I went biking with my friends Ted and Steve. We biked around downtown Cincinnati and rode across the purple people bridge to Newport. The first panorama is downtown Cincinnati and the second one is obviously on the Newport waterfront.
When I go out on the weekends, I also sketch the people I see. This is a little trickier because they do notice when you stare at them. I usually have to be a little more clandestine. Of course, sometimes, I get caught and then the person comes up and wants to see your sketchbook. This can be somewhat embarrassing – especially when you are really caricaturing that person. It can become a pretty dicey situation and I do not want to offend anyone. Sometimes I even just make up features and add them on to increase their character quality. I use my artistic license liberally and draw them thinking that someday I may turn them into an animated cartoon character. Following are some of the characters that I have observed. (Please note that any resemblance to real persons, anyone you know or love, living or dead is purely coincidental.)
When I go out on the weekends, I always bring a small sketchpad and mechanical pencil with me to sketch or write down ideas. Very often, I just sketch the people or the musicians that play. The musicians are great because they don’t mind you staring at them for a long period of time and they stay in relatively the same position for a long time. These sketches never get seen by anyone. Even I, rarely ever look back at old sketchbooks. So I decided to look at some of my old sketches and post a few here on the blog. The following are some musicians I have sketched as they played. The last one is an old rare sketch of the old H-Bomb Ferguson – who has already passed away. This was one of his very last performances at R.P.McMurphey’s. 
If you have looked on my site of the 2D homepage you will see two images that I call ‘vector paintings’. These are paintings done in Illustrator on a 16/9 aspect ratio. These ‘paintings are vector images, which means that they are resolution independent. They can be scaled up to the size of a billboard as well as scaled down to the size of a postage stamp and still retain their crisp, clean quality.
I want to do some more of them and here is how I start them. I have a very small sketchbook that fits in the back pocket of my jeans and I draw these small sketches in a long horizontal format with a pencil. These are three of the sketches that I want to finish.
Last week as I was walking into my bank I looked down and saw a beautiful Luna moth dying and being swarmed by an army of ants. I have never seen a lunar moth before and never expected to see one except in books. It was around noon and the sun was shining so it seemed even more surreal to see this gorgeous creature being slowly devoured. I picked it up and placed it on top of the bush to the right. I thought that maybe the moth would regain its strength and fly away or maybe die a natural death before being eaten alive.
After work I stopped by the bush expecting to see it gone. Here it was dead and the ants had left it alone – so I took it home blocked it wings, dried it for a week, bought a Riker mount and placed it in the mount with a moth ball in it. I photographed it in its mount and as I was blocking it below.
I found out that I will have two photographs in the Carnegie Regional Photography Competition. The opening is Friday, September 7 from 6-9. They put one of my photographs on the postcard and flyer that they mailed out.
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Occasionally, I like to create a piece totally analog – not using any digital manipulation other than scanning the art or photographing the art. This artwork is a colored pencil drawing of Fred Steffen, a local musician.
This is one of the last times I heard him play and one of the most emotional songs I have heard him play.
His music can be found at:
http://www.myspace.com/fredsteffen
I think of myself as mostly a fine artist. Nevertheless, due to the fact that I have created a lot of commercial graphic work – I get ideas for graphic design and font design. I have been taking photos of trees lately for the Photography Album 1 called Tree Porn. You can see these photos on the Photography tab of my website.
I have also taken a lot of pictures of tattooed trees – trees that people have carved their names or initials into. These are carved onto live trees and change significantly as the tree grows. So I have carved a whole alphabet into one of these trees and have photographed the first day. I will continue to photograph it over time and record the changes. This creates what I call a “living font” that I can use for some kind of graphic design work in the future.
Howdy Folks,
The website is now up and running and officially launched. I have promulgated all the galleries and links so it should all be running smooth. Let me know if you encounter any difficulties by sending me an email. I did not include a comment block on this blog because of the way it is built and because of blog spam. So if you really want to comment or ask me something, just email me.
So my first blog post is a photo that I took of a window on a building – I call it a bird print. It is a print of an actual bird that flew into the window on a building. I looked down at the bottom of the building and saw the dead bird underneath the window.
The print looks so much like a bird that I think the creature must have just taken a dirt bath before he flew into the window. They often roll in dirt as a protection to keep away insects and parasites.
The bird is now taking his dirt nap.
