me and the beard

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Self Portrait with Floral Motif
pen and ink on paper with digital coloring, 5" x 7"

here is a self portrait i made recently. the first version is a simple pen and ink drawing, without the color bits. i made it for my friend mike freiheit's new project, in which he is enlisting several artists to do portraits of jesus. my first sketches were of a truly semitic jesus, as opposed to the anglo-jesuses we see here in the west. but then, while i was working, i happened to see my reflection in a window, and thought, "hey my beard is looking jesusy, i have a shorter haircut (which my research had revealed would probably be more accurate), and i happen to be 33 years old right now. also, i was wearing a hooded sweatshirt at that moment, and i figured it would be a good stand-in for a shepherd's robe of some sort. and maybe it could be read in a "jesus is in all of us" sort of way, as well. i certainly do not mean to say that i am the messiah or anything, so don't look to me for salvation or anything--i'm fresh out at the moment.

i did not draw this on location

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it's been a while since i've put up anything with scenery. i love doing the portraits, but every now and then i need a change of pace, you know? this drawing was inspired by a photo i came across on the adventure 16 blog, which you can see here.

i'm still working mainly in colored pencil, but lately i've been throwing in a few change-ups here and there (more liberal use of graphite, pen and ink, digital manipulations, etc.)

i've really been pushing to get commissions as of late, putting myself out there as much as i can. i joined hireanillustrator.com, spraygraphic.com, stars-portraits.com, and so forth, in hopes that the right person is going to discover me soon. grad school ain't gonna pay for itself, folks!

a great white guy in the great white north

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here's conan o'brien, in his royal canadian mounted police uniform, from the week he did the show in toronto. i loved the look of the white gloves against the red jacket, though i think the real guys usually wear brown gloves for the most part.

i did something a little different this time, using black and red ink in the belt and jacket areas. i used the ink for the base layer, then added colored pencil over it. it really makes the color all bursty, don't you think?

reunited and it feels so good

some of you out there may have heard me at some point tell a story about myself as a young lad of about seven years of age, sitting in my driveway while drawing a car that was parked across the street. i remember this moment as probably the earliest inclination i might have had about being an artist. i remembered being very proud of that drawing, and i would take it with me wherever i went for the next several weeks, showing it to people.

i thought that the drawing and any evidence of it was long gone, but lo and behold, i happened upon the photo you see above while visiting my dad over christmas! in the photo you can see my brother and i in the treehouse our dad built in grandma davis' front yard, and there i am, clutching that already rough-hewn sheet of construction paper. i must've had it in my pocket, as the six fold lines would indicate. so a big thanks goes to former me, for thinking to whip out the drawing when my dad went for the camera.

this would have been enough to make the present me happy, but when i voiced my excitement about the photo to dad, he said that he probably still had the drawing itself stashed away somewhere. and after two minutes of shuffling through a dresser drawer, he produced this:

holy crap, right?

my life as a potato

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here's a fairly new one of daniel day-lewis and paul dano, stars of there will be blood. i just saw mr. dano as dwayne in little miss sunshine last night, too. i'd seen it before, but it came on television last night, so i saw it again.

julia and i had been away from home for 12 days until we finally arrived got back yesterday morning. we had intended to get a lot of work done this weekend, but when we got here, we found that we didn't want to do a thing except vegetate on the couch. we ended up watching three movies in all, so i feel like we accomplished something, no?

my candy was taken away by a baby

that's right. a kid stole my ipod, right off the teacher's desk in my classroom! at first i thought it was one of my own students, which broke my heart. now i'm 99% sure it was taken while another teacher's class was in the room, which makes me feel only marginally better about it. unfortunately, i was not aware that it was gone until about an hour after it happened, so we could only narrow it down to the twenty or so kids who were in the room at the time. i've told my students and the other teacher's students that i will not punish anyone if it is returned safely. i also offered a reward for good information that led to recovery. but that was two days ago, and nothing's happened so far.

just for the record, it was a 5th generation, black, 30GB ipod video classic, serial number 2Z6164G3TXK. it was in a black metal case that had a leaf/vine pattern etched on the front, to the right of the click wheel. i had over 9300 songs on my ipod, which had taken me two years to load. unfortunately, i had no backup for my song library, due to computer problems. so even if i finally get a new one, it will be a long road back to where i was. that's what burns me most of all.

i'm so sad. so much of me was in that thing. all the scouring the internet for obscurities that only a few people know or care about, songs that were woven through my memories and tied to my own personal history--it's all gone, and i'm so sad.