This is a quick sketch of my son Jack from last month when we went to see the latest Harry Potter movie. He was sitting next to his friend and joking around — I only had time to sketch him, but you see a certain conspiratorial mischief in his expression I think. Would have been better with the other kid included, but hey.
More fun with the Pelikan fountain pen.
I did this in two sittings over two days: first for the line, next for the color. Thanks to Mattias Adolfsson, I’ve rediscovered my old Pelikan fountain pen. I asked what kind of ink he used, seeing that it appears to be waterproof and yet is coming out of a fountain pen — two things that usually don’t go together. He told me he uses American Eel ink, so I ordered some. Fantastic stuff. That pen has neither written nor drawn better than it does now.
This last evening we went to the Hollywood Bowl as guests of some good friends who had front row seats. I did some watercolor sketching:
This is Sarah Chang. She was amazing. I normally don’t pay too much attention to clothing, but she was wearing a dress that really suited itself well to watercolor.
Violinists in the orchestra right in front of us.
I’ve been trying to get the time to do more watercolor. The pencil and the smudge tool are just so much more portable. Although every day I’ve been looking at a watercolor book I bought recently: Pasadena Sketchbook by Joseph Stoddard. I love his incredibly loose linework and washes. Very inspiring — and he’s a local artist painting locales very familiar to me. More of his work can be seen here.
Night before last I was in my studio and heard some noise outside. I looked and discovered our friend “Pat” (see post below) — but with four small raccoon cubs — all munching on peanuts. They looked up at me, then went right back to feeding. I think this means Pat is a female? Not certain, but a hunch nevertheless.
A neighborhood raccoon about the size of a medium-sized dog comes to our front porch a couple times a week. Sometimes we put peanuts out for him/her (not sure, so we’ve named him/her “Pat” — in honor of the Julia Sweeney SNL skit, ha). He/she was moving quite a bit so I had to sketch a bit faster than usual to capture him/her.
A nice relaxing Fourth Of July at our neighbor’s house. What you don’t see are the ten kids in the pool.
Anthony Zierhut 