Crossing the Atlantic

A ladybug shuttle took us to Terminal Z at JFK, where the Lepidopter was wreathed in steam and slowly test-flapping its golden wings.

But at the last minute Delta’s service rep barked out the announcement that there would be a service change. They switched to a Mayfly 4000. That meant an hour more standing around and sipping coffee, and it was a much more primitive ornithopter.

Liftoff was after sunset. We hit heavy turbulence, much to the displeasure of a school of guppy girls, who insisted on being dropped out the back so they could swim the rest of the way. The service carts kept banging my knees as I tried to sleep.

Seeing What's Not There

A couple more images from Baby Tattooville last weekend:

In an atrium of the Mission Inn, there's a fountain.

I sat there and sketched it, and here's one of the creatures that waddled up for a sip early one morning when no one was looking.

Then a saucer descended and dropped off this guy, who was old and twice as huge before he took a sip.

By the way, the BT event was covered by the TV show Nightline, so keep an eye out on that program in the next couple of weeks.

Wireless Era?

Abe in Two

Spiderwick Meets Dinotopia

Tony Diterlizzi asked a bunch of his art friends to do drawings set in the Spiderwick cosmos. The drawings will appear in the back of an upcoming omnibus edition of Spiderwick stories.

I drew Hogsqueal riding Bix.


Here’s a movie of the work in progress, drawn with a Niji water brush filled with Higgins Eternal ink.


I gave the original to Tony and he reciprocated with this nifty drawing of Will Denison meeting a befeathered Bix. I love it!

Read how he developed his drawing on his blog, link.

Concert Sketching

I'm always a little nervous to haul out my sketching gear during a highbrow concert, like this a capella madrigal event at Vassar College. You don't want to be scratching away on a big charcoal pad, or knocking over jugs of water in some lady's lap.

So I recommend this technique, which is super-quiet and low key. You just get two brushpens, one with brown or gray and the other with black. Do a quick pencil layin, and just draw the figures as shapes rather than lines.
The fountain pen ink in the waterbrushes goes on silently. It works nicely with the all-black costumes they wear at classical concerts. And when they turn the house lights way down low you can still see what you're doing. These figures are only about two inches tall, and in the low light I could hardly see what I was doing.

No matter how carefully I hold onto the stuff in my left hand I always manage to drop a pencil under someone's seat.

Flip-a-Mation

It was a crazy idea. Why not put a flip book into a paperback novel?

After I designed the cover for a science fiction book Quozl by Alan Dean Foster (1989, Berkley Books), I proposed including an animated sequence inside the pages of the book.


The story was about long-eared aliens called quozls that come to Earth and end up starring in a Saturday morning cartoon. It seemed a perfect reason to try out the flip book idea.


I did 100 pen and ink drawings for the animated sequence. It starts out with a spacecraft landing. The hatch open and a quozl climbs out. It walks over to a skateboard, steps onto it, does a flip, and ends up sitting on the skateboard.

The press technicians worked hard to keep the pages lined up so that the animation didn’t jump around too much.

If the idea didn’t become more widespread, perhaps it was just because it was just too much work and too much cost.

Line Weight Hierarchy

Computer drawings made with the CAD program often show the lines all the same thickness or weight. In a large or complex drawing made with uniform line weight, it can be a bit difficult to make out what’s important.

Architects learn to prioritize certain lines and give them greater weight to help the eye sort things out. This “line weight hierarchy” follows specific rules.

First, as an object gets closer to the viewer, it should be drawn with a heavier line.
Within a given form, the heaviest line should be reserved for the outer contour or silhouette (a).

The second heaviest line should be used for "plane breaks" (b)—that is, lines within the form that define the edge where two planes meet.

The finest lines belong to surface details within a given plane (c).

If you reverse those rules and put the heaviest lines in the back of the scene or on the superficial details, you can see how confusing the drawing becomes.

Thanks to Henry Sorenson for explaining this to me.

CAD drawing from Rough Rider Industries, link.

Hi from Virginia City

I haven't been posting because there's no Internet at Yellowstone. Here's one sketch from Virginia City, an old mining town in the Rockies. This old Ford still runs, the locals told me.

The sketch is a mixed bag of watercolor, brown fountain pen, and water-soluble pencils. The original is about 3 x 4 inches in a mini Moleskine sketchbook. It's a big file if you want to click on it.

We've been enjoying the company of about 40 members of the Society of Architectural Illustrators. Members have come not only from America, but also from Japan, Australia, and New Zealand. These artists have experience in both architecture and illustration, and they create artistic but accurate renderings of proposed buildings, both in digital and traditional media. They meet annually for a juried exhibition, workshops, hikes, and sketching excursions. They're amazing watercolorists and sketchers. More information here: link.