coffee cherries

Saw these at the Mountain Thunder Kona coffee plantation--beautiful place that smelled soo good, and had a great tour.  You can actually eat these, which house the coffee beans themselves.  This is in colored pencils.

ren

It's been a while since I practiced any Chinese calligraphy, and I've gotten rusty.  Despite its simplicity, this character was one of the few I was happy with.  It's the character/radical for person, or man.

too young for the beats, too old for the hippies

I recently got around to reading Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.  (I'd been meaning to read it ever since I read The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, oh, about eight years ago.  My reading list gets really long, so it can take a while to get to things...)  Incidentally, I watched the Jack Nicholson movie shortly after finishing the novel, and though the movie is good, it really is just a shadow of the book.

Waikoloa

So we say that habits are hard to break, but I suppose we really mean bad habits, because it seems like good habits can easily be broken and once they are it's actually hard to start them again.  Granted the holidays can be a great distraction from the daily routine, but nonetheless I feel a bit guilty about not posting or doing much art in the last oh, month or so.  Well, here's to 2011.  This was a brief sketch done near Waikoloa Beach on the Big Island of Hawai'i, watercolored later.

st. george & the dragon

Here's a little oil painting I did from an old Russian icon of St. George, with accompanying pen sketch.

winter in Southern California

As in, not really.  I like to look at paintings like this and remember how much I love/miss the snow, and winters which are, you know, wintry.  Also I enjoy the idea of depicting snow using black ink.  This is on rice paper.

owls: benign & fierce aspects

 

cardboard printmaking

I found these scattered among my things: some early attempts at printmaking, I made these by taking a thick piece of cardboard, and carving out the design with a knife.  Then I brushed over it quickly with various watercolors and quickly rubbed a sheet of paper over it to make the print.  It made some interesting effects after going over it several times with different colors.