Went to the top of the highest mountain in Germany today. Â While descending on a rickety old cable car, of course I couldn’t help but think of Richard Burton’s epic ride. Â Thankfully mine didn’t include gruesome ice-axe injuries, or explosions and general death. Â Thanks for not trying to kill me, fellow riders!
[Comments and critique always welcome]
Sitting at LAX this evening waiting for a flight. Â Airports, I’ve found, are not so great for finding things to draw. Â That’s how you end up with a sketch like this.
[Comments and critique always welcome]
Just took my cousin to the airport for a visit to the motherland. Â Best way to get there: Qantas A380. Â What’s that you say? Â You want to see the inside? Â You got it.
[Comments and critique always welcome]
Back to the fine line pen — this time drawing from a photo. Â Here, Ms. Punchingbag and Mrs. Sketch 365 take to the Austrian bikeways. Â Looking forward to doing this again soon!
[Comments and critique always welcome]
Ah, yachting — a pastime that combines three of my very favorite things: pretension, motion sickness and Sperry Topsiders.
[Comments and critique always welcome]
This is a follow-on from yesterday’s drawings. Â I’m currently working on an idea to develop a series of kid-friendly characters around this and future Mars rovers. Â So where yesterday’s sketches were basically a simplified version of the real thing, this is the next step — finding ways to integrate basic expressions and characteristics within/around the established structure. Â We’ll see how this develops…
[Comments and critique always welcome]
Another few sketches for a project I’m working on. Â This is the NASA’s next Mars rover, currently under construction at JPL. Â Through a nationwide naming contest won by a Kansas sixth-grader, this rover has been dubbed “Curiosity.” Â And with a head-mounted laser, it ought to make short work of any extraterrestrial felines.
[Comments and critique always welcome]
My aunt is passing through town this weekend, and brings with her more great photos from my grandmother in Australia. Â The writing on the back of this photo says that my aunt, mother and grandfather are baling hay on the family farm — but I think it’s clear who’s doing most of the work…
[Comments and critique always welcome]
This is another quick sketch from the storyboard collection I’ve been doing at work.  The idea here is that rock samples would get collected from Mars, and then be put in a little rocket and sent back to Earth.  So here, a recovery team converges on the re-entry capsule, which has touched down somewhere out in the middle of nowhere.
Of course, the real deal would probably be more involved than four dudes in a pickup truck — but I’ll let someone else figure out that part. Â And the whole part where samples are collected. Â And that bit with the automated rocket launch from the surface of a planet millions of miles away. Â I’ll just stick with the pencil sketches.
[Comments and critique always welcome]
This time, no redacted image! Â Today at work, I was doing storyboards again for this future Mars mission — and here’s a frame I can actually show. Â This is a made-up closeup of the rover’s main cameras, which sit on top of a rotating mast. Â (In the real world, it would look something like this.) Â What I’m trying to do in these storyboards is to give a little bit of personality to this robot. Â And hey, if you’re gonna do that, why not borrow from one of the classics?
[Comments and critique always welcome]
