Ever since going to France last year, I’ve gotten in the habit of carrying blank index cards with me everywhere.  So I end up doodling at odd times like standing in line or waiting for friends to show up, etc.  Back in France I carried a pencil, eraser and pencil sharpener, but it’s just so messy and annoying to carry around that I just stopped and tend to favor the pen I already keep in my pocket.

So I’ve been doodling with an ink pen more and more.  It’s tricky.  No pencil means no rough sketch. 

Here’s a bunch of them:

Working on Uncle Rich’s car (as in, it was leaking oil on a long trip on an extra hot day, so we stopped to let it cool down and give it some fresh oil to hold it over until we get home and he can actually fix the leak.)

 At the book store.  Playing with Marc’s technique of putting more detail in the center and letting fade out toward the edges.

 Sketching while watching TV (it’s tough when the reference is always changing! :)

More TV sketching.

sketched over lunch:

 more tv sketching

 more tv sketching

 sketching while burning backup discs (see the stack of index cards on the bottom left?)

 sketched while out at breakfast:

 Idea while standing in line for coffee:

Yes, it works and I’ll sue you if you steal my soap idea! :)

had time to kill before a movie started.

The dots are how I’ve been making a rough sketch without a pencil.  If you scroll back up you might see a stray dot here and there on the more elaborate sketches (I don’t do it as much for the quick cartoons)

~Danny

(just fooling around with drawing using flash)

After working in grays and black for so long, color feels like a breath of fresh air.

After much searching on amazon, I found the set we use in class:

Our instructor showed us the powered color that her master used to use. They are brilliant, vivid colors. Half are from rocks that have been grounded into dust and half are organic –but almost all of them are poisonous. Which makes sense, all the brightest colors in nature usually warn predators of poison.

Because half the colors are minerals and half are organic, if you see ancient paintings, half the colors will still be bright and vivid (the minerals) and half the colors will be fading away (the organic colors).

Another interesting not about these powdered colors is that since they are nothing but dust, they need to be mixed with a type of glue to get them to hold together and actually be usable to paint.

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