Lizard Boy

This one is a version of a photograph of my great-nephew.



Photoshop gave me fits while working on this: I think it must have frozen at least 4 times while I was in the middle of working, and even though I was saving what I did fairly regularly, I still kept losing bits of work. Is Photoshop so unstable, or is the Wacom tablet itself a contrary tool? Does anyone know?

In Colorado

I'm in Colorado in the moment, and this drawing is a version of the view from my niece's back porch. The dog, Candy, and I sat outside while I worked on this.



What does having great-nieces and -nephews lead one to do? Drawings like these--

Just a hall wall

. . . based on my niece's house.

Just one

Only a couple

I did some work yesterday which I lost when Photoshop Elements froze again. Yikes. And I did some work on a tentative book jacket which I'm not ready to reveal yet. So we have only two offerings, the first of which is a version of the one I lost part of. This is based on a photo I took in the Azores Islands.



And this second one is just a little athletic sketch.

An odd mix

Yesterday I worked on a weird mix of drawings. I'm still trying to find a way to do a somewhat identifiable "self-portrait" or caricature. Maybe I'll get there one of these days. This first "went wrong" quickly and so I turned it into an anonymous head.



This might be a little closer, but mostly it's just an experiment in using the "dry media brush" in Photoshop Elements.



This is, well, a window in a wall.



I also worked on two "sociopolitical" statements, which I'm calling "fundamentalist nudes": here they are.

Ay, tantos desnudos

Yesterday I experimented with more images from the ancient world, in some cases aiming at using very few lines to suggest the form of the god or goddess. Here is Ishtar (of Babylon):



And this is Aphrodite:



Ares:



Hermes, who was of course the messenger god (hence the winged feet), as well as being associated with fertility:



Going back several millenia, here's my cave painting. See if you can guess what I like best about this one:



And finally a "modern" drawing: a rather sketchy look at a "two-a-day" football practice:

Get that man away from the books!

Yesterday I took a trip up to Archer City, Texas, to Larry McMurtry's bookstore, so I had no time for posting or drawing. Do I like reading or drawing more? Well, gee whiz, it seems impossible to get me away from books, so. . . .



Here's yet another version of "The Reader's Hand."



Here I was trying to get a version of the Greeks' dawn goddess Aurora. I'm not there yet. I'm aiming for a more free-flowing line and maybe even a hint of Blake, but this seems tolerable to me.



And here's something tacky for you all: "Coach."

I like to draw

This is one of my attempts to get a semi-caricature of myself. I'm not there yet.



And this one is based on a photograph which I call "Pathetique"--not "pathetic", but rather "provoking pathos or feeling." All of us grow up knowing that one day our hair will most likely fall out or turn white, but no one ever sits a boy down and says, "Oh, just wait till your chest hair starts turning white." I call this "Middle-aging".



Here's a hand:



Here's part of a leg:



And here's the goddess Athene, appropriately fragmentary, like so many statues from the past:

Dylan?

Sketchily trying to get a caricature of myself, I got a nose that looked more like Dylan, so I went with it. I wonder what you will all think:



In Greek mythology, the hunter Actaeon got in trouble when he stumbled across the goddess Artemis bathing in the river. She turned him into a stag so that his own hunting dogs killed him. In this drawing he is about halfway through his transformation. I hid one of Artemis's nymphs in the tree:



And this is just a nude, not terribly successful, I think. Her expression looks something like a cartoon Thurber might have done and then blamed on one of the dogs. But I like the angular foot, even if I didn't initially intend it to look that way. I'm still having some trouble drawing at the bottom end of the Wacom tablet.

Maybe later I'll do an aurochs.

But meanwhile here's my Cave Horse:

Haiku?

Jack Lindus says that these three drawings, appearing together in this sequence, constitute a kind of visual haiku. (Jack is a lot smarter than I am.) This first is simply called Yucca, though I may have misidentified the plant:



This one I call Spring:



And the last is Summer:

Introducing Mr. Blixenbloxen

Mr. Blixenbloxen is a gallery of (ahem) artwork, mostly created digitally: my experiments in trying to draw. Here's Garage:



And as the British like to say (more or less): "The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the creator of this work."