Safe

We took a field trip downtown the other day for the Education for the Arts Peace Forum where our students along with students from other area schools met and participated in an assortment of arts workshops. I made this in a workshop on using the language and techniques of street art to cover the topic of community.
It's maybe a little pretentious, but hey, I whipped it off in 20 minutes with markers glue and index cards, so I don't think it turned out too badly.

Good Fences Make Good Neighbors

They say good fences make good neighbors. I think I need a better fence.

Metro

Another Art Class demo.

This one is the robot lady from Metropolis- part of my machinations to make sure that whatever we use as source material in class is safely within public domain.

2 Kool 4 Skool

Count Day was this week, so I thought I'd draw a student who was too cool for school (in that they no longer attend school).

(I used an old picture I took for a self portrait project she never finished to make a regular portrait rather than a self one)

P.J. Harvey

A poster for one of our upcoming theme days for school. Students worked on the other days but nobody took Monday.
I had to draw it pretty quickly, and for something I turned out in less than ten minutes I think it looks pretty good.

Doodle monster

A monster I doodled with my niece and her markers.

May the Fourth of July Be With You

A nerdy painting I made... oh geez, fifteen years ago I think? Maybe fourteen years ago? I was digging through some old stuff recently and found it.

Pixel Chix

I have this mosaic/pixel assignment I do with class where we draw something on graph paper then translate it into something 8-bit looking with the grid and some markers. It's fun.

I took this picture and did it, then for some extra fun I scanned it into Photoshop and played with some layers to give it the pukey green tint of a Gameboy screen.

Ironic, right, using paper and pencil to get a mechanical look, only to scan it into a computer program that could have translated the original image that way with a few mouse clicks? 

8-Bit Bird

An example for a bonus assignment using a grid to create 8-bit style characters.
It's a bird.

Scheherazade

Another example for the portrait project for class.

Leia? I Hardly Know Ya!

Playing around with my Copic Markers.

The City of Refuge

Another example from Art Class.

The Delusion that Beauty is Goodness

An example for the portrait project we're working on in class.

Who's your daddy?

Take two with the Copic markers, this time with something more nerdy.
I managed not to get a big splotch of mistake on it this time and added a dab of Prismacolor for some darker darks and a smidge of Photoshop to blur to the background to finish it out.

Learning Curve

I got a set of Copic markers for Christmas and wanted to give them a try. I used a photo of a Kalamazoo woman from the 1880's I found at the Kalamazoo Valley Museum to give it a whirl. I sketched it out, I laid out some base tones, then totally messed up her eyes when I misjudged how much ink and how much of a wet on wet effect there would be.
Whoops.
I'll do better next time.

The Eternal Question

A portrait example for art class based on a hundred and some year old photograph.

May the 4th be with you!

I did this back in 2001.
It was for some Star Wars fanart contest thingy I think, but who can remember. It's Prismacolor markers and colored pencils.

I heart NYC

This is a picture I made (from a photo I took) a while ago. It's made with Prismacolor markers.
I gave it as a gift to my sister, who was for a while quite the globetrotter, though not the kind that consistently defeats the Washington Generals.

Rex-n-Effect

This was a collaborative drawing with some students and another teacher.
I don't really remember what the point of it was aside from that I wanted to draw a dinosaur and they wanted to draw purple polkadots and flowers. How we didn't wind up with a picture of Barney I'll never know.

Happy Beardaversary!

About a year ago my Dad's beard turned 40 years old and we threw it a party. This was for the card everybody signed.
All the men invited to the party were encouraged to grow their beards out as well and I've been too lazy to shave since. The other day my sister, who sees me on a fairly regular basis, said to me "Wait a second, you have a beard?" Either it looks so natural on my face as to be unnoticeable or my head has a reality distortion field that obscures my actual facial features. I'm going with the latter, since it also explains why my staff photo at work wound up looking so terrible.