Back to the Digital Drawing Board

Image

Reply

I started this Paper 53 piece last evening while stationed – along with 5 other Art Hop artists – at Cue Spot Billiards in downtown Merced, CA. The emotion that I wanted to convey was linked to my finding out that none of my digital painting entrees was selected by jurors for inclusion into this year’s top one hundred at the Mobile and Digital Arts and Creativity Summit (mDAC) 2017. You may recall that I had a piece selected in mDAC 2016 and one in mDAC 2015. This year’s winners are really awesome, click here to take a peek. So, I’m a little disappointed; but, I’m using the development as an opportunity to re-evaluate my artistic vision as part of the coaching and rebranding process that I’m currently engaged in. In that process I’m trying to articulate not so much what I do, or even how I do what I do, but rather why I do it. I’m having some insights, thanks to Adam James Butcher’s coaching process. So let me go back to piecing together some things and dismantling others.

Crafting a Creative Story … About Me

Posted on by
9

I mentioned in a blog post last month that I had begun a process, which I said I would elaborate on in detail at some point. Well, I’m not going to elaborate on that just yet, but I will say that one of the goals of the process is for me to be able to have something coherent to say “about me.” I will also say that I’m working with Adam James Butcher, artist and coach. So in the spirit of showing my work, when it comes to this sort of work in progresss, here’s a one minute, thirty-one second video that I did in Videoshop that represents a draft “illustrated about-me statement” that I hope to improve upon. Your feedback, as usual, is welcome. Please feel free to chime in on this post or any other post.

Andrew has never been the same ever since

Posted on by
2

A rite of passage, a transition ceremony of sorts! Andrew’s identity changed when he left the group of non-shoe tyers and became a member of the shoe-tyers group.

Click on image to enlarge it. Incidentally, this actually happened in the mid 1990s, a couple of years after completing my doctorate, and it encapsulated in a single episode my sociolinguistically-oriented dissertation research in a bilingual Kindergarten classroom near Washington, DC in the mid 1990s that was undergoing a reform of its mathematics curriculum. Learning is identity change. Andrew has never been the same ever since!

50 Some Odd Years

Posted on by
2

There’s been a guitar – or two – in my life for a half a century.

On a weekend visit from college in the late sixties my big brother brought home the first guitar I had ever handled. He could tell I really liked it. A couple of years later he gave me that guitar!

These kinds of drawings are so weird. I started it with a left hand on a fretboard and no idea of how it would unfold or where it would go. It’s done now, waiting in my camera roll for me to insert it into this post; and now my heart is overflowing with emotional memories.

My brother was a central, nearly heroic figure for me throughout the first ten years of my life. By the time my periscope was up high enough for me to appreciate him as my brother, he was already making plans to go off to college; oh, and this devasted me. I remember an exchange we had one evening in the nearby church parking lot while shooting hoops. As he outlined some of the highlights of this plan, the football scholarship, the name and location of the university, and so on, I burst in tears and tried my best to put into words why this was all so unacceptable. Looking back, I knew he understood because he found a way to help me understand how I could manage without him between visits home and why it was the right move for him to make at that time in his life.

So when he gave me that guitar, he gave me a part of his heart that has been a part of my heart for fifty some odd years…and counting.

Made with Paper by Firth Three on an iPad Pro with an Apple Pencil

Under Construction

Posted on by
Reply

Somg 35 odd years ago in Pittsburgh, PA I learned an expression that came to mind the other day while I was stopped dead in my tracks heading west on Olive Avenue in Merced, CA. “The shortest distance between two points is under construction.” The expression has come up before on this illustroblog, click here for further details.

click on image to enlarge

I used an iPad Pro with Apple Pencil in Procreate on this.

 

Let me get this straight…

Posted on by
1

I’ve begun a formal process, one that I’ll elaborate on in due time. Suffice it to say that this process requires some reflection, and that this illustration is an autobiographical by-product of that reflection. I won’t include any analysis of this real event in my life at this particular point, but I do hope to so as soon as I’m able to coax out a pattern or two.

This drawing was done on an iPad Pro using an Apple Pencil and Paper by Fifty Three.