I made up a new word!

Precrastination: noun. The precursor to procrastination. Procrastinating about procrastinating. example: "I'll think about doing it tomorrow...tomorrow"

Original Pattern Ink on Paper

I'm not updating this blog much because I have a full time office job now. But my job is technical and non-creative, so I need to keep doing my art on the side as a creative outlet to keep my brain healthy.

This hypnotizing pattern started out as a doodle on the back of a notepad from work (I think I was unwittingly making it as I was on a phone call) and I liked how it looked, so I brought it home and started inking it on grid paper. And I will say this...making patterns is hard. Especially alternating patterns. I messed up in the bottom left. But, as Salvador Dali said, "Have no fear of perfection, you'll never reach it"

Now that I have this scanned, maybe I can print out copies and start coloring them in.

Finished a drawing

Begun 7/18/2015

Finished 10/17/2015

Sometimes it feels good to go back and finish an unfinished piece... Of course no one can tell me when I'm finished. Sometimes even I don't know. I guess it's when I run out of space on the paper. 

Fall is here!

I haven't blogged on this page in so long it feels like a crime. 

I got a new full time job in April, and I have been working a steady 40 hours a week ever since.  It's hard to believe the whole summer came and went and the cold rainy fall weather is here already. It happened too fast...a 40 degree drop in a week isn't cool. I'm afraid of getting sick from this rapid weather change.

Anyway, I work as a contractor for Xerox now and my new job is photocopier and printer maintenance. Not repairs, but replacing toner cartridges and 'consumables' when they run out. In a two-building office complex with about 47 copiers and printers, that is a job in itself.  I'm so happy to get a better paying job in my field with the health benefits I needed, but it isn't creative work at all. And 8 hour workdays really wears me out, leaving me too tired to do the art at home that keeps my brain and soul alive. This Photoshop painting I'm about to post is literally the first time I drew anything in months.

Photoshop is actually a really powerful paint program if you know how to use the brush tools properly.  The variables you can change for brush tools are almost infinite. It has options called "Jitter" that let you vary the color, size, shape, angle, texture and scattering within a single brush stroke of your mouse or tablet stylus.  I won't go into details here, but if you have Photoshop it's worth taking a few online tutorials to unlock the power of brushes.  All the fun of painting, without the mess to clean up afterward.

Here's a seasonal doodle for you, using the brush effects I just described. All the leaves and tufts of grass were 'scattered' with swipes of the brush, not cut and pasted. This took me less than an hour.



Tired or not, I just have to force myself to sit down for an hour a day and do this. Make something.

What a life...

There's deranged, there's slightly crazy, there's genuinely crazy, then there's making art for a living. ...Then there's genius. In that order.

Memorial Day

This weekend, show your flag and remember the fallen soldiers who gave their lives so you could keep yours.

When in doubt, use Caslon.

This is a reboot of an old school assignment where I had to pick a typeface, research its origin and make a tribute piece of artwork to be printed into a booklet. Naturally, I chose Caslon. I think this is the most elegant piece I ever designed. All the graphics in the pages were made from the Caslon font's unique symbols and characters. Any suggestions for a font to do next?

New Compilation CD Burned + Album Graphics Designed

I do this thing every now and then where I make "compilation albums", usually a playlist with a certain theme that I make my own CD of. So whenever I do this, I sometimes create my own album art to give me some Photoshop practice. (See this earlier post)  

This is one that I came up with this week...music from all the James Bond movies. (With a few relevant bonus tracks) The album title was taken from the opening titles in the movie Tomorrow Never Dies, which is a Pierce Brosnan one and my absolute favorite of all the 007 films. Oh alright...it's a toss up between that one and Goldeneye.

Pierce Brosnan IS the BEST James Bond.  Wanna know why? Because the '90s were awesome, that's why. He's a genuine British man who is not faking the accent. He's polite, charming, super cool and level-headed, always has a dry joke at the best times (which were all improv lines in his movies by the way) And, no matter what he does, his suit never wrinkles. Plus, I actually met him at Times Square once on a field trip to New York in 8th grade.  He was very polite and pleasant, unassuming, just as cool in person as he was in the movies.

I have my own reasons for not liking the other James Bond actors.

Sean Connery: Way too Scottish, not enough British. Also he is the only Bond that ever wore a fedora. And fedoras are way out of style.

Roger Moore: A bit too old to sleep with 25 year old girls....? Seriously Rog was pushing 70 when he starred in License to Kill. And he slept with a very young woman. That's f****ing disgusting.

Timothy Dalton: not even British, also terrible actor.

Daniel Craig: Wooden actor, very cold/emotionless, not appealing enough to ladies, weird scar on his face, doesn't look charming, not witty enough for Bond. (Seriously, where's the sarcastic one-liners and dry humor we came to love? He's way too deadpan.)  ...Even though Ian Fleming's original idea for Agent 007 was in fact a blond man with blue eyes, as described in the 1957 novel Casino Royale in which he first appears. I think he's great as a stone cold bad ass in other action movies, but he really sucks as 007. I'm sorry. I just don't like him.

But I digress. I put together lots of these compilation albums, it's a throwback to my radio DJ days. So anyway, enjoy the slick graphics. I can't sell this CD as I don't own the rights, but go ahead and download these tracks if you want and I can gladly print you this jewel case insert and CD label for them.

Front jewel case sleeve insert

Back insert + spines

CD label

 Constructive comments on the package design are welcome.

New York: Day 5

This is my favorite part of the forest. It reminds me of so many places. The first glimpse of Narnia in the Lion, The Witch and the Wardwrobe, the silent deadly forest in the Ardennes where the battle for Bastogne occurred in Band of Brothers, and the "Forest cathedral" described in the Red Badge of Courage.  It's a storybook kind of place. The snow makes it absolutely enchanting to walk around in.

This is my church.

There was no sign of anything living out here. It's as if the whole place is sleeping. It's silent, wonderful and dreamy. Absolute peace and tranquility. Due to the total absence of moving creatures, I guess I should be working on macro shots instead.

Some berry things on a branch.

These are some odd flowering plant that never loses its flowers. They just turn brown and dry up in the cold and then turn pink again in the spring. They grow in clumps like this.  Everywhere in this forest, one gets a sublime sense of not dead, but a sort of dormant beauty. Just patiently waiting for spring.

I like to brush these pine branches with my hand and watch the soft powder fall to the ground in a tiny blizzard.

This is an exposed hillside where the wind constantly blows from one direction. Look at how the snow is on the side of all the trees. It's magical.

These pines make an indescribable sound when they flex in the wind. Sometimes it sounds like a groaning or a screech. Other times you hear sharp cracks like rifle shots. It can be startling if you're unfamiliar with the sound.

Something passed by here. I didn't leave these tracks.  It might be a "coyote-dog". Grandma's woods is home to a pack of coyotes that mate with stray dogs. Sometimes I can hear them howling as it gets dark.

Still no luck with the infrared scout camera. We think the extreme cold is making it shut itself down. (It dropped to 5 last night).  I moved it indoors and put it near the bathroom window, but that also failed. The infrared flash bounces off the window and back at the lens, making the whole scene a whiteout.  I guess I'll have to use it when I come back up in the summer.  What a bummer.But at least we know it works, as I captured my own face a few times when I was trying to reset it.

We were going to come home tomorrow, but there is yet another lake-effect snowstorm on its way... so we will just have to come home sunday.   I have been doing some sketches and keeping my blogs updated though.  Tonight I am already in my PJs, sipping some hot tea and watching Cold Mountain.

One more day. I wonder what tomorrow will bring.

New York: Day 4

New York: Day 4

A visit to the farm

Today we paid a long overdue visit to my uncle's house and one of my cousin Emory's farms. They live about 2 hours away from my Grandma's house (up here they measure distance in hours).  It is a very long, boring and monotonous drive through flat country and quaint little podunk towns, with peeling paint and collapsed barns. I couldn't make this drive by myself. It's too long and not exciting enough to keep me alert.

On the way there we saw an interesting sky phenomenon.  Sometimes cited by quacks on the internet as signs of UFOs, this is called a Fallstreak hole.  Water droplets in a cloud crystallize into ice faster in one area than the clouds around it, thus the weird 'hole' punched in the sky.

"Look! An alien mothership just disappeared!" - said no scientist ever.

This is not the first time I have seen bizarre cloud patterns in upstate New York.  Check out this super cool optical effect I saw once, on a day when it was 10 degrees below zero. A prismatic halo around the sun.

Picture taken January 1, 2013

(The above effect only happens on days when it is below zero at high altitudes.
Moisture in the clouds turns to tiny ice crystals, which refract the sunlight
into a rainbow spectrum when the sun shines through it.
I've seen this before in other places, but not anywhere near this dramatic)

We arrive at the dairy farm. This farm is only being rented through the winter. It has over 200 cows which are the chief milk supplier for Byrne Dairy which stocks grocery stores all over the region (the place where Grandma always bought her milk) Needless to say, it's an impressive operation.

We drove up the long dirt road to get to the farm right as my Uncle drove a tractor in front of us. He's pulling a grain spreader to these two barns across the field where the maternity ward and the calves are.

Inside this corn crib is about six tons of corn grain. My Uncle says these cow eat about 2 tons a day.

And here's the moneymakers.

This is what the farm uses instead of silos. Long trenches of poured concrete,
with grain pushed into it by bulldozers. Then the pile is covered
by a plastic sheet and weighed down by hundreds of spare rubber tires.
I asked him where the tires come from. He tells me the gas stations
and car repair places throw away tons of defective or punctured tires,
they just give these to him for free by the truckload.

Finally, the Byrne Dairy tanker truck comes in to load up hundreds of gallons of milk.