Winding Spring

"Winding Road Cellars," one of my favorite Northern Virginia wineries, was the destination for this week's "Wine Saturday." But when I sat down to draw, there wasn't a vine to be seen, just the enchanted fresh green of meadows nearby. Scott, the vintner of Winding Road, would love to purchase the field and grow vines on it, but that isn't going to happen any time soon so it remains a beautiful scene to delight the sippers and draw-ers on the front porch of the wine lodge. 

This is the first iPad drawing I have done in a long time and the device seems to have forgotten how to work with me, or more probably the other way around.

"ArtStudio" app on iPad, 10" x 8", April 29, 2017.

Overgrown African Violet

I have always had plants in my dwellings, even when I lived in a tiny college dorm room. The one you see above is an African violet, the houseplant with the fuzzy leaves and purple flowers which appears in countless windowsills or dreary offices. Most African violets perish of neglect. This one, placed in a sunny window, just sat there for years with only minimal care from me, watering with a touch of fertilizer every few months. It lost a lot of leaves, but it also kept growing, and growing, and blooming in a rather boring magenta color. It got bigger and bigger, put out more leaves and flowers, dropped them and grew some more. Today I gave it some attention, removed handfuls of spent flowers and leaves, and pruned it a bit. Will it still keep growing? African violets are threatened in their original habitat but seem to thrive in mine despite everything. I used to have a collection of colorful African violets and maybe I'll get some more. This drawing is dedicated to the "Random Stuff In My House" theme.

Black tech pen ink on sketchbook page, 8" x  5", April 28, 2017.

Old Dr. Who Fan Art part 2

Here are 2 more panels from my drawing adaptations of early Dr. Who episodes. The top one is from "The Aztecs," and the lower one is from "The Sensorites," from July-August 1964. (Wikipedia has information on everything.) The Doctor is played by William Hartnell. The story goes that Hartnell was annoyed at having to play a silly science fiction character when he was a Serious Actor but when he found out that his granddaughter adored the show he changed his attitude and played the role until he became too ill to continue, at which point he regenerated as Patrick Troughton.

Both drawings ink on illustration board, 6" x 4", spring 1981.

Colors of Spring 2017

Here I am working with some of my fancy new colored pencils, the Irojiten and the soft artistic colors of the art-famous Prismacolor line. I now have many ways to depict the sky, and I love doing sky sketches. Most of my sky images are from memory because the clouds change moment to moment. You might say I have lots of cloud memory storage. I also have a good memory for colors and I wanted to note down the golden green of fresh new leaves sprouting. This only lasts a few days as the leaves mature quickly. I have pencils titled "May Green," "Spring Green," and "Chartreuse Green." The empty area to the left is where journal text was written.

Colored pencils on sketchbook page, about 8" x 5", April 26, 2017.

Green Flames

Sometimes I want to try out a more "graphic" style (flat colors, simpler design) especially for my Holiday cards. My theme color for 1994 was bright green with a copper accent. Each card was hand made painted, not printed so this one was unique. It was my favorite of the edition so I kept it. The green is not "neon" color but the scanner and Photoshop did a good job enhancing it. The copper is a touch of spray paint at center. 

Gouache and metallic spray paint on green paper, 5" x 8 1/2", December 1993.

Canadian Japanese Viking Fantasy

Long, long ago, in 1977 when things were fresh and exciting, I was holed up in a Harvard graduate school dormitory waiting out the summer until I could start up my academic work again. Among the summer people at this place were a number of people studying for a session at various programs including business school. These folk were staying in the dormitory socializing, eating, and drinking, and I got to be friends with some of them. For some unexplainable reason, many of them were Canadians and also fantasy fans. I was already doing fantasy art and one of them saw my work and offered me a commission. He claimed he was of Viking ancestry, though he had always been Canadian living in Alberta. He said that there was territory in British Columbia that matched the fjord lands of Norway and he wanted a fantasy picture of a Viking ship sailing down these waters, guided by whales. He wanted a full moon as well as the Big Dipper constellation in the sky (fantasy, because the full moon and the Dipper never appear in the sky side by side). To add to the cultural mash-up, I painted the scene in watercolor in a pseudo-Japanese-print style. If you look very closely you can see the lights of a village ready to welcome the Vikings home. The ship and three whales are in the lower center.

This photo and any records I have of this piece are barely visible so what you are seeing is heavily restored, in rather the same process as my Roman ruin pictures.

Watercolor and acrylic on Fabriano illustration paper, 7" x 10", summer 1977.

Early Dr. Who adaptation art 1

These were adaptations of stills from early episodes of the British s.f. program DOCTOR WHO starring William Hartnell as the Doctor. They were commissioned by the editor

of FANTASY EMPIRE, a zine devoted to British fantasy TV shows, because the BBC would not allow her to print the actual still photographs. These were done for a survey of the episodes of the series, at least until 1981. I don't know which episodes these were from, but the bad guy is at the top with the Daleks, and the Doctor is at the control panel in a stressful moment.

Ink on illustration board, both images 6" x 4", spring 1981. Published in FANTASY EMPIRE no. 2, October 1981. Click for larger view.