Sustainably Raised, Chiseled and Focused

I haven't done an "end-cap" billboard for Trader Joe's in ages, but here's one. This is another California wine special. We advertising folk get a printed handout that tells us what to write on the sign, so the red wine is to be described as "chiseled and focused." No idea what that means, but I hope it doesn't mean that the wine is so pungent it feels like a chisel in your mouth. "Sustainably raised" is another piece of current ad-language which can mean many different things, depending on what is being sustained. Anyway, I hope I get a taste.

Chalk markers on black-painted Masonite board, about 36" x 24".

Volcano Wizard

The "Volcano Wizard," here calling up flame to control the destructive force of the mountain, is a character of mine who some of you might remember. I did a lot of work with him over the decade of the 1990s. I wrote a number of stories, did lots of art including portraits, and most of all, made a graphic novel starring the wizard and a crew of geologists under the shadow of a huge volcano about to erupt. This graphic novel was never finished. I started it in 1999 and got to about 40 pages before I ran out of time and energy. I have a complete plot summary and want to finish it, but I have to devise a different strategy for working on it. The graphic novel is called "The Flaming Ramparts" and has a lot of intrigue, psionic magic, and volcanic explosions. It's set in my modern world of the Noantri. How can I do more on this and finish it? I just don't know right now. I need a wizard to help me with this problem.

The picture above isn't quite from the graphic novel. The volcano wizard doesn't wear Gandalf-like robes, just the normal clothes of his world, although he does have a showy white cape. He glows with a brilliant orange aura when he unleashes his interdimensional energies, and is surrounded by any number of orange artifacts. He bequeathed the Orange theme to me, which is why I am almost always wearing or using something orange. (Now you know!) However just now I am wearing purple, for the weeks of Lent...but the purple belongs to another psionic adept from that world, who has not shown up in any graphic novel or story. Color goes between universes.

"Volcano Wizard" is acrylic, ink, and gouache on red paper, 7"x 10", fall 1998.

Dragondrool

Countless artists have depicted volcanic lava dragons, or dragons that look like they are made of lava with a black scaly crust. I'll probably do one of those someday. Back some years ago I had the idea, but decided to save the lava only for the dragon's drool. If you were a fire-breathing volcano dragon, wouldn't you drool lava?

This picture was done on grey paper, so I added the black parts with ink and the lava with gouache. It was done at a time when I was watching Mount Etna erupt almost every night, through a live "lava-cam" which was set up on a nearby cone. I had lots of fresh visual reference, at least for the volcano part. The volcano-cam was later destroyed in an eruption (what a surprise!) and current observation cameras at Etna are placed far out of range, which takes away that dragonish intimacy with the lava. The title is "Typhoeus, Volcano Dragon." "Typhoeus" (or Typhon) was a huge fiery monster who was eventually imprisoned by Zeus under Mount Etna, where he resides to this day.

Typhoeus is ink and gouache on grey paper, 8 1/2" x 9 1/2", October 1998.

Hillsborough Almost Spring

There's a tinge of green on the ground in the hills of Virginia wine country. I had a number of sips at Hillsborough Vineyards, in the top vertex of the triangle that is the state of Virginia. The beautiful grounds, expansive views, and the hospitable hillside estate, even without the wine, will be a reason for me to return later this year when it's all leafy and green. I sat outside with the WinePad (the "I" of Wine!) and did this study of some farm buildings on the estate.

This drawing was touched up in Photoshop when I got home, that is, I corrected the roof lines and silo dome. I haven't had a lot of time to do winery drawings in the winter, even on the iPad, and maybe with longer days I'll get more work in. That way I could make a less sketchy and more accurate representation of the scene, or whatever wine bottle or vine is in my line of sight. Or "wine of sight."

Autodesk Sketchbook pro "for the WINe," March 10, 2012.

And: R.I.P. Jean "Moebius" Giraud, one of the greatest fantasy illustrators of the 20th, 21st, and any century.

Magic-Using Dragon

Writing, especially fantasy writing, is one of the few creative activities that just about anyone can do. It needs no expensive equipment and you can write at any level you are at, whether high school or PhD. The texts that you see published are a tiny proportion of the texts that are written all over the literate world, writing that never sees any print or even Net presence. These texts are written solely for the satisfaction of the author and his or her friends. Every so often, an ambitious writer will try to publish his or her fan writing, or even original work. It is always rejected, but at least the would-be author tried. I am among that number. I have stacks of old and unreadable writing that I amassed over the years. What you see on my various blogs are the more coherent passages that make enough sense to publish on the Web.

This illustration is from one of these fan texts, written by a lawyer acquaintance. I wanted to illustrate it simply because it was so generic, so character-less, that anything I did could be re-interpreted as any story. I didn't tell him that, of course, but I did him the favor of reading his novel-length manuscript (quite a job, I will say). It was almost entirely in dialogue, which had all the excitement of a corporate legal document, but it did have one mildly interesting idea: a dragon who was intelligent and was able to use magic just like a human magic-user. This dragon could battle with human wizards, as he is doing here. In the book, this dragon didn't have wings, but portraying him without wings made him look like a fat crocodile, so I added them anyway, which annoyed the author. Since this book had no chance of being published, it was not much of a deal. I later sold the art to someone else at a convention.

"The Wizard-Dragon" is acrylic on illustration board, 13" x 22", July-August 1992.

Bat Wing Dragon

Most dragons have wings like bats' wings. So I took out my animal photograph books and copied out some photos of bats and parts of bats. Here's the odd part. While I was drawing these drawings, a real live bat got into my apartment and flew around wildly, having no idea how to find the open window and get out. I tried to, uh, bat it to the floor with a dusting mop, but I couldn't capture it. However I did get a close-up look at a real live bat. Synchronicity at work! But sometimes synchronicity can get downright annoying. I called the local animal control and found that the police take care of animal intrusions in the off-hours. Meanwhile the bat was still flying around in my bedroom. I opened the window and closed the door, hoping that the creature would find its way out. The policeman arrived and found no bat. So either it finally found its freedom through the window, or it's still hiding somewhere in my room. I am not sleeping there till I can check all the hiding places. Meanwhile I'll sleep on the living room fold-out couch. Fortunately, though the bat bumped into me a couple of times careening about, it didn't bite me.

But that won't stop me from finishing my challenge practice drawing for tonight. Here are my bats, and an adaptation of a bat-like dragon from Peffer's book - as well as a little sketch from memory of the hapless "large brown bat" specimen who spent a couple of difficult hours trapped in an alien environment. Pencil on sketchbook page, about 8" x 11", March 9, 2012.

Cat and Unicorn

I've done more animal art than I thought, as I look through the color slide pictures that I've been transcribing to digital. If I had enough references to work from, I could put together a passable horse...or unicorn. Cats were easier, as I could always visit my friends' cats and do sketches of the real thing. I also had (and still have) a book on "How to Draw Cats." Even if it doesn't really say this, I think the first line of text in this book should be, "First, find a cat." Well, you won't find a cat perched on a unicorn, for various reasons, so this all came from my imagination.

The colors in this picture are almost completely restored, or re-painted, in Photoshop, which didn't exist when this picture was painted and photographed in poor light. Fortunately I clearly remember making it. I wanted to evoke my memories of the hazy greenness of summer in the hills of western Massachusetts, where I once spent a turbulent semester in art school. This was in "Tanglewood," the arts center where the Boston Symphony plays their summer concerts. That was an age ago. Now, in the unimaginable 21st century, I could restore the old colors to this little painting. My Tanglewood season was in 1972. I painted this unicorn picture in 1980, and named it "Friends of Tanglewood" after the Symphony's fund-raising organization.

"Friends of Tanglewood" is acrylic on illustration board, 7" x 11", August 1980.