This time Julia and I focused on some sculptures. A small bronze by Remington, two marble sculptures by Joseph J. Mora and an Ogoni mask from Nigeria.

Julia and I spent some time drawing the Conservatory of Flowers and the nearby Dahlia Garden. We also did some sketches inside the De Young, I’ll post those later.

This coming weekend I will be exhibiting at the SF ZINE FEST in Golden Gate Park. It is a nice little show and unlike other book conventions, it is FREE to get in.

The ZINE FEST takes place on the south side of the park, near the 9th & Irving neighborhood. The first building you come to, after 9th avenue enters Golden gate Park, is the S.F. County Fair Building (A.K.A. the Hall of Flowers). If you’re in the Golden Gate Park area this holiday weekend, please come by and say hello.

Even though it is a 3-day weekend, the SF ZINE FEST is only on TWO of those days; Saturday and Sunday from 11AM-6PM. I hope to see you there!

It is hard to overstate what an incredible inspiration Deane was to me at the very beginning of my career. When I was around 18, he took me under his wing and taught me 2D animation layouts; composition, shape, silhouette, staging and all that fun stuff, and his influence is with me to this very day. His quirky drawing style, so full of wit and invention was, and still is, a constant wonder to me. I am so happy that he is posting online where I can get access to his drawings once again.

So please, go look at DEANE’S BLOG, where you’ll find in equal measure tasty drawings and hilarious musings on his long career in the animation industry.

Seeing a 30 year retrospective of his work made it clear how much of the visual style of the past few decades can be attributed to Gaultier, and not just in the field of fashion itself. He has done extensive design work in iconic films and styled many videos and album covers in the music business too. His cross-cultural fashion mash-ups are astonishingly witty. I was very impressed with the exhibit, though it was almost impossible to do any drawing due to the Disneyand-scale crowds that had shown up on the last weekend of the show. I only was able to do one sketch from the ONE dead-space within the swirling maelstrom of onlookers, which sadly gave a vantage point BEHIND one of the mannequins. When the crowds got to be too much, we went to the MASKS area of the permanent collection upstairs, where there is always something great to draw.

After a quick bite to eat, we did some more sketching outside the museum and called it a day. These sketches allowed me to FINALLY fill the little watercolour sketchbook I have been using for the past 10 months. Unlike all those before, I had resolved to fill this one ONLY with observational sketches (rather than doodles) and it has been a great exercise that I want to continue, though hopefully filling the NEXT one rather more quickly.

Our posh dinner was set for Sunday so we planned to devote all of Saturday to exploring and sketching. During breakfast on the porch of our inn, we saw a deer and her two baby fauns walking through the garden and into the forest. With that charming sight in our minds, we put on back-backs and set off, musing on the advantages of country life. Our inn-keeper had given us walking directions to some interesting farms nearby but, when we arrived, there was nobody to ask permission to enter the properties. It felt presumptuous to ignore all the “Keep Out” signs and set-up drawing in the owners’ absence, so we retraced our steps back to our inn.

Suddenly, we were startled by a grisly scene; about 10 feet from the trail we walked on, one of the fauns we’d seen earlier that same morning was having its throat torn out by a huge black Labrador, while the clearly-distressed mother watched from a safe distance with her other baby. After a pathetic yowl, the faun was dead, almost before we knew what was going on. Thoroughly deflated, we decided to get in the car and go seek things to draw elsewhere.

Although the valley is incredibly pretty from one end to the other, it was surprisingly difficult to find a place to sit and draw, because everything picturesque is on private property, plastered in “No Trespassing” signs. On the other hand, maybe we were not looking hard enough; seeing Bambi slaughtered by Cujo had sucked the fun out of the day for us. Whatever the cause, by the end of the first day, all we’d found to draw was an abandoned school house. Driving back to our inn that evening, we saw an old rusty truck and resolved to draw it early the next day before our dinner.

The next day was a vast improvement over the first. We drew the truck as planned. While Julia devoted all her time to the truck and did a fantastic pastel, I managed to bang out another sketch, of a nearby wagon before we had to head off to our event.

The dinner we’d gone all that way to attend took place at one long, long table seating 140 people, placed between a row of trees in the fig orchard of CAPAY ORGANIC FARMS. For several months now, we’ve been getting a box of their produce delivered to our front door every other week, so when we heard there was to be a farm dinner hosted on their property it seemed like something we shouldn’t miss. The dinner was preceded by a tour of the farm itself which was an lovely setting for an evening meal with just about the best weather you could have wished for. Our table-mates were strangers but excellent company. Each of them had some connection to farming or wineries and we had lively and fun conversation that made the entire journey well worthwhile.

EMANATA is sort of digital anthology indie comics MAGAZINE, with each short story linked from a scrolling index of panels that forms the index page. Each story then links to the website of the respective artists. The interface design is very clean and intuitive and the artwork looks very nice on the iPad. I had to re-format my SEPHILINA story, as my artwork was initially designed for a LANDSCAPE aspect-ratio book, but I did not mind doing this because I’d actually planned to do so anyway, when I had enough pages for an album, so this was a nice test-of-concept.

I am very much a person who likes having a REAL book to hold in my hands but, after spending several years on the self-publishing and comic convention exhibiting treadmill, I am very interested in the potential of this NEW venue for comics, especially if it helps them reach people who might not otherwise see them.

If you have an iPad and have any interest at all in comics, indie or otherwise, please go check out EMANATA; the app is FREE.

In my recent location sketching, I’ve attempted to record all the detail as accurately as I can, with mixed success. For a change, this time I tried to distill what I saw into some sort of a gesture. Hence the scribbly approach, where tried to imply detail with scribbles of a ballpoint pen, without actually drawing it all. Not sure if it works yet..

After an few hours in the Tea Garden we had lunch and then some of us walked on to the Haight Ashbury area for a beer and some more sketching.

It was tempting to go back over these with some scibbly colour when I got home, which is probably what they need, but I’ll save that until NEXT time I try this approach.