Children's Folk Dance 1


Last weekend my friend Alina told me there were a whole bunch of little kids dressed in traditional clothes about to put on a dance performance in front of a small Mexican resturaunt around the corner from her. That was enough for me. I grabbed my sketchbook and joined her. I did several pages of pencil drawings. I'll upload them as I get around to coloring them. I want to try a few different methods for computer coloring on these since I never really do that. Here's the first.

Pandit Arun Dravid

I attended a beautiful morning concert of Indian Classical Vocal Music of Pandit Arun Dravid of the Jaipur Gharana. It was a small house concert out in Arcadia. The people were really friendly and I have a lot of respect for those who do what they can to keep the arts alive, simply for the love of it. My thanks to Shobha Dravid Ji for accomodating me at the last minute and to the host family for opening their home to us and allowing people to enjoy such a rare treat!

My pal Alina, the Ice Cream Monster


I did this caricature of Alina as revenge for all her misdeeds. That's all she's got online, but you should see my poor sketchbook she destroyed with evil drawings. It's too painful for me to scan. So I did some quick doodles in pencil, scanned them, hacked them together in photoshop and added some color. I wasn't trying to clean it up. The final image was always intended to be the watercolor. I like the pencil one best. The face kind of changed by the time I got it to the watercolor. I haven't had as much time to paint and draw lately, but I want to try and spend a bit more time on the ones I do, just to more consciously work towards improving.

Below you can see some of the quick sketches I did to figure out how I'd approach this.

Now if I can only get photoes of Cholki and Mark...

Descanso Gardens 2


A painting I started at Descanso Gardens and finished up at home. Usually when I paint something like this I do a lot of pushing and pulling. I build up real slow and just keep pushing things back and other forward and hope that when it's all done, something decent comes out of it.

Chinese New Year


Went to check out the Chinese New Year Parade in Chinatown here in Los Angeles. The company was great, but the parade was a bit underwhelming. I wish I'd some drawings of the tiny kids performing traditional dances before the parade. They were quite amazing and cute. Too bad they weren't in the parade.

Street Dancer


Painted this based off a thumbnail pose I drew at dance performance a few months back. Been busy lately working on my short. The thumbnails shown were drawn in the dark. Hard to draw when you can't see the paper...gotta work on that. You can see where it becomes completely dark in the progression of poses.

Getty Center and Work


Went to the Getty Center and listened to some blowhards use big words to describe art. Then I saw a short performance of Indian Classical music (the reason I was there) which was a lot of fun. Also threw in a sketch from my desk at work. Good way to rest your eyes from staring at a computer.