It's been a weird couple of years where social media became so toxic I'm just not online much. This place isn't like that so I have no excuse! So here's the CD cover for my new album "Junkyard Sam - OUTCAST", now available on Soundcloud & Spotify.
A foggy morning opens up to a burnt landscape. I wanted to paint a couple of different environments in one painting but still aim to be refined. I used fall colors and smaller lines.
When your own son calls you anonymous, you probably don’t exist. He likes to be funny on greeting cards. Hahaa! Usually my doodles are a one to two day thing. I continued adding to this one over a period of a couple weeks. Life has been a blur lately. It feels good to be able to post something again.
Two old trees.Illustration from Singer/songwriter Juha Tapios song Kaksi Puuta. Story of couple who are like two old trees. Both standing alone but sametime weave roots together. .
I had a rock tumbler as a child and really enjoyed it. When my youngest was a child we bought her one. She was eager to enjoy it too, but somewhere after starting on that path, we lost track and it everything inside turned into a solid mass. We tossed it and forgot about it. On a recent beach trip, I collected handfuls of rocks, as I am always likely to do, and, upon return, remembered how I loved my childhood rock tumbler. I immediately researched, ordered and eagerly anticipated its delivery. Of course, with Amazon Prime, that was only a couple day’s wait. As soon as I unboxed it I thought “what am I doing?” I have neither time, nor space for yet another hobby. I thought “what will I DO with a pile of polished, pretty rocks?” I would gather them in my hands and feel their silky smoothness. I would likely gather them in some beautiful glass bowl and…then what? I have toddler grand kids frequently at my home. They put small colorful things in their mouths and up their noses and feed them to the dogs regularly. And I don’t even have a single space to display a bog bowl of pretty rocks. So I quickly decided “I’m Returning the Rock Tumbler” and will, for NOW, stick to painting them when the mood strikes.
An exercise in observation - quick sketch. I was told that if I made a drawing a day for 365 days, that in a year, I might have a couple nice drawings.
I helped create the Island in the Sun can for Conshohocken Brewing Company a couple years back. They release it every year in the summer and I drew this up to celebrate the re-release this year!
Many years back, I watched that documentary ‘The Boy Whose Skin Fell Off’ about a fellow called Jonny Kennedy who lived with the skin condition EB. There’s a bit in that film where he talks about what he hopes his afterlife would be like and, for whatever reason, a couple of coffees as I was re-reading the Wikipedia article about it triggered an idea I had to scribble down...
I try to do a couple of birds a week (obviously don't post them all). This is based on an on-line photo reference drawn with a "soft" Palomino Blackwing pencil and a 4B Koh-I-Noor Hardtmuth Progress woodless pencil. Hence the dark velvety black.
Completed my first commission of the year — inspired by my Dream Tree mural in Bristol, for a couple from the neighbourhood who walk by the mural nearly every day
It's an odd feeling to reexperience the old anger and frustration I thought I had overcome, but, in all reality, I've been letting it creep back in for a while now. There was a moment of fear, it's still in the back of my mind, I'm afraid to slip back into the mental place I was a couple of years back. I'd like to say I've finally realized that it's ok to be afraid, and even a bit frustrated, but it's a matter of how I handle those emotions and my own reactions that make the difference.
I’ve been doing ink doodles somewhat like this since the early 80s but I have to give a shout-out to Visoth Kakvei for greatly influencing my style the last couple of years.
