Tag: sketchbook
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Land’s end
Even though my trip south originally brought me across the Bay, it seemed like San Francisco was the logical starting point for my long trek home along the coast. So after a quick sketch (while humming that Journey song that popped into my head for the umpteenth time), I crossed the bridge and headed north.…
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Hitting the road
My usually insatiable wanderlust has been at an absolute fever pitch lately—and a pretty intense recent case of studio burnout has only increased the feeling. So in order to recharge the old battery a bit, and maybe stir up some brand new inspiration, I’m closing up shop and hitting the road. The Tailor and I…
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Turning the page
This might seem a little strange, coming from me, but the New Year’s resolution at the top of my “art” category is to draw more. I mean that I’d like to spend more time with my sketchbooks—with everything else that happened last year, there just didn’t seem to be a spare second for observing the…
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Merry and bright
I was afraid I wasn’t going to have any holiday photos to show you—when I was in Portland the other week, my camera took a nosedive after being bumped off my shoulder in a crowded room. Snippets from my daily journal So I shipped the lens off to the good folks at Canon for repair,…
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Cancelled trips
Since I posted this drawing and some others this summer, people have been asking me what’s with the stamps in my sketchbook. I guess the short answer is that each one is a little piece of personal tradition. But you know I don’t really do short answers. The long one, then. I grew up in…
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Memento mori
One of the things I used to do with Bampa is visit the colonial graveyards tucked away in every corner of New England. On this trip I only had time to visit a couple, so I picked my two favorites: the Old York Burial Ground in York, Maine; and the Granary Burying Ground in Boston.…
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Volcano vacation
The second part of my little stolen holiday was a little more ambitious: a four-night camping trip with the Tailor in southern Oregon. It was just what the doctor ordered—the perfect prescription for recharging the soul. We camped in the Rogue River National Forest, in a grove of hemlocks and blooming dogwoods, just downstream from…
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Vampire vacation
Since I’ll be a hermit for most of the rest of the year while I finish my Rainier book, I tried to sneak a little stolen summer vacation time into June. If I was going to lock myself indoors during our sunniest season, I wanted as many mountains, oceans, flowers and skies as I could…
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Ashes to ashes
I’ve had volcanoes on the brain for nearly two years. Littering my studio are volumes of sketches, nearly 6,000 photographs, reference books, stacks of maps, and a brand new, functional prototype of the artist book about Mt. Rainier I’m working on—all evidence of my attempts at capturing a series of fleeting moments and freezing them…
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Visual compulsion
The other night I went to a talk by comics artist Art Spiegelman, and as usual, brought one of my trusty sketchbooks with me. Since comics and I go way back, and I’m a big Spiegelman fan, I think I got a little carried away with the doodles accompanying my lecture notes. I was a…