On Thursday I tried drawing the boy who told me to draw the tricycle instead.
And a Figure 8 to start a quiet Sunday morning (since I decided that work can wait till Monday).
-
Sway the Head and Shake the Tail
Outline of a tricycle from behind, drawn in red ink on a yellow steno pad. Line doodle sketches of the boy climbing around his chair. Red ink on a yellow steno pad with old pencil notes and sketches. Sketch from my Ba Dian Jin instructional book. The head is way oversized, maybe because we watched My Neighbors the Yamadas for the past couple of weekends. (The kids love it!) -
Wise Owl Gazes Backwards
I feel like I’ve got a decent handle on bodies when I’m paying attention. I might switch to focusing on heads.
Threw in some more architectural scalies. Reminds me of that one day where I spent twelve hours practicing architectural lettering. Have it down for the rest of my life.
Unfortunately it’s a dead art. Though I’ve used it on handwritten thank you notes after interviews to show I’m a real old school draftsman.
-
Swiss 1JJ, Page of Wands
I copied the drawing while waiting for files to upload to the server
I used the classic upside down technique…but ran out of room at the bottom of the notepad for the top of the head.
-
Separate Heaven and Earth
Monday was crazy so first thing Tuesday is to catch up on yesterday’s figure. Maybe I’ll get a second round in this afternoon.
(I threw in some architectural scalies for fun.)
I’m reusing my notepad with sketches for the 6 of Swords….and this is now my desk pad so the rest of the white space will eventually get filled in (and green highlighted when completed).
-
Edvard Greig, Peer Gynt Suite No. 1, Morning Mood
Let’s repeat my first video artist for #MondayNightMusic by celebrating the vernal equinox and the advent of Spring!
I’m a huge fan of Stephen Malinowski. He’s posted an immense amount of music animations on his YouTube channel. It’s an amazing library of visual explorations around those odd sequence of sounds that we find so appealing as a species.
If the start of the Gregorian calendar did not go well, I wish you all the best as we enter a new season. Let’s make this an awesome new year!
-
Notes from San Diego
Three years after our country shut down, we went on our first vacation, for a week out in San Diego.
Finally getting out of Nevada made me a little sad about the time lost. But I was also grateful for the massive privilege to take a week off and not have to worry about it.
One big mental shift on this trip was my constant worry about time. Trying to optimize a trip is madness but I couldn’t help myself. I’m not sure what happened to the young man who spent a lovely spring afternoon on the Seine just reading Raymond Chandler. Maybe he’ll return one day.
Legoland
- Kids (just 9 and almost 5) loved it.
- It’s not a big park, but it took two days to get everything out of it.
- The second day was drizzly which worked great — shorter lines and the rainy day pledge means we get free admission for a day within the next year.
- What didn’t work great was the Technic rollercoaster. Totally not worth an hour wait.
- Pretty amazing to stumble across my childhood friend my first day at the park. It’s a small world.
- The boy was scared of some rides the first day, but then enjoyed them on the second day.
San Diego Safari Park
- Gorgeous views.
- Tons of walking.
- Make sure to visit the botanical gardens at the top of the park.
- Worth a day, definitely a great perk for locals who are already members of the main zoo, but wasn’t a highlight. Most likely way better for the animals than the humans.
- Wait until the Elephant Valley construction is completed before visiting if you’re out of town.
- Bring Binoculars.
San Diego Zoo
- Every bit as amazing as I remembered it.
- Even with the disappointment that the Great Pandas have been recalled back to China. (Fortunately I found out before we arrived).
- There was a long line for the tour bus in the morning. By the afternoon there was no wait. I presume it was the same dynamic for the Skyfari gondola.
- The was the only park we didn’t stay till closing time, only because they had extended hours to 7pm for Spring Break.
- Maybe next time I’ll bring some sketch books and we can draw some animals.
- Hopefully the next visit won’t be in such a rush, cause we’ve now seen most of it all.
La Jolla
- We got lucky with free admission to the Museum of Contemporary Art (2nd Sundays and 3rd Thursdays).
- Coming from a city without an art museum, it was amazing. But I’d have a hard time paying $25 per adult since the kids didn’t have much patience.
- Wrangling an 4 year old around priceless art is tiring. International travel is at least two or three years away.
- If you go to the museum, check out the Orange Wedge.
- Also check out Adriana Varejao’s disemboweled painting.
- Free parking in the city is a nice perk. Keep an eye out on the signs, every street has different rules for how long you can park.
- We got to walk through to tide pools at low tide. This was dumb luck as well.
- The momma seals and pups at the “Children’s Pool” are cute, even if you could only watch them from above since that area is closed between Dec 15-May 15 to protect the seals.
- Always good to revisit the Pacific Ocean.
COVID-19
- We’re still COVID cautious. Thankfully we got nary a side-eye for being masked up the whole trip.
- Recommend the 3M Aura and VFlex N95 masks. V-Flex comes in two sizes, and the smaller size was perfect for the kids. I’ll be curious how they feel when it gets warmer.
- We stayed at an AirBNB. Flushed out the house when we first arrived, including running a Corsi-Rosenthal box for the first night.
- Not eating out removed a decision point throughout the trip. Less fun, but simplified the travel.
- Our pattern was to have a big breakfast, get to the attraction, play till the 5pm close, eat a PBJ Sandwich in the car, and go home to cook a late dinner around 8 (or 9!) pm.
- We also kept Kind bars in the backpack.
- Since we didn’t eat out, getting an AirBNB near a supermarket was critical. We brought plenty of stuff from Vegas, but you always need something.
- I just realized that the Take and Bake Pizza from ALDI’s is the first non-frozen, non-home prepared meal we’ve had in 3 years.
- I didn’t go in, but my wife reported that ALDI’s isn’t all that. Very sparse, which explains the equally empty parking lot.
- It might be my bougie privilege speaking, but I appreciate that California charges for plastic bags. It’s long overdue to make these perks not-free so they aren’t freely wasted.
- As for illness, let’s see how things go in a week. So far so good, but given our long hibernation, I’m assuming we’re the freshest meat out there for all the latest germs out there (corona and otherwise).
Detour Home
- We took a detour home through the desert. Added an hour to the drive time.
- I love driving 2-lane highways. My wife was not amused.
- Not sure I’d do it in summer, it would be terrifying to have car trouble with that heat.
- There some cute shops in Joshua Tree and 29 Palms. Make sure to gas up in one of those two towns, it’s a lot of nothing after that. (And gas was cheaper than in San Diego!)
- I wish we stopped at the little Wonderland Books shop, but we were in tired, heading home mode.
- It was awesome to see the big restored Roy’s sign at Amboy. They’ve cleaned up the lobby. Worth a stop for a couple of pictures.
- The highlight of the detour was the Kelso Depot. The building is nicely restored and the National Park Staff were super friendly.
- Because we didn’t get gas at Joshua Tree, we had just enough gas to make it to Vegas, but had to refill before landing at home. It gave us one last ride — the kids’ first car wash. They squealed in delight.
With the free admission day in Legoland, we’re now pondering a summer visit. Might as well revisit the beach and Zoo. Add one day at Balboa Park and a visit to the New Children’s Museum (which we loved in 2019) and we’re back for another full week.
Some bureaucrat at the California Office of Tourism just earned her wings.
-
Bad Figures
At the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego I contemplated my recent decision to draw more (than nothing everyday). One gallery had paintings with several highly stylized figures. I committed the classic response to modern art.
I could do that!
Spoiler alert: I can’t.
This idea pushed me to finally attack the white whale of drawing figures. I’m so bad, even my architectural scalies look awful. This is way out of my comfort zone but it’s time to attack the issue in a concentrated fashion.
I’m calling this Figure 8’s . The series is to draw a human figure for +/- 8 minutes, for x8 days.
At least for 08 days to go with the 8 brocades, maybe up to 78 (tarot deck) or 18, 28, 68, or 88 (for good luck).
Yesterday, I started with image of a guy stretching upward. I didn’t use a reference and …. umm yeah … this makes my scalies look like palatable.
The drawing today was from the cover of my exercise book, the second callisthenic shooting an arrow. I’ll do exercises 3-8 from the book before I venture back out into my imagination.
The girl got a good laugh when she saw these drawings, she even got her brother upstairs to join in the fun. It may be good for them to see dad fail miserably…and hopefully get better by the end. Given how quickly she picks things up in school, I worry she has developed a fear of failure. So hopefully this will encourage her to take some risks and fail graciously a few times before the stakes get too high in life.
-
Fell in Love with a Girl, White Stripes
Wow.
I stumbled across a childhood friend at LegoLand. I’ve known him since from church before elementary school and we went to Berkeley together.
He’s one of the two guys I still talk regularly to from college. This is the first time I got to see his two kids.
One helluva way to start our first vacation three years into the pandemic.
-
Coat, Desk, Chair
I took my first studio in the spring of 1998. More than architecture, ED11A was about drawing and seeing.
This was the big midterm assignment.
It also coincided with the clock change, and we bemoaned the loss of an hour to complete this drawing.
It turned out that I didn’t need that extra hour. I finally got an “A” on this drawing. It was a brutal studio (architecture studios are half hazing), but something clicked on this drawing.
I expended an intense amount of effort on this piece, but one must also credit Fortuna, since nothing is guaranteed with art.
It’s been a quarter century since that long week in concrete caverns of Wurster Hall. Things that seemed cataclysmic are mere whispers in our memory.
Maybe I’ll return to this level artistry one day. More importantly, I hope my kids will push themselves to discover their art — my daughter is less than a decade away from her freshman year in college.
18″x24″ Pencil Drawing of a Coat, Desk, and Chair. I spent the week on my stomach drawing the green army trench coat at my studio chair and desk. A classmate drew this same scene from a different perspective. Everyone else took this opportunity draw in the comfort of their dormitories. The graduate assistant for our section was Noga Wizansky who still makes great art. During my time at Berkeley, I developed close relationships with the professors Chip Sullivan and Joe Slusky in future studios. I loved their omnivorous approach to everything. It’s a shame that the Architecture program has become focused on architecture. There’s plenty of time for that silliness after college.
Ink for determining the perspective 
Detail of the selected view -
6 to 5, Early Bright, Seamus Egan
Three years ago, the pandemic landed on our shores.
We were living with our in-laws, but the tenant in their rental house had just left. That gave me a place exile myself since I was still going to the office before the shutdowns were announced.
Even after the shutdowns, I was still conducting a variety of site visits between construction projects and budgeting investigations. So I spent a long spring as a bachelor, until work slowed down and I stopped running around town.
It was a trying time (we celebrated my boy’s second birthday in the backyard) but it was also a cushy middle class sacrifice that pales in comparison to the loss that so many others experienced.
During those long days as a loner, I would take a 40 minute walk every morning, listening to this CD by Seamus Egan, which he has now released as a live performance on Youtube.
