cool visual remnants. There are so many amazing glimpses into the past tucked in people’s attics and basements.
I just placed the negatives on my lightbox, and shot them at different angles with my digital camera, then inverted them (and restored the proper coppery tint).
To the best of my knowledge, these are the last pictures I shot on 35mm film. When we were living in Los Angeles back in 2003, I grabbed my trusty Yashica T* loaded up with black and white film, and Julie and I set off to explore the haunting Salton Sea area, about 60 miles to the south-east of Palm Springs.
We had heard it was an interesting place to visit, but we weren’t prepared for the things we would see: An artificial mountain built of mud, paint and car tires as a monument to God’s love (Salvation Mountain), entire neighborhoods, buildings and vehicles devoured by pink alkaline slurry, sulfurous boiling mudpots, defunct hotels from the 1950’s heydays and a dead, smelly sea.
If you are ever in the area, be sure to make time for a visit.
This is one from the dusty depths of the archives…The blur on the boot is a bit too much, but I had just discovered Photoshop (version 2.5 if I am not mistaken), and it looked good enough to me on my grayscale PowerBook 165 at the time.
I was psyched to get this super-fun job from Time Out Chicago to do a series of illos for their “Worst Case Scenarios” story in this week’s issue (Thanks Mike!). The editors came up with a list of harrowing situations, and asked various Chicago-based experts their advice on how to keep your cool and survive these stressful calamities. The scenarios I illustrated are: “ATM eats your card”, “Your car brakes fail”, “Your boss asks you to take a drug test”, “You lose your job”, “The condom broke”, “I got doored on my bike”, “My apartment was burgled” and “A bat was trapped in my house”. This is my first job for Time Out Chicago. Read on to see the full illos…
