Radio Boat

Alphaville Revisited

Ended up drawing something anyway…which, the final version, it’s not actually an anaglyph, obviously. I mean, you can try it if you’ve got 3D glasses, but it’ll probably give you a headache (at least). Mostly it just sort of has the look of an anaglyph, ’cause I like the look whether it works optically or not. Anyway, for no particular reason, here are the sketches and the provisional final art…until I decide to change half of it tomorrow or whenever. Mostly the main point of this thing was to draw it as fast as possible…although it still took about two hours, I guess.

Fiasco 2

Fiasco

A sketch for a new paperback cover for Stanislaw Lem’s 1987 novel, Fiasco. Although, of course, I love the cover it already has on it. Anyway, this is just for practice, I guess. Meanwhile, I have another, different idea for this one, so maybe I’ll work on that tomorrow, if there’s time.

Space Opera

A sketch for the cover of a new edition of Litorina’s sprawling interstellar adventure, A Marriage of Convenience (which, by the way, somebody oughta CGI the heck outta this book…it’s a wild, wild ride).

Desert Wedding

Yet more silhouette style imagery, which I’m posting ’cause, first of all, I just refound this stuff in my crowded, chaotic storage space, which is more like a digitized Salvation Army than anything remotely like The Matrix or those Tron-inspired datascapes in William Gibson’s books. Plus, I need to remind myself about some work I need to do, painting-wise, and this here blog-like thing’s better than a bulletin board for that kind of stuff, since I otherwise tend to sort of pointlessly fill up sketchbooks only to end up sticking ‘em on a shelf someplace, where of course the alleged art inside slowly gets more and more forgotten. Anyway, these drawings are drawings I did right after spending about fourteen Ice Ages not drawing, and they look weird to me now, looking back. Or maybe not weird enough, who knows. But, in any case, they were made for a super-happy occasion and at least doing ‘em made me start to feel vaguely imaginative again. Maybe that’ll get to be a less vague feeling in a few more thousand years. We’ll see.

Meanwhile, just came back from an amazing neighborhood walk with my wife and her friend, who’s visiting from out-of-town. The walk included lunch at an extra-amazing new delicatessen, which opened up a few weeks ago in a space that was formerly the home of a very down-market beautyshop. Which, stuff changing, I guess, is a symptom of how gentrification is bleeding out past the borders of the yuppie neighborhoods to the south, which is in a lot of ways a somewhat disturbing thing, ’cause we like living near plumbers and bricklayers and retired preachers, instead of in a monocultural neighborhood full of designers and webmasters. But, whatever, the sandwiches at the deli are crazy delicious, which goes a long way toward making me not worry so much about how many houses in the area now have Honda Elements in their driveways (although that’s still not completely un-scary when you think about it too much).

Boy Racer

Today’s task list is about five million tasks long, so I better go get started on all that stuff. Some of it’s even semi art-related, believe it or not. First, though, there was this great picture on the BBC site of a guy riding a wooden scooter. Apparently they’re having a festival somewhere in the Philippines, right at this exact moment. And that’s the full and complete extent of what I know this morning, except, I guess here are some more sketches from the olden times…new ones maybe next week.

Regional Funk

Dang, but these are some super-fossilized old drawings, from back when my sketchbooks were full of endless, pointless cross-hatching (it’s almost as if I thought ink and the money to buy ink grew on some sort of tree or something, which I now know is 100% not the case). Also, I was looking at a lot of molas and books about molas, and sort of half-assed collecting ‘em, too, until nowadays I’ve got one on nearly every wall, which is a way better thing to have hanging around than any number of plasma screens. Ruined me for doing perspective, though. I mean, I used to do it, way back in the jurassic, even had to do it on jobs, now and then, especially on jobs that involved drawing all kinds of weird experimental gadgets, but I suppose now my error-prone eyes are only good for cave painting and maybe ecstatic prophecy art, if I was into that sort of thing, which, for better or worse, I’m not. Anyway, it’s funny some kid on an island off Panama’s got a better hand at this stuff than I’ll ever have. But, you know, not at all funny in a bad way.

I just vaguely remembered: one of my crusty backwater professors used to always get on my ass about doing “regional funk” instead of Deeply Serious Theoretical Art. Which, I’m massively glad to be far, far away from all of that kind of talk, ’cause regional funk’s way more what I care about in my heart and soul and bones and wherever else it is that people harbor feelings and opinions.