While most of the rest of the world was watching the Superbowl this past sunday, I spent my day at what I find a far more agreeable event: an all-day life drawing marathon put on as a fundraiser for the Bay Area Model's Guild. I spent the whole time at the short poses; these are all one or two minutes. ( quick gesture drawings )

I've been thinking for awhile now that I should to get back to doing some landscapes. I've been finding it harder to go out on my own lately, and much more inclined to work in groups, meaning most of what I've been doing has been life drawing. But this means lately I've been doing practically nothing else aside from that, and I've been feeling like it's become a somewhat unbalanced practice. Fortunately I came across a painting group (accidentally, through a google reference search in fact), and spent yesterday in the idyllic grounds of St. Vincent's Church in Marin.

Though it's totally to unrelated the random photoshopped-over marginalia below, I wanted to be sure and link to this:
call your congresspeople- really

Old sketches of the Pterasaur and T-Rex skeletons from the UC Berkeley Biology Building; I meant to scan and post these yesterday on the occasion of ibts's birthday. Happy belated birthday, ibts!
( Behind a cut )

Some good things IMHO:

This wooden skyscraper in Russia. From a "safety and practicality" standpoint, so wrong. From a "joy for me to behold" standpoint, so very right.

This delightfully mournful, and entirely a capella, cover of "Hey Ya".

The watercolor paintings of the late David Levine (often overlooked in favor of his pen and ink caricatures).

The fact that my old school chum Ruben finally has a blog and is posting these excellent sketches.

This getup donned by an excellent drawing model:


Things which are the opposite of good: natural disasters in impoverished nations with poor infrastructure.

Happy New Year! This is the closest thing I could find to anything festive or cheerful to post. Have a happy new year song.

Inspired by these photos of "feral houses", discovered awhile back via Fafblog.

Other random link I found interesting: Coming up with a warning sign for Yucca Mountain meant to last ten thousand years. As a commenter notes, the skull-and-crossbones we think of as the universal warning could eventually be mistaken as symbolizing a burial site, which would then tempt grave-robbers and archeologists. It's fascinating to me that they opted to make an anti-monument monument, saying the exact opposite of what every other monument ever does: This place is not a place of honor... no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here... nothing valued is here... What is here is dangerous and repulsive to us. The ideas about building giant cool art installations of concrete thorns or forbidding black blocks seemed laughably problematic to me-- I mean, could there be a better way to intrigue hypothetical future people who've forgotten what's there?

One more link I've been meaning to point to: Most of my co-workers and art acquaintances have known this for ages, but illustrator Barron Storey has a blog set up featuring pages from his personal journals. Barron was the best teacher I've ever had, and I'm still tremendously influenced by him and his work, as I mentioned in this journal some years back when I posted this caricature sketch of him. My thanks to the folks running his blog, and to Belgian connoisseur Carl Wyckaert, for making possible a long-awaited reprint of his Marat-Sade Journals.

Study of a Casper David Friedrich. It's been called The Sea of Ice and The Polar Sea, but I've always associated it with its other title: The Wreck of the Hope.

So, I was listening to this new Mountain Goats album. And there's this one particular song on it. Just at the last line of the first verse the meaning of the lyrics suddenly hit me, and I realized it was referring to this footage of the very last living Tasmanian Tiger.

The sun above me, the concrete floor below.
Scratch at the chainlink, maybe bare my teeth for show.
Fed twice a day; I don't go hungry anymore.
Feel in my bones just what the future has in store...

I pace in circles so the camera will see:
Look hard at my stripes;
There'll be no more after me.

Bay trees in Tilden park. I played around with some selective blurring in photoshop.

A cafe sketch stitched together in photoshop from three pieces of paper.

Have some almost-abstract art. Chairs and safety cones stacked in a corner of a cafe where I was sketching.

I meant to post these to the sketchcrawl forum, but out of my love for lj wanted to put them here too. Because my affection for lj outlasts russian takeovers and spam-bearing bots and ugly, ugly ads (if you look at my journal plz use adblock thx!). Now if I can only remember the code for an lj-cut... *racks brain*
( chinatown sketches )

A belated r.i.p. to Gary Gygax.

Spent the day in the city doing that sketchcrawl thing, around Portsmouth square in chinatown.
( +10 )

Jackson C Frank
This was drawn from a photo; in the liner notes of a Jackson C Frank anthology cd there's this polaroid of him late in life. Having only seen the pictures of him when he was young, I had an "Oh my God" reaction similar to the one described by Jim Abbot in the wikipedia article.

On a sketch-trip over the weekend at an SF shipyard, I drew the Cosco Busan. Colored later in photoshop, of course.

Had trout for dinner tonight; I wanted to do a quick photoshop painting of the head.