My Reward

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My reward for this horrible, hectic week is this post. A

Awake at 4:30am - 2 hour commute - 10 hours of design rat-race - 2 hour commute home... for the past 2 weeks. Yeah, I know, nobody likes a complainer.

I'm gonna go draw the back of somebody's head.

A hair fetish.

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If you ride the MAX train and have dandruff, sebboreah, or psoriosis... I probably know.

Keeping tabs on commuters.

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Some people call it stalking, others just call it creepy. I call it "observation".

Rastafarian dreadlock punctuation.

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I know everybody has secretly wondered to themselves, "What if our sentences were punctuated with balls of tangled human hair?". I guess we can only theorize about what that Utopia would be like... but I did manage to break out a 4B pencil and begin illustrating it.
I gotta go, my cat is coughing up an elipsis.

A hodge-podge mish-mash

A 'mish-mash' of sketches from various pages in my sketchbook.

A few notes:
The Dark shapeless blob looks cooler in person than it does on the scan... All textured and moody...(Likewise, I am more interesting than I appear on this blog)

I draw the back of too many heads...I know.

The skull wasn't drawn because I secretly want to draw comics or "ink a tat"... Or whatever.. I didn't draw it because I'm a dark person...into witches and barbarians....I drew it because there was a teenage boy in the train seat right next to me... I knew he was watching me draw... And, I admit it... I wanted to draw something a 15 year old would think was cool. Not another sketch of somebody's head.

Lastly, the explanation for the penguin - It's a flight-less, Antarctic sea bird.

Noxious vegetation.

Portland is covered with Himalayan Blackberry (Rubus armeniacus) and English Ivy (Hedera Helix) to the point that it is literally choking out the indiginous vegetation. It drips off the trees like gawdy jewelery off of a rapper.It would be cool if I could harvest it and turn it into ethanol to fuel our city buses. The city would pay me to harvest the Invasive weed off the land... and then they would pay me again for the fuel. maybe something similar could be done with the opossum as well.

Secret dispatches from the eye of the storm.

I haven't been posting onto the blog. But I have been sketching.
Work get crazy occasionally, and I need to put my distractions back on the shelf... which is fine, as long as I remember to get them back out as soon as the dust settles!
The dust hasn't settled. I have, however, decided that I will sketch and post when nobody is looking... and at the moment, the coast is clear.
So, if you don't tell my creative director, my wife, my kids or my Boston Terrier, I'll try to send out these messages in bottles from the midst of the storm.

Ken
Reporting from a squall

The People on the Bus go....

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I think I drew the back of this guy's head before... or somebody that own the same jacket. I cant seem to land on a style that makes me happy. Then I start thinking about it while I draw... then the whole thing turns into a muddy... scribbly mess. I know what I like. But I think I'm going to list it out analytically with citations and examples... A sketch manifesto if you will... maybe that will get me back on track. I'll publish it here on the blog, and you all can say you remember the day that Ken went completely Bonkers.

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The Rock and Roll Hall of fame on my train car! I was doodling like I do... trying to draw without looking like I was drawing...looking for the characters in the crowd... only after I was done filling out the page did I notice that the guy on the top looked a little like U-2 guitarist "The Edge",
The Emo girl in the middle looks like shock-rocker Marilyn Manson.
The guy on the bottom sorta looks like "The Boss" Bruce Springsteen. I don't know who the guy on the left looks like... bet he should consider rhinoplasty.

Embroidered logo

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I draw on the train. Not the most comfortable conditions. A moving vehicle, packed with work-a-day Portlanders that just want to get home. Sometimes it gets tough just to find a seat. The scenery moves... the people move. If you are shy about drawing in public (I AM!) then drawing on the light rail train during rush hour is a nightmare!

But on this trip, things were different. The guy sitting in front of me had on a ball cap with an embroidered logo. So, for 20 minutes, my subject hovered motionless, inches from my face! In baseball terminology... I was served a meatball on this one!

Dude.... I was drawing that.

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I decided to post my failed attempts to draw the EDM challenge of a towel... I know the exact sentence I uttered to my son as I stopped drawing: "Dude I was drawing that.....".
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It was the second time I had to say it to him. His reaction was identical each time too.
He attempted to put the towel back in it's original spot... Like that's possible!

EDM #157 : Draw a Towel

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I don't usually say this... but, I actually like this better on the page than I do as a scan. Scanned images have a way of blurring out the blemishes and evening out tones - its kind of the botox for sketches. My usual PhotoShop routine for these things is: scan - desaturate (if it's black and white) - manually adjust levels (to get the color of the paper back to white) and save for web.
Here's my last gripe. The damn grey fade on the left side of the page, where the page curves into the sketch book binding... its annoying and distracting.

Last mother's day

Another old sketch from m other blog, that I'm able to find, scan and upload. In some ways it feels like cheating. But... It's my blog I can do what I want.... and... I miss having a lot of stuff cataloged on the site.

old mower

An older contour sketch of my lawnmower. Sharpie marker.

Catch-up sketches

I need to get better at uploading the things I sketch. It really is the bottleneck in the blogging process. These were done on the train. I think I need to do more stationary drawing.

He had Kurt Cobain hair.

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Three kids were on the train. Around sixteen or seventeen years old. I decided to sketch this guy, dressed all in black with "Cobain Hair"; stringy and blonde, in his lap were his girlfriend's legs as she quietly reclined across the seats. His buddy sitting across the way was making stupid sound effects and laughing non-stop. Then randomly the silent reclining girl would lean forward for 2-minutes of extreme kissing before falling back into silent repose. then the stupid sound effects and laughing would pick up where it left off.

6B pencil... a little over worked, next time I'll try to be a little less liberal with the graphite!

The Punk Dude On The Train.

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Here's my sketch from my ride home yesterday. 6B pencil on bond.
The six o'clock slouch. iPod, Blackberry and Portland business casual dress.

Before I could capture him... ha got off of the train.

Work sketches

I haven't had much time to sketch for personal pleasure, so I submit this montage of sketches for a project I'm doing for work. Every sketch on this page represents a design dead-end.

My jaw got massively infected last week and it made me pretty sick. I ended up missing two and a half days of work, and loosing two teeth (A wisdom tooth got pulled too.) a Doctor's appointment, two dentist appointments and a ton of antibiotics and painpills later... I'm begining to feel better.

centerfold

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New rules -
Start drawing when I get on the train, and don't stop until I reach my destination, no stopping, no re-starts.
Or: 45 minutes of graphite chaos.
This ended up a little sketchy, but here are some good things about it; it's an accurate panorama drawn from life. Every seat, hinge and bolt were drawn from observation, in public (I'm a shy public drawer), and it is a 2 page spread. in my hand made sketchbook, with a dull #2 ticonderoga pencil.

EDM#9 - Organized Chaos

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uploading some Old EDM challenges. This is my desk at work, the essence of chaos.

EDM - Leaves

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Going back and uploading some old EDM challenges to my new Blog.

EDM - Folded

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Going back and finding my old EDM challenges and uploading them to this blog.

Speciation

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Drawn on the train with the damn mechanical pencil.

The idea here was to illustrate the concept of something I read.

Gone in 30 Seconds.

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Same stupid mechanical pencil.

The task here was to sketch and memorize the scene at a train stop... just about 30 seconds to commit it to memory, and draw in the details from memory. kinda fun. I might do this again... it's good practice for when I see a UFO, or Bigfoot.

The back of his head.

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It's hard to sketch on the train. The loco-motion, cramped seating all conspiring against me. Not to mention the lousy mechanical... I know, I know. Just grab a real pencil Ken.
Then I feel like a creep staring at strangers... they probably think I'm a pervert or something.
And then... before you finish, the "victim" of your sketch, gets off the train....
Oh then there are the people looking over my shoulder... silently critiquing my work. I know they are. I would.

The ride into work this Morning.

Armed with the same mechanical pencil as last night, I saw this "real train" as I sketched my way to work on the light rail train this morning.

The ride home lastnight.

Aerial Disasters, all I had was a lousy Mechanical pencil on my train ride home last night. If any of my facts are worng, don't email me... it's just a sketch.

empty.

You gotta restart somewhere.

Yup, you gotta restart somewhere. Why not the back of this dude's head. It's what I was looking at during my light rail commute this morning.

I stopped my sketch-blog a while ago, and now I feel like I need to start it up again. The back of this guy's prickly melon gets to be the first. I kinda got lost in the minute details of his bulky snowboard jacket.