September Sketch Fest Part 1

September has meant "back-to-school" for me for so many years, bringing with it the associated anxiety and a suspicious feeling of unpreparedness, that it still manages to conjure those emotions in me decades after my last official class. So "back to school" it is, or rather, back to the drawing board...

I've shared sketches here before, but they were usually precedents of eventual paintings (or posters or logo designs). This month (among other things) I'll be posting various sketches from book #24 (mentioned with a few sketches from it here) in no particular order –but they may be paired up thematically, if possible...or by whim. These doodles (from life or my own photo reference or from magazines) were as much for practice as they were for fun.

The top window was the one to our bedroom on the third floor of 163 Concord Ave. when Krista and I lived in Toronto. We called it "the shoe box". Now we live here.

This is Krista sleeping on the Via train on our way to Montreal in 2005. It was during this trip that I took photos of a lion statue that would be featured in The Lady and the Lions. Note my choice of rendering the night sky out the window was very abstract.

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Axel Foley's Chevy Nova (1/25 scale model)

Multiple tributes, here. I remember first seeing Beverly Hills Cop on video at my friend Chris K's house, 'cause his family had a VCR and we'd watch tons of movies (and record music videos) together. The summer of 1984 was a special time for us (having created a strong bond in school since Grade 6 a few years before), going on biking adventures around the 'burbs and into the city, etc., and home video played an important role from then until I moved to the opposite end of Scarborough just before we started high school. We liked the movie a lot, both of us fans of Eddie Murphy from his Saturday Night Live days. I don't think I'd seen the movie since then (it would have been 1985, probably summer, since the movie came out in late 1984) and I became curious to see if it still held up. It did. It does. I found Murphy as charming as ever and the comedy (and even the action) holds up very well and its very re-watchable and very entertaining. Beverly Hi

City of Angels

17" x 11", watercolour and digital, 1999 Ah, City of Angels . I thought I was getting cool film noir but got a cheesy musical instead (Google it if you must). Still, it was fun to make the poster and associated images, mostly because the research consisted of watching real films noir and buying a great book on movie posters of the genre. I made tons of sketches and a few digital mock-ups. For the final poster above, I made three separate watercolour paintings (one of the couple and one each of the two black and white heads) and composited them in Photoshop, where I also added the text. In true movie poster fashion, I wanted the actors names to be the top two names, but I lost that battle and had to use the characters' names instead. It looks fine, but it implies that "Kingsley and Stone" are the lead actors in the show. Oh, well...it's only community theatre... By making the "angel" above half black and white and half colour, th

Small Pond Arts Puppet Wagon (1/24 scale model)

I dreamed up the Small Pond Shipyard for my fanciful scratch-built sci-fi airship creations (which still only exist in sketch/Photoshop mock-up form (and boxes in my closet) for now), but more and more ideas kept coming ( this wind turbine , for example, will be part of a rather elaborate diorama I'll be working on this winter). But the Puppet Wagon was a sleeper surprise, to be sure. [Really, though, I don't know why I was so eager to build this right away since I was planning to slowly develop my modelling skills with simpler builds first and the work my way up to more complicated projects.] Not all parts were used/needed. Most of these ideas have come from watching modelling videos online, and when I saw a review of this sweet little Japanese "Ramen Shop" food truck by Aoshima (right-side drive!), my brain started making jokes about customizing it to the weird food truck ideas I'd been posting on Facebook. But the more I thought about what the co

The Naked Silo

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