A few Fridays back I served jury duty at the State Supreme Court in Brooklyn. I arrived on time and 8 hours later was sent home. Despite not being selected to be on a jury I was dismissed having “fulfilled my obligation.”
It was INDEED boring but I was able to pass the time reading and sketching. In addition to drawing the tree above I was able to make healthy headway into the 600 something page DeKooning biography. Interesting so far. The guy never really intended on becoming a fine artist. Started off as a commercial artist (and a rather successful one even in the midst of the Depression) before he became romanced by modern art (particularly Picasso.)

Anyhow…book jacket below:

This fellow was sleeping in the very same spot as the man in the sketch I posted last weekend. Washington Square fountain: good sketching spot.

Some ideas of potential crowd characters and background bits for this years siren art. I like the idea of a bathing suit clad stormtrooper strumming a banjo.

sunny morning in the fountain

(Click on the image to see a larger version)
This is a detail of a piece I am working on for my new postcard. I am really enjoying doing all the values, and I can’t wait to get into the color. Doing it all in Photoshop, using custom brushes. This is the second version of this, as I needed to redraw the people to look more like my characters…

Lesson learned: You have to find all the little bits you love to do in an illo, and then do pieces with nothing but those parts. That’s the plan at least.

Inspired by Jon Keegan’s ‘Barely Conscious Drawing’ post from below… the red pencil is getting more playing time as of late.

I wanted to draw a portrait this weekend and Mr. Orwell seemed an appropriate choice.

Some more tests using photoshop to color the scans of my sketches.

Been doing a lot of drawings in my small Moleskine sketchbook on the subway, as I enforce a strict No-New York Times rule (limited to the paper edition), for the time being.