My Neighbor's Truck

This is my neighbor's truck parked across the street from my house. Drawn in charcoal pencil while looking out my living room window.

Sketch Crawl in City Park

Today was the 25th Worldwide Sketch Crawl, put on by sketchcrawl.com. The original plan was to meet up with some other aspiring New Orleans artists at the New Orleans Museum of Art and spend the day running around City Park with our sketch books. Sadly, a storm rolled in and it was raining all day, which meant that I was the only one there to draw (although a very nice guy named Bill did come by to say hello and set up some other drawing sessions). Here's what I came up with:


This is a lamp post in front of the New Orleans Museum of Art.


This is not actually a real alligator - it's a sculpture by Elizabeth Shannon called "Camille II" that I drew looking out the window of the museum coffee shop.


This last one was done in about ten minutes during a break in the storm. I would have liked to have worked on it longer, but it started raining again and I had to run off. Note the trash bags lined up under the bridge and the hoses poking out of the water - I think they had it set up that way to prevent flooding if the storm that kept all the other sketch crawlers away turns out to be bigger than expected. Here's hoping we can get a few more people next time around.

CC's Coffee House, Jefferson Ave, New Orleans

This is the CCs Coffee House at the corner of Jefferson and Magazine in uptown New Orleans. Those with a keen eye for detail and a knowledge of the coffee houses of New Orleans may have already guessed that this is the very place where I sat and drew this. Actually, now that I think about it, there's really no way anyone reading this could have made that connection unless I told them myself. So, if you did guess, you are probably either my wife or you are stalking me, in which case I'm either about to make popcorn and watch "Westworld" with you or I'm calling the cops. Anyway, it's a nice place to get coffee and a very cool old building.

Flickr-ing

This post was spawned from an exercise that I've mostly been using for warming up or for when I feel like doing some drawing on my lunch break but don't feel like leaving the warm, fluorescent confines of my cubicle. I go to http://flickr.com/photos, click on the first image that comes up, and start drawing. The trick here is not to cheat - whatever comes up, just draw. What I have discovered is that 90% of the images on flickr are of people and, of those, the majority are either photos of children or photos taken at work/family gatherings. There also seems to be a strong correlation between whether or not a person is holding an alcoholic beverage and the likelihood that a person's image will end up on flickr. These odds increase if the person's facial expression suggests that they are about to yell "woo!". Anyway, here are a few of the results of my flickr perusal, most of which were done pretty quickly. This has turned out to be a really interesting and challenging exercise that has resulted in a lot of really terrible drawings (no, I won't post those) and has pushed me to look at subjects that I might have otherwise shied away from.

25th Worldwide Sketch Crawl - November 21st

The 25th worldwide sketch crawl is coming up next weekend. What's a sketch crawl, you ask? It's a loosely organized event where artists, amateur artists, and anyone else who feels like picking up a pencil head out into their respective cities, draw what they see, and then post the results back to the forums at sketchcrawl.com. This is going on in cities all over the world and I'm hoping to get at least a few people from New Orleans to come out and represent our city.

The plan is to meet up at 10:30am next Saturday, November 21st, on the steps of the New Orleans Museum of Art and head out into City Park for a day of drawing (or an hour, or fifteen minutes - whatever you're up for). There's a thread on the sketchcrawl.com forums that has a bit more info (click here). Anyone reading this who will be in New Orleans on November 21st is heartily invited to join in.

And no, there are no pictures in this post. Sometimes life has its little disappointments.

Another Truck Out in the Weeds

I guess "The trucks of Jefferson Parish" doesn't have quite the same ring as "The Bridges of Madison County." In fact, it probably holds about as much dewy-eyed romance as "The Used Tires of Alameda County" or "The Giant Pile of Dead Fish that Threatens to Destroy Milwaukee." Still, these slowly decaying vehicles are kind of interesting to look at as I drive around the suburban/industrial wastelands that lay outside New Orleans. Longtime fans of Revenge of the Pencil ("Pencilteers," for those in the know) may have already guessed that this truck was parked in the weeds along Elmwood Park Boulevard not far from where this was drawn.