Join the Parade!

While putting together the Adorable Progeny's deluxe suite (presently referred to as the Nerdery), and I keep coming across the information that young infants can most easily see high contrast black and white imagery. There's some very nice stuff available for purchase, but, hey, I've got a bottle of ink! Why not make my own?

Here's what I'm thinking: I'll post my drawings at pretty high resolution (600 dpi). Any parent who would like to use these for their infant is welcome to. They remain my intellectual property, and are not available for other use without contacting me (this includes schools and garage bands), but parents can do all kinds of things with them: make flashcards, wall art, tattoos, whatever.

And, in my very first attempt at memecraft, I'd like for other folks to add to the parade. The parameters are:
1.) You are willing to offer the same terms that I have. You retain all rights, but parents can use the images for their kids.
2.) High contrast black and white imagery, at a pretty decent resolution. No grays, no gradients, no colors. Well, maybe red.
3.) Content should be all-ages appropriate. Dahr.
4.) It's a musical parade! Give your marcher an instrument!

No deadline. We'll keep on marching for as long as people are interested in joining in. Drop your link in the comments of any Parade post, or shoot me an email!

Beeswax Bound for San Diego

So I'm shuffling all my various ducks in rows, columns, and tiers in preparation for heading out to the Big Show, where I plan on being very graceful in defeat. And, just so I don't have to turn up empty-handed, I'll be taking along 50 copies of Beeswax Bound, a little sketchbooky sorta thing I put together through CafePress. It's mostly a collection of images you've already seen, for free, here on Beeswax (sell it, Joel, sell it!), but all re-contextualized through the power of imaginative typing. For instance, I have written profiles for all the various Fist-a-Cuffs designs I've drawn, and cobbled together a fun and educational game for them called Fracas. Play along at home!

Also found within the covers:
How to Kill and Skin an Animal the Size of a City Bus
A Vigilante's Personal Ad
Words of Advice from Bell of Splendid Awakening
A Thrilling Rock Grant Assignment Log
Full Frontal William Blake Nudity

All in all, it's 52 pages of black and white single-signature stapled fury, available via your nearest information appliance, or where ever I can be found at SDCC.*


* Namely, the AdHouse table at the following times:
Thursday July 26th, 2-4
Friday July 27th, 10-12
Saturday July 28th, 2-4

Painting Procedural pt. 8

In contrast to the watercolor stage, where I was slopping down the paint willy-nilly, during the gouache stage, I spend a lot of time mixing. This is especially true at this point in the painting, where I'm making the little tiny details. I'll spend ten minutes mixing the color, make a couple brush strokes, spend another ten minutes adjusting the color, make another brushstroke or two, and so on. In fact, most of the time, the painting is shoved off to a corner of the table, and I'm just looking at my palettes.

One of the tricky things about mixing colors with gouache is that it changes value as it dries. Some colors lighten, some darken. But the great thing about it, as opposed to, say, acrylics, is that dry gouache can be re-wetted. So, if you have enough palettes (no, I don't consider the amount pictured to be enough. And, yet, I'm embarrassed to buy more), you can keep all the colors you've mixed and dip into them when mixing new colors.

And here's the painting as it stands today. This is not a scan, but a digital photo taken under sunlight; I was trying to avoid the weird color casts I was getting from my scanner. The result is a little washed out. Le sigh. Reproduction is hard.

I haven't looked at this thing since December, and I now see several things I'd still like to adjust. But I don't know that I'll get around to it. There's always the danger at the end of a piece that you're not making constructive changes, you're just fussing with it.

All in all, it was a fun side project, kind of a palette cleanser after wrapping up the final McGraw-Hill job. If I ever get a decent scan of the thing, I'll probably make postcards.

Painting Procedural pt. 7

Okay, So, now that Valentie's Day and Supergirl have reminded me that I have a blog, I suppose I should continue with the young lady we left in the woods.

So, I'm still popping out highlights from the watercolor layer--namely, her hair, skin, blouse, and left shoe. The blue cast to this image has more to do with my inept color calibration than the paintingitself. The next image is more representative.

Filled in her red thought-bubble. This was my plan from the start, but it has proved controversial. Most people who have seen this painting have asked when I was going to add the words. I intended for the color alone to show our protagonist's state of mind (that is to say, pretty dang pissed about something).

The addition of the strong red made many of the other colors in the painting look washed out, so I've darkened the weeds in the forground considerably, and have begun to increase the contrast in the trees.

Painting Procedural pt. 6

Ah, gouache – lovely, chalky gouache. I have added a bunch more color to the background, so that it moves from pink to yellow to blue, which seems like a fairy-tale-sky sort of thing to do. And I've started painting in the fur accessories on our damsel's ensemble.

Now you can start to see what I'm trying to do with the two kinds of paint: the reds I used for the watercolor are preserved as the shadow, and the gouache fills in where the light strikes.

I have enpinkened the reflected light on the edges of the fur. Reflected light color shifts are the principle on which the buttercup-under-the-chin test for bed-wetting operates.

Painting Procedural pt. 5

Nearing the end of the watercolor phase. I'll drop in a few more all-over brown washes to ensure that it is darker and duller than I'll want the painting to actually be. Normally, when working in watercolor, one wants to be careful to preserve the white of the paper as your highlights. But I'm planning to go in with gouache paint to reestablish the lighter colors. The plan is to have the shadows transparent, and the highlights opaque. This is similar to the technique Thomas Kinkade built his Empire of Evil upon.

First taste of opacity: The sky seen through the trees in the background. Gouache is watercolor paint that is meant to be painted in thick coats. The pigments are ground in a coarser manner, and it has opaque fillers added. It works well in flat, graphic applications, and it blends easily. It also has it's temperamental aspects (your never more than a sneeze away from ruining your painting), but I love it. It works the way my brain seems to assume paint should work.

Painting Procedural pt. 4

Okay, so back to the painting. I'm continuing to lay in the local color in transparent watercolor washes. Local color is the color that we think things are (the trees are brown, the grass is green, et cetera), without the impositions of, say, the color of the light sources and shadows, and reflected light bouncing around between surfaces.

The previous three posts showed work done during classes while the students were busy doing whatever it is students do. But then the weekend came, and so I'm in the home studio for these shots. I wait for each wash to dry before laying down a new one to prevent them from bleeding into each other or washing each other away (heavier pigments will push lighter ones out of their way). This means there's a lot of down-time, which makes it the perfect activity to intersperse through a day of house cleaning.

The local colors are now pretty much established. But, obviously, there's still an awful lot of painting to do.

Painting Procedural pt. 3

Having established a basic value scheme, I start to add color. First, I lay down a wash of yellow with a mop brush. Yellow is a near-compliment of blue, so it kind of tones down and grays out the blue. Orange is the actual compliment of blue, but full compliments are often too harsh and "vibratey."

And then I start dropping in the local color. I'm not mixing the paints so much as laying down transparent washes of straight paint over one another. The base of yellow and blue will make all of the colors relate to one another

There will be more images of this once I find the cable for my digital camera.

Also, if'n yer innerested: apparently MySpace and LiveJournal just aren't geeky enough. There is now ComicSpace. I just signed up with it, because I thought Dean Trippe would make fun of me if I didn't. I'm not sure I really get the whole social networking thing, though. As near as I can tell, it's like Pokemon, only instead of collecting images of fantastic creatures, you collect images of people who draw fantastic creatures.

I just can't figure out how you win.

Painting Procedural pt. 2

This is an Art-O-Graph, although I've always known it as a "Lucy." I suppose this moniker is derived from camera lucida. I found it in the back of a junk closet at school, along with an waxing machine and other artifacts of the predigital era of Design Arts. At least once a year I have to keep someone from hauling it away as garbage. It works a like an inverted opaque projector: you put an image in a lit chamber above a pair of sliding lenses; then, you adjust the lenses until the image is projected at the size and clarity you want on the table below. In this instance, I stuck my original pencil drawing in the chamber, and projected it onto a block of Arches 140 lb. Cold-press watercolor paper.

This is the tracing of the projected drawing, darkened via Photoshop for your ease of viewing. The idea is to actually have a very light drawing, so that it won't show through the paint.

If I were at home, I might have just redrawn the sketch at a larger size by hand, or blown it up on a xerox machine and traced it with my shoestring light box (a pane of glass balanced on my lap and a desk lamp between my feet). Or made the xerox into a sheet of carbon paper by rubbing the back with graphite and transfering it.

And then I restablished my line drawing with a thin painted line, and blocked in the basic value scheme. The paint I'm using is about half Prussian Blue and half Payne's Gray. I think I meant to just use Payne's Gray, but grabbed the Prussian Blue by accident, and thought Huh, okay. At this stage, the color doesn't matter as much as the value.

Painting Procedural pt. 1

One of my favorite non-bikini-related things on the internet are art tutorials. This is my little contribution to the genre. Except, I'm calling mine a "procedural," because I'm not sure anyone should tutor themselves in my process. See, despite years and years of art school, I didn't take a class that was actually about how to paint until I was well into my freelance career. So, in my ignorance, I cobbled together a relatively consistent way of making my way through a painting. It works for me, but there are probably much smarter ways to go about it.

This particular painting is not a commission. This is my little way of celebrating the end of the McGraw-Hill jobs. That had kept me so busy that I hadn't really painted for the past two years. As a result, I've been a bit fiddlier with this painting than usual. This is partly because I'm a little rusty, partly because I'm self-concious about presenting it as a tutorial, but mostly because I'm just having too danged much fun playing with the colorful wet stuff.

Here's a quick sketch, drawn out on xerox paper. Why xerox paper? 'Cuz it's cheap, and plentiful, and quality is not an issue at this stage.

Costume reference, and inspiration. How could I resist drawing a get-up like this?


A xerox of my xerox, which then becomes a value study with the application of a little more pencil. I would normally do this on the original sketch, but I was working at school, so it wasn't much effort to make a copy. This preserved the original as a line drawing, which will be useful at the next stage.

Charles W. Morgan pt. 12

Look at that! It's the last of the drawings from my time at Mystic Seaport, sailing into the sunset!

October 13. "There she blows," was sung out from the masthead.
"Where away?" demanded the captain.
"Three points off the lee bow, sir."
"Raise up your wheel. Steady!"
"Steady, sir."
"Mast-head ahoy! Do you see that whale now?"
"Ay ay, sir! A shoal of Sperm Whales! There she blows! There she breaches!"
"Sing out! sing out every time!"
"Ay ay, sir! There she blows! there- there- thar she blows- bowes- bo-o-os!"

J. Ross Browne's Etchings of a Whaling Cruise, 1846
as quoted by Herman Melville

Charles W. Morgan pt. 11

I mentioned scrimshaw a few posts back. This is an example. There weren't many recreational options aboard a whaling vessel, but scrimshaw was one of them. Basically, you take a piece of whale ivory and scratch on it with one of the big needles used for sewing sails. Then you rub ink or soot or what have you into the scratches, and wipe away the excess. The result is an etching on the tooth surface.

There is some very beautiful work done in scrimshaw, and it's a craft that I've been fascinated with since childhood. It's safe to say that most of it's praticioners had no formal arts training, but there's a lot of very good drawing on these teeth. Interestingly, even when the drawings of people and whales and clouds are awkwardly realized, the rigging on the ships is always precise. Whereas I get easily confused by what seems to be an endless and arbitrary cat's crade of line, these sailors knew that rigging with exhausting, blistering intimacy of someone whose had to run all that rope, and whose lives depended on it being run correctly.

When I was in high school or middle school, I got a hold of what I thought was a small disc of whale ivory. I'm pretty sure trade in whale ivory is prohibited, and, looking back, am positive that what I actually had was a piece of ivory-colored plastic. Anyway, I had an etching needle and a bottle of ink, so I tried my hand at it. Of course, I drew a whaling ship. My memory tells me the results where pretty good. But, when it comes to my own art, my memory is a filthy liar.

When I was working on this series of drawings, there was a chance that they were going to get published as an artist's sketchbook, in which case I planned on naming the book Scrimshaw. I guess the series of sketchbooks wasn't doing very well, however, and whaling wasn't considered the red-hot subject matter that would revive the line. But I'm pretty sure more people have seen these images in blog form than the entire proposed print run of the sketchbook, so I'm happy.

Charles W. Morgan pt. 9

The giant wishbone is the whale's jaw. This is another picture that is based on photoreference, and, I have to admit, I'm not really sure what this guy is doing. Getting that last bit of blubber? Scrapping meat off for his dinner? Practicing his throat-cutting technique? It doesn't look like he's cutting teeth out of the jaw to be used for scrimshaw, and that's the only reason I can think of for hauling the jawbone onto the ship.

But I can tell you that (1) the jawbone really is that big; and (2) the decks looked even gloopier and more disgusting than I've captured here.

This drawing is also the egregious example of my rope theory of compositional enhancement. That rope in the foreground makes absolutely no sense, and, looking at it now, probably wasn't the best visual choice, either. Ah, well. Live and draw and learn.

Charles W. Morgan pt. 8

This is the block and tackle mentioned in the last post. I don't really have any interesting info to pass along relating to it, but it was fun to draw.

The best thing about drawing pictures that take place aboard a ship is the rope. Whenever you have a dead spot in your composition, you can just draw a line of rope. Instant directional dynamism!

Of course, rope is also the worst thing about drawing on deck, 'cause there's so much of it, and all of it has a very specific function. My first lesson learned on this project was to not get caught up in trying to accurately represent the rigging. It's just too much visual information, and every drawing ends up looking like a spider web. But I do feel like, with every one of the these drawings, I need to apologize to anyone with any sort of expertise in this area.

Charles W. Morgan pt. 7

After you harpoon the whale and let it exhaust itself dragging you around the ocean, you set a lamp on the top of your longboat's mast, and wait for the whaling ship to find you. The whale is then tied to the side of the boat and stripped of its blubber. An incision is made in the whale's hide, and a hook is run through it. The hook is attached to tackle connected to the ship's tallest mast, which acts as an improvised crane. The blubber is then pulled off the whale in a single long strip called the blanket. These men are tending to that process. This was difficult work, and it had to be done quickly, because sharks were eating your profits with every minute the whale was in the water.

Charles W. Morgan pt. 6

Happy 2006, Everybody!

I'm back from NY where I spent my days wandering through the Met and eating whitefish salad on bagels. The highlight was the Fra Angelico exhibition. A lot of minor works and pseudo-attributions, but the really good stuff is really good. Fra Angelico's frescoes at the Museo di San Marco in Florence rank very high on my list of all-time favorite human accomplisments (up there with Cycladic sculpture and lemon sorbet). This show was full of tempera pieces on board, which are smaller and, in some ways, more intimate that the frescoes. So lovely and delicate - I think the jostling crowds are the only thing that kept Stendhal's Syndrome at bay. Other highlights were an Indian illustrated manuscript and a collection of drawings admired by Vincent Van Gogh. This last struck me because it was my first exposure to a real, live Daumier drawing.


Anyway, enough of my yap. Here's a drawing of some of the different harpoons used to in historical whaling. As you can see, they're all variations of barbs, intended to go in more easily than they'll come out. Modern whalers use explosive bolts, which probably aren't any crueler, but still seems less fair, somehow.

End of December Absenteeism

I'm on the road, cramming as many family visits as is humanly possible into the next four or five days. Blog posts will, therefore, be spotty at best. So, here's a couple seasonal images stolen off my website:


First, of course, is kindly ol' Saint Nick.


And this is his grumpy older sister, Mamma Eggnog.

Mamma Eggnog has her own, less well-known holiday, the BicycleMass. I've got a bunch of drawings and even some Bikemas carols hiding away in a notebook, somewhere. If you're interested, bug me about them.

Okay, I'm off to listen to my family tell my lovely wife horrible lies about me. Happy Holidays, Wal-Mart shoppers!

Charles W. Morgan pt. 6

Okay, so, you've been tooling around the ocean in your whaling ship, and you climb up into the crow's nest, and you actually spot a whale. Now what do you do?
This is the crazy part: You, and a bunch of other guys, get off the nice, big whaling ship, and climb into this tiny little boat. These longboats are about sixteen to twenty feet long.
And then you row as fast and quietly as you can out to where the whales are. You are in the middle of the ocean, in a very small, very crowded boat. The whale is about the size of a city bus, and sperm whales are every bit as aggressive when protecting their own as any other mammal. So what do you do? You start jabbing them with pointed sticks.

Once you harpooned a whale, it would take off. Your boat would still be attached to the harpoon by rope, and so you'd take off, too. At high speed. This was called a "Nantucket Sleigh Ride," and they could last for days. And the whole time, you're hanging on just hoping that the whale doesn't remember that it's a whale, and whales can swim underwater.

Just how badly did the world need lamp oil and corsets, anyway?

Birds of a Feather

Here's an illustration I did this weekend for a poster. It's to promote an institute which supports diversity of all sorts in the study of Philosophy.

It's always tough to try come up with an image for "diversity" that doesn't look like a Seventies community mural. Or, even worse, that turns into some Wattsian checklist. In this case, I drew on the fact that I'm kinda into figuring out how to draw birds right now, what with the Rooster, and all.

Other than the pheasant and the parakeet, all of the birds should be pretty accurate depictions of North American songbirds. I have no idea if pheasants sit in trees, or if they make any sort of song that one would want to listen to, but I really wanted to put one in there. I mean, what says "diversity" more than a pheasant? If only there'd been room for a penguin.

Charles W. Morgan pt. 5

Here's the Crow's Nest, from which one would keep a look out for pods of whales and their tell-tale plumes. The crow's nest of popular imagination is practically a small room on top of a mast. Nice and enclosed. These guys, on the other hand, have a couple of planks and a metal hoop. And by contemporary standards, that hoop/railing would have been an almost ostentatious display of workplace safety.

This piece is the only one in the series that is more based on photo-reference than drawing-on-location. What can I say. I wasn't prepared to shimmy up a mast with a sketchbook clamped in my teeth for the authentic point of view.