Shapes and Lines

…One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer.

Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite

… or C.I.A. spook?

I think it was about 1 degrees here yesterday. Probably closer to the mid teens when I got up, but at that range who can tell the difference.  For about a minute I was seriously considering a slanket as a reasonable option.

Here’s some more napkin art.

Also Smashing magazine has some great seasonal icons and related goodies HERE.

Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite

…Old Post.

More cocktail napkin doodles.

Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite

Gobble gobble Zzzzz..

Here’s wishing everyone a great turkey day in the company of good friends, and a warm, sweet tryptophan induced slumber.

Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite

With turkey day just around the corner, November is almost in the bag, and a new year is rapidly approaching. Round and round we go.

On Saturday I bumped into the local group I used to run with, which brought back some memories and reminded me that this time last year I was gearing up for the Eugene Thanksgiving Day Turkey Stuffer 5k. What a difference a year makes.

I’m still running, but with a very different attitude and for completely different reasons. And I’ve never run better or with more satisfaction.

On a related note I strongly recommend reading “Born To Run” by Christopher McDougall, even for the non runners out there.

It’s a great book and a hell of a story that happens to be true. I read it earlier this year just as I was getting back on the trails following a nasty leg injury. That book caused me to completely reexamine everything about how I ran and why.

In other news, I may be holding an art show in December. I haven’t made committed to it yet but I’m getting a lot of push in that direction.

My apology to the friends out there that I’ve neglected to stay in touch with recently. I’ve had a pretty full plate these past few months, but you know the back story.  I am thankful for your friendship.

Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite

When I started doodling at the Vintage this evening, I wasn’t thinking about fish, I was thinking about my nephew Conner who turned three years old on Friday, and how quickly the year has past. I wasn’t thinking about fish, but that’s what I ended up with.

Funny how that happens.

Not at all happy with the fish surprise, and being determined as I tend to be, a trait I expect my nephew will inherit from my brother, I kept at it. After some gnashing of teeth, flexing of claws, and a little wine, I took a request from Charlie who wanted me to draw her a Where The Wild Things Are sort of creature.

Here’s the sketch, my loose and hopefully cuddly interpretation of a wild thing. I’ll paint it up some time soon. Special thanks to Maurice Sendak for breaking the mold.

Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite

It’s been a long and crazy week.  My birthday was Thursday, Thanksgiving is right around the corner, and Christmas will be here before you know it.

Here is yet another environment sketch (napkin doodle) on its way to becoming a painting.

Cheers,

Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite

…A choose your path adventure.

Just a quick note to my loyal army of followers and my virtual stalker (you know who you are).

It appears that the “WP-SpamFree” plugin in my new theme has been blocking comments from anyone behind something called a “proxy”, which I assume is some sort of magical Troll that lives in the series of tubes that make up the interwebs.

If you’ve been trying to post and it hasn’t shown up, blame the Troll.

My recent contract work has me developing a lot of urban themed environments, which is a nice change. But I can’t seem to think cityscape without thinking Zombies lately, Not sure if this is due to too much L4D or not enough.

Here’s a quick concept painting to exorcise it from my brain. Rendered in the same style I’ve been exploring recently, it’s yet another napkin doodle while having dinner at the Vintage. …stay away from my steak zombie, it’s mine!

Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite

…while my dinner’s in the oven.

I was chatting last night with one of the ladies from the Vintage about a philosophy course she’s in and a class debate about obligation toward future generations. That brought to mind a bit I read in Bill Bryson’s “A short history of nearly everything”.

I’ve taken a little creative license, but it’s a more or less faithful retelling, so here’s a scary little story of mad scientist and how their own creations always seem to be their undoing.

Once upon a time (in 1921) there was an engineer named Thomas Midgley. One day he decided to go all mad scientist and turned to industrial applications of chemistry. Sure it doesn’t sound very mad scientist like, but like most things, you get out of it what you put into it.

His first big success as an Evil Genius was in using Lead Tetraethyl to reduced engine knock in the increasingly popular automobile contraptions that everyone was so interested in.

Even though Lead was a well known neurotoxin a.k.a. a really bad thing for the villagers to be in contact with, it was used in all sorts of stuff. Get too much lead in your system and you’re on your own personal roller coaster ride of horribly entertaining side effects, like brain damage, blindness, cancer, convulsions, and terrifying hallucinations…until you die that is.

Lead …a known neurotoxin was used to line water tanks. It protected fruit from nasty bugs as pesticide spray. It even kept your tooth paste safe. What could go wrong? ..and it was crazy profitable, so that balances out right?

In 1923 Mad Doc Midgley’s Lead Tetraethyl gas additive gave three big corporations a big idea, they formed a little company called Ethyl Gasoline Corporation, later shortened to Ethyl Corp because it was easier for the villagers to pronounce and sounded friendlier I expect.

They began to mass produce the newly dubbed Ethyol as an additive for gas. This was good all around, Ethyl Corp was making lots of money, and engines made less noise, which seemed like a good deal.

Unfortunately people working to produce the additive were getting sick and dropping like flies. But Ethyl Corp pulled a Jedi mind trick and denied any connection. “..this additive is not the one you are looking for …these guys probably went nuts and died from working too hard …nothing to see here, move along”.

Even the best Jedi can’t keep that up for long, and as the villagers began to get restless Midgley went total dark side. In and effort either show how bad ass he was or that Ethyl was safe, Darth Midgley held a demonstration where he washed his hands in it and inhaled it, insisting that “you could do that every day ..no problemo”.

Mad Darth Midgley knew all too well the true dangers, having gotten seriously ill from exposure once before, and had avoided going near the stuff ever since.

Intermission… and obligatory pic. It’s a day late, but here’s a Halloween sketch. More doodling on cocktail napkins. I spent a little longer on this one than I probably should have, but still got it done in about three hours.

Back to the story… Like all good evil scientist, Midgley moved on to top his previous work by inventing Chlorofluorocarbons, that’s CFC’s for the typing challenged (me) or the environmentally minded. CFC’s, the dreaded scourge of the ozone layer were used even more widely than Ethyl. It wasn’t until much later that the destructive genius of CFC’s became as obvious as a pink elephant standing in your living room.

Midgley wasn’t around by the time the uber nastiness of his  CFC’s  were realized, having been strangled to death by a mechanical contraption he designed to control his bed after being crippled by polo.  …Ta Da!

What’s the moral of the story? ..you don’t know what you don’t know? The dark side works in mysterious ways? Take your pick.  My personal favorite is, Don’t bite into a fresh made donut 30 seconds out of the fryer, it’s too damn hot!

Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite