Here is your Drawing! I love this watercolor I made of Bilbo Baggins from The Hobbit. I am a huge fan of J.R.R. Tolkien’s world-building and the characters are really appealing.

Completed Projects

NFL MASCOTS
I actually completed this project in December but the Superbowl was this last weekend and it reminded me of it and I thought you would be interested in seeing it. I decided to paint watercolors of all 32 NFL mascots. I learned in the process that a few teams have bizarre or irreverent mascots. The Redskins is obvious but the Titans mascot is a Racoon. That is just, not right. I drew what I propose to be a much cooler mascot.

Current Projects

Ooof! I am even more busy.

A lot of stuff hasn’t changed, I have just moved past planning for my Kickstarter and now it is live!

I Launched my KICKSTARTER! I have already passed 1/4 of my goal! There are very limited early bird special editions available. Follow the link to view the video to learn more about the project, I hope you all will consider backing it.

#FEARbruary This month I launched another drawing challenge to coincide with my Kickstarter. Each day I will be drawing a new Phobe design from the Fear Hunters Universe. Feel free to join in the drawing or just follow along using #fearbruary.
I’m still drawing the Comic, Fear Hunters. I aim to finish the line art this month and spend next month coloring and lettering.
I’m still drawing the 100-page Graphic Novel for ————— Publishing House. I have Penciled the first 18 pages and am absolutely loving it! More info to come soon as I finish the pencils for issue 1.
I’m producing a short weekly comic strip for a major Educational Curriculum’s social media. I had a great pitch meeting for the project, here is one of the example strips.

I am still teaching Character Design and Photoshop to middle school and high school students. My students are fantastic and make great work. I will see about sharing some of it at the end of this semester.

Upcoming Projects

Uhhhh. Pretty much focused on what’s on my plate at the moment. I have been preparing for a chock full Comic-Con season. I will probably be giving a con schedule update in my next eNewsletter.

For now, Enjoy my silence.

Philosophical Rant

I have created an image, naturally, to show how I define art. First, anything created intentionally as art is in the box. Then it is placed in one of the four quadrants. The top edge is Beautiful art the bottom edge is Ugly art. This is not a value judgment, just a visual appeal or lack thereof. The left side is Skilled art and the right is Unskilled. This is less subjective than the morality of an image. It focuses on the actual ability required by the artist to render the image.

Here are some examples.

Jackson Pollock’s Drip Paintings are Unskilled and are, I believe, Ugly.
A child’s drawing is obviously Unskilled. But it is good and Beautiful because of their innocence and joy.
Picasso’s Guernica actually takes a profound amount of Skill. ( I will argue about what Skill is in a future rambling.) However, the image is Ugly in its depiction of a midnight bombing. It is not meant to be beautiful.
Van Gogh’s Starry Night is Beautiful, and Skilled, despite his mental afflictions.

Art, by my definition, is a blanket term used to hold many things, good and bad, beautiful and ugly, skilled and unskilled, commercial and profound.

Next time, What is Skill?