Amidst all my art critiquing I’ve also been trying to make some of my own the past five or six months.   I’ve painted fifteen paintings since April, but I’m not really ready to put anything up on the web yet.  About a month ago I bought a moleskin to start getting down to more serious sketching.  I’m a little more than halfway through – and some …interesting… stuff has been coming out.  Here are a few sketches:

So I guess this is a guy getting eaten by an octopus.  I think this came from reading Byron’s copies of SandMan and thinking Dream’s mask/helmet looks a lot like an octopus with one arm.

Dancing girl.  Sketched out at the coffeeshop with Byron.

Some kind of native guy with swords.  One of the first sketches in the moleskin.  I used to draw guys like this all the time when I was a kid, so I think this was my “return to something I have more confidence in” moment after struggling with the paintings I’ve been working on.

This was my take on all the (a lot of the time very lame) fairy/elf art you see on sites like DeviantArt.

I drew this on the flight back from Seattle.  I don’t know what all this means, but I keep drawing this spaceman and baby (and often monster/alien/devil).

I was working on another spaceman sketch and doodled this up in the corner…and I like it better than the main drawing (you can see the boy from the other drawing on the lower right).

Another dancing girl from the coffee shop.  I kept drawing people with hands for feet that day.

This is another back to basics creepy high school kinda thing.  I was always interested in quasi religious violent imagery.

What is it?  A dog?  A kangaroo?  Maybe this has something to do with my blogs about trusting kids with wild animals… I don’t know.

When Byron and I were at the coffee shop we saw a woman ride up on a bicycle with a bluetooth in her ear and a big white parrot on her shoulder.  We laughed about how with the constant yammering on the bluetooth she was just as annoying as the bluetooth yuppie car drivers that she surely hates.  And then of course there was a big white parrot on her shoulder…wtf?  I started to sketch the parrot but only got an outline before she left, so the layout of the feathers is all wrong… oh well.  I wanted there to be a chain around his neck, but it isn’t very clear.

I don’t think this happened in Heavy Metal, but I wanted to imagine the astronaut from Heavy Metal coming home to a little boy… although this boy isn’t so little… and if you look very closely maybe not so human.  Is it an embrace, or an attack?

While with Byron at Bauhaus on my last night in Seattle I decided to try to do the astronaut and little boy theme again, but this time more clear.