In honor of our nation’s birthday, here’s a sketch of George Washington I did a year or so ago.

Also, I googled some thoughtful quotes from our greatest President:

“Be courteous to all, but intimate with few, and let those few be well tried before you give them your confidence.”

“Few men have virtue to withstand the highest bidder.”

“Happiness and moral duty are inseparably connected.”

“I hope I shall always possess firmness and virtue enough to maintain what I consider the most enviable of all titles, the character of an Honest Man.”

“We ought not to look back, unless it is to derive useful lessons from past errors and for the purpose of profiting by dear bought experience.

“Let your heart feel for the afflictions and distress of everyone, and let your hand give in proportion to your purse. ”

“Let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.

Have a terrific 4th of July!

I first discovered Heinrich Kley in college when my life drawing professor showed me a book of his amazing work. Kley was an Austrian artist/illustrator during the late 19th and early 20th centuries (he died around 1945). Though not well-known today, he achieved a certain level of fame during his lifetime. Among his many admirers was none other than Walt Disney, and the early Disney artists studied Kley’s work. You can see his influence in “The dance of the Hours” sequence from Fantasia.

I’ve learned a lot from studying Kley’s drawings. He was a master of the human form. His pen lines are confident, the strokes are loose and casual yet perfectly placed. He was a master at creating anthrapomorphic animals and creatures (i.e. frogs or elephants that walk upright on two legs, wear clothes, etc.) and made them feel both fully animal and fully human at the same time. Kley didn’t just draw well, he told stories with his drawings. His characters are always active and expressive, rarely standing still, and many of his drawings depict situations that are both dramatic and humorous at the same time. He was a true master.

The Lines and Colors blog has a nice write-up on Kley and his work. You can also view a gallery of Kley images at Heinrich Kley Online. Unfortunately low-res JPEGs from the internet don’t do them justice. To fully appreciate his genius, I highly recommned The Drawings of Heinrich Kley. Buy a copy or check your local library. I own a copy and I always get inspired whenever I browse through it.

Oops….

During the switch to my new blog it looks like I posted my new RSS feed incorrectly. Which means some of you RSS folks weren’t able to get the new feed. My bad. Hopefully I haven’t lost too many subscribers.

Also, one of the reasons I switched to WordPress was so that I could track RSS subscriptions and get a better idea of how many people actually read my humble thoughts and ramblings. Unfortunately, I just discovered that WordPress recently decided to scrap their RSS tracking.

To fix both problems, I’m now using something called FeedBurner. But that means changing my RSS feed….again.

I hate to do this, but if you read my blog through RSS I’m asking you to please change your feed one more time. Click here for the new feed, and then just delete the old one from your RSS reader. You can also subscribe by clicking on the blue button on the right side of my blog.

I think I’ve got it set up correctly. If you have any problems, please leave a comment and let me know.

For those of you who don’t use RSS, you can now subscribe to my blog via e-mail. Each time I post new content, it will automatically be e-mailed to you. Click here to subscribe.

Thanks again to all of you who read my blog regularly. It’s humbling to know so many people take time out of their busy days to read this little old blog.

(EDIT: If the images below aren’t visible, just click the “Refresh” button and they should appear. If that still doens’t work, please leave a comment and let me know.)

Today is the big day. At precisely 6pm gadget-loving hordes will descend upon Apple stores all over the country and begin snatching up iPhones. I won’t be among them, but there’s a good chance I will be purchasing one at some point down the road.

When that happens, I thought it would be fun to create my own wallpaper. So during a break yesterday I started playing around with some old sketches to see what I could come up with. Then I thought, why not post them on my blog for others to download and use?

So, if you are looking to personalize your new iPhone and if any of these strike your fancy, simply click on the thumbnail below. Consider it a small token of appreciation to all my blog readers.

I’m currently busy with several projects which I can’t really talk about (yet). Since I can’t post any new art, here’s some studies I did a while back from the book In Character: Actors Acting:

The book is an excellent resource for studying facial expressions. Most photo reference books have amateur models giving stock expressions (sad, happy, scared, etc.). In this book, professional actors were given unique dramatic situations and then asked to act them out (i.e. “You are a pediatrician with a bright five-year-old cancer patient who is making up an intriguing fairy tale.”) The results are rich and expressive. A great resource for any artist seeking to learn more about expressiveness and emotion.

It’s moving day. I’m in the process of transferring my blog from Blogger to WordPress. Please update your bookmarks and RSS feeds. The link to my new feed is the blue button on the right.

I’m quite fond of Blogger, but the more I’ve learned about WordPress the more I’ve found its just a better site with more options and features. So, welcome to my new home!

Be patient with me while I unpack the boxes and get everything set up. I was able to import all my past content from Blogger except the pictures amd links. I have to do that myself one at a time. And since this is primarily an art blog, that’s a lot of pictures for me to import. But I’m excited to be here.

I’m also hoping to post more often. With WordPress I can write several posts at once and then schedule them to show up one per day. That way, when I’m in a writing mood I can do more than just one entry….giving the illusion that I am more organized that I really am, and hopefully resulting in more frequent posts.