Illustration Friday: Clean

Hey, has this ever happened to anyone out there? It did to me once. I always go to one of those chain haircutters. I went to one real late one afternoon as it was real close to closing time. I got a hairstylist who never cut my hair before so she looked at her computer to see what I usually got it cut. It told her that I always got a number 2 clipper. Yes, it did, but it didn't mean all around my head -- which she did! I was furious! Now I can use the emotion of how I felt for this illustration.

I guess it's not a total loss, at least I got a good illustration out of the whole experience. lol. :)

Illustration Friday: Opposites

This is what I painted for this week's IL word: "opposites". I painted a vacationing fat cat from the view of a panhandler. I tried to play around with foreshortening a bit with the hand extending from the tourist's body to the tin cup with the cityscape in the background. To add a little intrigue, I show the back of the sign so that the viewer can use his/her imagination as to what it says.

Illustration Friday: Sacrifice

Here's my take on this week's word: Sacrafice. For those of you that aren't up so much on baseball or softball lingo: it's a strategic move by one player that advances another player to the next base while the he (the first player) is "sacrificed" for an out. I hope that clears it up. Go team!

Illustration Friday: Sticky

Coming up with an image for this word was tough. I wanted something different and then this image just popped up. The sushi and chop sticks were hard to draw believable, so I cut and pasted them from the web. Hey, they turned out pretty nice with the rest of the hand drawn stuff. Yummie...Dinner time.

Sketch Crawl X: San Francisco Landmarks

To start the four day Independence Day weekend, I joined a sketching group called Sketch Crawl. These folks meet every other month and sketch all over town. It's international. Click the link to see if there's a group that meets in your area. Here's some watercolor paintings that I came home with:


High on top a hill overlooking the great San Francisco skyline is the Grace Cathedral. The walk to this building is half the fun because in order to get there if you're on foot, you must go up sidewalks so steep that you need handrails. What a workout! Although, when you get to the top, the view is spectular. I tried to start with the basic geometry of the building and get the details as the painting progressed. I ran out of time but got just enough detail of the round stained glass window to move on to the next sketch. Afterwards, I noticed that the sketchy feel of the parts unfinished and without much detail added more to the middle portion of the church.


I painted this from a plaza overlooking Chinatown's "Empress of China Restuarant". I've attended many weddings at this place and everytime I went would say to myself "I've got to paint this one day". Today I did.