Saturday Brunch

An explanation for the slow going-ons around here…

I’m in the midst of redesigning my website into something more functional and less embarrassing. I’ll be re-launching it within the next few weeks. Contained within will be an integrated blog but I will, in all likelihood, continue to post identical entries here. For a while, anyway. Regardless of whether or not I choose to continue my Blogspot blog, however, it will remain here for posterity. I’ve already imported this entire blog over to my new site, so my archives will be available there too.

Here’s a sketch I drew while sitting in the window of a café on last Saturday.

Below: Here's a sketch I almost like. It's one of my favorite houses in my neighborhood. I'd been meaning to draw it for almost three years by the time I got around to doing it last November. When I finished it, I hated the drawing for the way I got overly tight and detailed in the upper left corner (where I started) and the wonkiness of the ellipses. I actually like the wonky now but still regret the excess details. It's a reminder of the power of simplicity. I'd still like to go back and do a proper drawing and painting of it this year, though.

Hope to update again sooner rather than later. With the new website in hand.

Godfather: Five Families [First Neighborhood, Pt. 1]

Over the next few weeks I’ll be posting some of the work I did on Godfather: Five Families. My niche on our team is environment art. I did all the landmarks and almost all of the racket buildings.

I painted the front of most of our buildings facing the light, but the Fat Cat Club was an exception. The Fat Cat is a night club but our game view is late afternoon so I put the entrance and signs on the shadow side so I could exaggerate the lights and still give it that night club feeling.

I went ahead and named the theater after myself. Because how often does one get the opportunity to do something like that? Forgive me this one vanity. And for those who play the game, here's a related factoid: Capelli Steel is named after our art director, Ken Capelli.

Coworkers

Above: Jason Courtney and Greg Eichholzer.
Below: Sabrina Cecchini.

Above: Karla Ortiz and Thomas Denmark.

Fragments

The house drawing was originally intended to be a painted sketch but the only time this house is lit in a way that I like is in the morning. I don't like working from photographs or making up lighting for drawings done on actual location and I'm not a morning person so it follows that it may be a long time before I make it over the hill to go paint this.

Conservatory of Flowers

Sweet Blog o' Mine

I certainly didn't mean to take over a month-long hiatus from the blog but following APE, I was pretty burnt out. But look. New art down there.

I took a vacation a couple weeks ago and now I'm right as rain. While I was gone, I finished this sketchbook layout I've been chipping away at for months. Done in the Mission District, Alamo Square, Hayes Valley, and Lower Haight.

APE Recap & SoMa Love

To keep it brief, this year's APE was the best (and busiest) yet. I didn't get the opportunity to walk the floor, aside from visiting a few friends' tables, but that's probably for the best considering that I probably would have spent a large portion of my profits on all the awesome stuff that was there. Thank you to everyone who stopped by our table. If you'd like to purchase one of my sketchbooks, there are some available through Stuart Ng Books.

I found the time to sketch something last month but didn't have time to scan and post it until this week...