Mr. Raven just happens to be green. Mr. Raven likes to sit on the crescent moon and think about stuff. He likes companions…like his friend spider who tags along. I would venture to guess he’s thinking about how far away the earth is now. Flying home might be a challenge. Do you think he’ll make it?
This drawing is a scratchboard from a series of green raven fantasies I did a while ago. People loved this character and I’m bringing him back. He really does hang out with a spider. He protects the spider and the spider protects him by warning him if he hears any bullies around. Bullies are a menace and don’t do anybody any good. Least of all to themselves. I never had compassion for bullies. They are boring.
My love of writing and reading came from my sister Noel who was my second mother. She read to me often as a child. I did the same with my children. When I was little we had a huge library in our little cold water flat in Connecticut. We lived by the railroad tracks and I would hear the train whistles blow every day at regular times. You would never know we were poor. We had books and art everywhere. My sister loved to read me English romantic poems. We memorized a lot of them. It was the print on the funny paper, the sound of the words, the languages in our house were English and French. They told me I spoke French before I spoke English. I switched to mostly English because my mom wanted to soak up everything I learned at school. This is handy now that I’m learning Spanish. The written letters back then for me were more than shapes….they were a way out of our little barrio. They led me to being an excellent student with excellent grades. I learned Latin, French and how to diagram sentences with great skill. I worked as a stenographer in the ’70s. I took dictation and was a speed typist. My high school shorthand teacher was also a professional calligrapher. He taught us a lot and my eyes were glued when he demonstrated how he executed some of his formal documents. I often wondered what he was doing in this small town. I still wonder. He was very educated and distinguished. He would make us memorize sentences in our dictation exercises, beginning with short ones and progressing as the term went on to longer, complex ones. Believe it or not, it really helped train our teenage brains to learn to memorize and translate very quickly. Nobody teaches that way anymore. When I was learning digital, I was working as a children’s librarian. I would do the html and thank God himself when I could put little pictures together with letters, words and sentences. Nothing has changed. It still fascinates me.
I TOOK a picture of this amazing dog when I first moved to Mexico. He was sitting in front of a blacksmith shop; sort of halfway in and halfway out of the doorway. He was pretty darned big and he had an certain look on his face that told me he was a love bug. I’ve been wanting to draw him for more than a year and today I just decided the time was now. Usually I start to tablet draw on a transparent background but today I chose white and when I put the floor tile color in, I accidentally colored the whole sheet so rather than fixing the error, I went with it. I discovered that I love painting this way as it’s a little like oil painting in that you can easily put lights over darks. what fun. I used a spatter brush, and ultimate chunky pastel brush. Laying the text was a little different too because the style of the font is casual and lining it all up to the left worked out great. Because of the short and similar length of the words it was appropriate and I chose the blue to connect to the shadows of the dog. All in all, I’m happy with this guy. I know that black line art is very dark but I still really enjoy its boldness. See the tee shirt here.
Two adorable critters are having a serious discussion on the subject of whether or not they are different. Seriously? They are like night and day. They are not people or goblins or menacing anythings. They are just critters wondering why they don’t fit in? So tell me who fits the norm if we can agree that they certainly are different.
When I was placing tags on this image it was very hard. It’s an abstract thought. The illustration is about prejudice and bigotry. It’s about purple and green skin on fantasy beings. It’s about a sky that has a spherical illumination in a world that is truly dark. I remember in the early 1980’s there were a lot of people writing about multi-culturalism and how we ought to be giving this a lot of focus in our schools for our future generations. The authors described this as a new focus on an inspirational world where mores would change. Peoples would be migrating north they said. I remember that quote specifically. That was then and this was now. What has changed? What have we accepted? What remains the same? So I think my new efforts in designing are moving to writing 4 lines of poetry with accompanying drawings. I’m liking that idea. Here’s the link to these guys on tshirts.
After Pablo Picasso’s rose period style painting of woman in chemise, I painted this watercolor with her sporting the picasso bug from Africa. This bug really does exist and I wanted him to adorn our most beloved painter of the 21st century. Find her on my tshirt here
Painting Mexico 
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