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31Jul
Haunted House

Here is my house decorated for Halloween. Almost all of the decorations are hand made by me, and so are arguably ‘art’. (The kids made the sign post, and some small items are store bought.) In recent years, the big spider has been hanging out in the front lawn — but I forgot how good it looks on the roof…

If I can find the photos/videos, I’ll also add my dinosaur costume and even my haunted (garage) house (which I haven’t set up in years).

[2021 Note] I set all this up this year — mostly because a family moved in next door with young kids, and it seemed the right thing to do. We even had trick-or-treaters. Some notes:

  • Ladder – My ladder broke when I was getting decorations down from the rafters in the garage. I got banged/scraped up pretty good on my left side (ribs, arm, leg) and the lack of ladder slowed me down on some of the details / finishing touches.
  • Spider – I put the spider on the roof, but was having challenges getting both eyes lit (I run a wire up to the roof and use lawn lighting, which is a big task). My wife suggested that I use battery lighting in the future — a great idea (and safer).
  • Rain – We had record rain, and the decorations got quite wet. I’ll have to judge next year how damaged they are.
29Jul
Bubbly

As I continue to learn the Procreate app, I produce some items with a surprisingly good result. Here is one. Now all I need to do is remember how I created this…
28Jul
Christening

I must have drawn this when I learned that naming a ship and naming a baby are both called ‘christening’ — but the ship ceremony traditionally involves breaking a bottle on the ship. The parents in this drawing look like my parents when I was younger.

This was drawn on blue-lined loose leaf paper. I digitally subtracted out the blue lines, but had to do a lot of cleanup to blend in the result. (If you look closely, you can see where the lines were.)
26Jul
Brown the Clown

This is a fully-illustrated book on my writing site which should also be available from this art site. I illustrated this poem long ago using basic shapes in MS Paint for Windows, then injecting noise to pixilate the result.

Click the image itself to read the book.
25Jul
Mermaid

This one, I erased the paper in the image — leaving just the drawing. I did this because it was on the backside of one of my dad’s forms from work — and the form structure and text showed through. (I may do this ‘erase the paper’ for all my old artwork on white paper.) I kept the date and the surrounding original paper background — you can see how dark the paper was, and the benefit of removing it.

Drawn by a horny teenager, she is a bit too detailed on her private parts — but it does raise some interesting questions about mermaid/merman physiology and reproduction. Are mermaids warm- or cold-blooded? This mermaid has a belly button (as does Ariel from The Little Mermaid), so she must have started in a womb with a placenta, and not been hatched from an egg. Plus, she could clearly nurse her own young — a very mammalian attribute. Also, how could she give birth if her legs are connected top to bottom? Hmmm…
24Jul
Superhero Guy

I have a set of hand-produced artwork (most done long ago) that I plan to scan and post — so I’ve created a new category called Classic Art.

I’m trying to decide the degree to which I ‘fluff’ this artwork once it’s scanned. I don’t want to ruin the feel of the original artwork, but it seems wrong not to try to bring the artwork closer to its original appearance, and minimize the distraction from the aging of the paper it’s on. For this drawing, I initially only made minor adjustments, but then went back and ‘un-yellowed’ it and ‘erased the paper’ like I did with my mermaid drawing.

Not sure who this is — a superhero from comic books when I was young (or maybe a villain?).

22Jul
One Market

Here’s a photo from the inside of One Market — at the bay end of Market Street — which is a full-city-block complex of three office buildings across from the SF ferry building and the Embarcadero Center. The buildings are Spear and Steuart (modern office buildings) and ‘Landmark’ — the former Southern Pacific railroad headquarters.

I worked at One Market for two different tech companies (Autodesk and Salesforce), so it was interesting to continue to see my old Autodesk colleagues when taking the elevator to Salesforce. Also, it was fun to have office celebrations on the various roof terraces — including watching the Blue Angels practice for the annual airshow.

One Market has good shops and restaurants — some of the restaurants are fancy, some are great for office worker lunch. The complex has a nice courtyard for eating — which includes a fountain with a ‘shower’ falling from the ceiling maybe 100 feet above (pictured here). Unfortunately, the covid pandemic caused many of the restaurants to close.

Two more pics — from One Market windows:
20Jul
Kona at Night

Downtown Kona. Pretty happening — relatively speaking. Places to eat, and have a drink afterwards. Plus there’s a shuttle that runs to/from making getting there and back straightforward.
20Jul
Breathtaking View

We looked at a house in the Santa Cruz mountains uphill from Woodside — back when I was working a lot in Palo Alto. The house itself was pretty unexciting and far from civilization — but the view from the back deck was amazing. Could you image morning coffee or evening cocktails looking at this? (while the evil forest goblin waits for nightfall to make his move…)
18Jul
My Pearl

We’re close enough to the coast that we duck out for oysters pretty often. The ocean cools our summers but warms our winters. Here’s a mid-winter oyster run with my lovely wife.