Neighborhood Foliage
Right place, right time — of the day and year. All photos taken while walking the dog around the neighborhood.
Backyard Elegance
I’ve discovered that bright daylight shining through a tree can produce a beautiful image. Below is a red-leafed Japanese maple, and a flowering cherry tree (which only blossoms for a few weeks a year) — both of which are in our backyard.
Beauty in Tragedy
Tragic story around this photo —
Early in my time at Salesforce, my daughter had a coworker whose mom went missing — and they thought she might have gone astray on her way from the peninsula to the east bay. As such, I joined an effort to search the marshland near her town looking for (evidence of) her along the path she would have taken.
They later found her — turns out she drove off the road, and died. 🙁 It was an interesting/sad experience searching for her — with this photo being the only highlight.
The Band
This is a crazily artsy photo of the kids at Vasona park in Los Gatos. We joke that the photo looks like an album cover.
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.
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…
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.)
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.
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…
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?).