…a sketched pot, however… This was the first time I’ve noticed that the steam doesn’t come directly out of the spigot, but an inch or so away from it. File that in the “stuff you learn while sketching” dept.
We had a nice relaxing four-day weekend. We spent one day and one night up in the local mountains. Our friends let us stay with them in their beautiful, multi-level cabin-like summer home. I did some sketching – this view from the dining room table:
Later we went out and had lunch. I sketched this view of a giant totem pole in the parking area while standing on the porch waiting for the kids to make their purchases in the candy shop:
In all, it was some much needed relaxation.
I unexpectedly got the day off! Happy Father’s Day to all the dads.
I’m trying some small changes, bit by bit, to this blog. For the first time I’ve turned on the “comments” below the posts.
This is the nifty little Ibanez bass guitar I have leaning against the wall at my office. I love the sound and the speed of this thing – even better than my 1979 Rickenbacker, which cost four times as much back then. Playing guitar: another obsession.
The night before last we all got into the minivan and went to LAX to pick up Joan’s cousin, who’d just spent the last four and a half months in Paris. We overestimated the downtown LA traffic and found ourselves in the International Flights waiting area an hour and a half early. Jack and I started sketching. Jack likes to sketch from memory characters from the latest Playstation game he’s working on, while I sketch stuff around me. He draws lots of long-haired mysterious looking guys with swords and strange beasts and monsters. I asked him to sketch something he saw here, which he did, and well; but that’s all rather boring to a 12-year-old. I know I would have been bored with reality at that age too. He asked me why I like to draw things, everyday things, that I see, and I told him honestly I don’t know. For some strange reason, the older I get the more interesting it is to draw normal reality as it unfolds. I can’t say why.
This young lady next to us hardly moved – except her thumb, which was doing a mile-a-minute, text-messaging on her cell phone. Her face was without expression, but her hand was quite expressive.
I scribbled this at lunch about an hour ago. Working again on a Saturday – crunch time.
I was doing some visual research yesterday on city stuff and accidentally came upon some interesting information about the inventor of the traffic light system that’s used throughout the world. I am constantly amazed about the things we take for granted. Sitting at a red traffic light, watching the cross traffic, well, cross, it’s interesting to think – somebody had to invent that traffic signal. I suppose we all kind of think, yeah, some giant corporation somewhere came up with it, etc., etc. But in reality that’s rarely the case. Usually these things are invented by one person and it goes corporate after that, not the other way around. In the case of the traffic signal, it was invented by an American named Garrett Augustus Morgan – a man who’s remarkable not only for the fact that he also invented the gas mask, but that his parents were former slaves in the Confederate South. A brilliant and creative man who became wealthy by his wits, and whose ideas affect virtually all of us several times a day, nearly 130 years after his birth.
Anthony Zierhut 