Today on my lunch break I took my sketch book and scanned in some of my favorite sketches from the past six months.  Some of these I posted shoddy camera shots of back in August (?) and some are newer.  Some will become paintings later – and some will not…

The real reason for scanning these is that I’m working on a new version of the website that will be much much much easier for me to update.  I haven’t got any good shots of my newer (as in 2009) paintings, but I can at least share these sketches.

This will be a painting at some point.  It is calling out for a large work – but I’m procrastinating and working on many other pieces before I’ll tackle this guy.  I guess he’s sort of a “sequel” to the the ribbon girl I did a few months ago.

This one reminds me of Amy Sol’s work a tiny bit, so I’ll probably paint this on one of the wooden panels I have.

This one has two separate ideas overlapping two pages of the sketchbook.  I really like the on on the left.  The giant eyeball and crab hands seem much more curious.  I changed the boy from a baby into a young man with a helmet too.  The larger one is less developed, but you get the idea.  The alien was turned into more of a “devil” so you could see more emotion.

This one will become a painting one day as well.  This is my favorite from the “Astronaut and baby” series of sketches.

professor Byrd.  Supposed to have a chain around his neck, but it’s hard to see, isn’t it?

I love drawing hands.  although I like feet too, I like hands much better, so one day (while in Seattle) I kept sketching these women with hands for feet.

This was the first “real” sketch in the new sketchbook.  Sort of a return to my old comic book character drawing days. 

The first sketch of the “Astronaut and boy” series.  Isn’t his suit awesome?  He’s got fat Bender legs, a patriotic star shoulder and a WWF championship belt.  the boy here was drawn intentionally a little “alien” so the viewer doesn’t know if this is the start of an embrace, or regarding an alien specimen (holding it at arm’s length) trying to attack.

I sketched this in five minutes before going to my last Finance class.  I suppose it isn’t finished, but I’ll probably not go back into it.  The most interesting part for me was the head/face and that’s done already.  You can use your imagination to fill in the rest….

Here is a short sketch I did while waiting for a script writing partner at the woodland hills orange line stop in September.

Last but not least, this is a photoshop collage of two sketches done on transparency paper in preparation for the painting I’m currently working on.  I know he looks kinda like Jesus (maybe) here, but he won’t look like that in the final painting.  The Owl has metamorphosized a bit since this sketch too.  I spent four hours painting the Owl on Tuesday only to realize that the shape was all wrong because the body was stretched like a cat.  I’d used freehand sketching with a light grid to set it up, and somewhere something went wrong.  So I had to white-out the Owl and start from scratch.  You’ll probably have to wait a month to see the results as this one is on a 4’x3′ canvas.  I’m also painting on top of a paper collage cemented to canvas this time instead of directly on canvas.  I find this gives the work more “personality,” especially in cases like this where there is a lot of symbolism and the paper (in this case pages from a book) can add meaning to the work.