Sketches, etc.

A few caricatures.

A very tiny John Adams

This is a do-over of a cartoon I did years ago.  This new version will be appearing in a series of textbooks next year.  They wanted to use the old one, but I thought it looked ghastly, so I redid it.  I won’t even show you the old one, it’s that bad.  Just image this cartoon, with worse drawing.

Celebrity sketches

A few caricatures I did at a celebrity golf tournament.

Spud Webb, Cheech Marin, Don Cheadle, Charles Barkley and Bode Miller

Church sketches

It’s been a while.  So here’s a large batch of random sketches of people I saw at church.

Shocked

Things change so fast.  One minute you’re on top of the world, hopeful, optimistic, young.  Then it all comes crashing down.  My dreams are shattered, my joy gone.  Hope Schmope.

I use to have piles of respect for President-elect Obama.  I used to think that he was a different brand of politician and could bring about substantive change.  I studies his policies and read his books. I believed in him.  I trusted him.

No more.

He uses a Zune.

How can I ever trust his judgment again?

The original GW

America’s first President set a precedence for wacky hairdos that other Presidents would try to live up to for decades to come.

This is the first in a set that I plan on doing weekly.  Each will be based on the Presidents portrait in the National Portrait Gallery. Next week: John Adams.

Finally. It’s over.

Caricature of Barack Obama and John McCain

The greatest part about this whole election cycle is that it is finally over.  I feel like I just finished watching two horse dwarfs mud wrestle for the last two years.  Geeze, it was horrendous.

NaNoWriMo

If there is one thing that speaks to my career choice it is that I am helplessly gripped by my passions.  No, I’m not talking about those passions, I mean the kind of passions you hope to find sometime between the day you declare your major and the time you are handed your degree.  I know too many people who are older than I and still haven’t found what drives them.  I consider myself very lucky to be paid to do the things I love.  Unfortunately for me, I catch passions like 1st graders catch colds.  I get them often and with a vengance.  But they don’t last long and then I’m bouncing off to the next thing.

Luckily for me, my wife and children are patient.  They understand (or pretend to understand) that sometimes I get swept up in my ideas and I can’t sleep/eat/make intelligible conversation until I get an idea on paper.  More often than not these wacky ideas don’t get any farther than my sketchbook but one such fantastically ridiculous idea is currently being made into a movie so that’s got to count for something.  While I don’t lack for enthusiasm, I am not known for my endurance.  I work best if I can seclude myself long enough to get my ideas fleshed out and done in one, or a very few, sittings.  I’d rather bang out a story in one short, furious session rather than pining away at something for a long period of time.  Perhaps I fear that an idea will lose it’s newness, but I get restless when I’m still working on something that is more than a few months old.

In the past 3 months I started two different novels.  One got stuck at 25,000 words when I realized I couldn’t finish it without either making an idiot out of my reader or delving into some serious research.  As you probably guessed, research really isn’t my thing.  So, I moved to novel #2.   Currently, it’s at just under 20,000 words and I still love the book so, you know, that’s thrilling.  And I don’t have to research anything which is another bonus.  And it’s now three days into National Novel Writing Month!  Granted, I started this book months ago so I think I disqualified myself but at least I have hordes of eager writers typing happily away at their manuscripts to motivate me.  Go team!

So I am officially participating in NaNoWriMo.  I’m going to bend the rules on my behalf to include December as part of my writing package since my novel is going to be about twice the length of your usual NaNoWriMo book.  And I’m not going to be releasing it publicly when I’m done.  I know, stingy me.  But I actually want to sell my book so I’ll be selfish.  And I probably won’t feel too bad about it even if I don’t get my official “I wrote a novel in 30 days and all I got was this lousy t-shirt” t-shirt, then so be it.

The plan?  Write like crazy while my current novel is still haunting me and before I am possessed with the brilliant idea to write a  romantic teenage vampire story.  Who would read that kind of stuff anyway?

Working stiff

It must be hard for Frankenstein. It’s difficult enough for him to find a sports coat in his size, and with the market the way it is there’s just not much of a demand for monsters, freaks of nature and abominations. He’s been considering dusting off his resume’ but he knows he won’t pass the background test. Poor guy. Here he is after a day working at the an investment bank, the last place on earth where you can squeeze the life out of people and still call it a hard days work.

Happy Halloween!

Church sketches

For those of you who have wondered what on earth those Mormon’s do in church for three hours every Sunday, I have an answer.

More urban sketching coming soon.

Family sketches

Two quick sketches:  One of my sister-in-law that I did over pie.  The second is of my older son making an emotional appeal to his father for more screen time.