This is a leopard shark, named for its spots, rather than demeanor. As adults, they are about 4-5 ft long (that's 1.2 to 1.5 meters for you metric people), and are really quite harmless to humans. I know because I have snorkeled with these creatures, on a trip subsequent to the previously mentioned "terrifying" first snorkeling experience. I should explain that as a lousy swimmer, the most unideal place to be introduced to snorkeling in San Diego is off a rocky shore near to marine caves. I was at the mercy of the waves. Though I'm sure the marine life is fantastic there, the waviness and depths are more suited to confident snorkelers.

Instead, I recommend snorkeling at the sand bar in front of the Marine Room (a fancy beach front restaurant) on La Jolla Shores, just north of all the caves and the tide pools. One doesn't have to go deeper than 4ft before you can see leopard sharks, guitarfish and rays. They tend to stick to the sandy bottom, so you don't have to worry about collisions. And they eat things like crustaceans, not humans. They're particularly abundant in the late summer, ie. Now. A bad surf day is a good snorkel day!

This garibaldi is one of the animals that will be featured on the kelp forest side of the van. It was first penciled, then inked with a brush, scanned into photoshop, imported into illustrator to be vectorized, placed back in photoshop and colored using 3 layers, designated: line, color and scales.

Garibaldi are perhaps the most obvious inhabitants of the kelp forest. During my first (terrifying) attempt to snorkel in San Diego waters, I don't recall seeing much but I did see flashes of bright orange against the greyish-greenish-blue.

I went to Comic Con 2007 today. The conference completely sold out, I think for the first time in Comic Con history. Sundays are usually rather sleepy, but today was a mad carnival of costumes, comics, games, toys and crowds... I was not disappointed.

My first stop is always the small press area, with tables by independent artists, often self-published. Here one can talk to the artists themselves, as opposed to sales reps and publishing agents. Less jaded by years in the industry, these artists appreciate my time, and enthusedly speak with me about their work.

I bought five graphic novels/ art books:
American Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang
Deogratias: A Tale of Rwanda by Stassen
A Girl Named Spark by PCP (Heisuke Kitazawa)
Incredible Change-Bots by Jeffrey Brown
Laika by Nick Abadzis

Here are some kelp fronds I've been working on for the van design. These will layered with a separate set of fish drawings. By the way, I can tell if you are led to this page because you are looking for an outline of kelp. If you are going to "borrow" this image, please at least post a comment and let me know what you're using it for. Thanks.

I camped at Sequoia National Park over the weekend. I look forward to outdoorsy excursions as an opportunity to take photos. On this trip, I was particularly fascinated by tree trunk patterns, whether cross-sections or on the bark. I wanted my photos to examine my subject trees at a level different from the standard Whole tree. They aren't quite micro-worlds, but perhaps they are relatively mini-worlds, on the scale of giant sequoias.

This was a sketch I did back in February when the I was first asked to design the Birch education outreach van. But only recently has the funding and organization surrounding it been more or less finalized, and I can proceed to the final designs. I now have more photoshop experience, as well as more kelp drawing experience. The kelp fronds I painstakingly put in the background now look scraggly to me. The fish could definitely use a make over.

The van will be used to bring the Birch to schools who can't make a field trip out to the Birch. So the idea with the van design is to feature a different local marine habitat on each side, so the van itself could be a teaching tool. This is the kelp forest side- the other long side will be tide pool habitat, on the back: sandy bottom, and front: open ocean. No I won't be painting directly on the van... the design will be printed on a giant sticker which will be professionally plastered on to the sides. The proper terminology is actually to "wrap" the van. Full wrapping of a
van (including giant sticker printing) is around $3500, in case you're wondering.

Apologies for not posting recently. It's been a busy July.

Here's another composition that I played around with for hours, and am still not sure that it feels complete. There are so many variations to choose from, it's hard to decide what looks best. I think my color choices come down to mood. At the start, the gray dancing figures were bright fuschia, but by the end I felt tired and the pink hurt my brain, so I opted for a silvery gray. Maybe the colors are too subdued for such an active subject matter? Anyways, I hope the aqua color schemes aren't getting boring. I will make an effort to expand my palette in the next one.

All the drawings are excerpts from my comic "Biceps", which was completed in April 06. Fortunately the comic was very image (as opposed to text) oriented, so there are lots of drawings to remix.

Whereas my previous 2 experimental images came together quickly and easily, this one took about an hour and a half to compose, and even then, I'm not sure I'm happy with it. I wanted to use sharks from a collection of shark drawings I just completed, but the composition consisting solely of sharks felt insubstantial, like a design for kids' wrapping paper. The longish shape and small faces of sharks made it hard for any shark to be the focal point of the composition, so I hunted around my scanned art folder for a more intriguing subject.

I found an old drawing of J, who was one of my favorite models for life drawing. The charcoal drawing of J is over three years old. I too, made her into a custom brush, which to my delight, captured the charcoal nuances (at least at a low res scale). Now I notice that I didn't quite finish her right hand, oh well. Anyways, for the longest time I kept J at a size that fit within the borders, when it dawned on me that expanding her beyond the borders would look so much more interesting. The strategically places colored stripes hopefully diminish the distraction of the sharks around her face.

As for the background, I pulled that from a kelp forest illustration I made a few months ago. Thank Photoshop for layers! I wanted a surreal quality. A calm image, in contrast to the average person's reaction to schools of sharks. The sharks are black tip reef sharks and thresher sharks, by the way.

I finished a set of plankton-related worksheets and signs, complete with a set of plankton icons for one of the Birch Aquarium's educational programs. Consequently, the theme of Custom Brushes Experiment 2 is Plankton. Zooplankton, to be more specific, as opposed to the photosynthesizing sort. I pulled up some older drawings of plankton from my image library. It was hard to resist going to town with the larval squid.

At first I had a photo background, featuring some sea grass sprayed over wet rocks, with the ocean and sky. It soon proved to be to visually confusing, so I replaced that with solid teal. At that point, I had the white jellies, gray larval squid and black icons. As much as I like limited palettes, it really needed a splash of color, so in went the red jelly.

I must say, the making of images for fun's sake is certainly fun! It's been a long time since I've experimented in art, just to see what happens.

Probably anyone with Photoshop experience will take one look at this and think: Looks like someone figured out how to use Custom Brushes. I'd been reading my Computer Arts magazine, and this issue, like all others, came with a CD with digital goodies. "Designfruit Photoshop brushes" caught my eye, and I uploaded them, and realized that they are simply designs saved as customized brushes, so they can be used almost as rubber stamps.

A quick Photoshop Help search actually proved helpful, and I learned that by selecting a design, then under the Edit menu, select Define Brush Preset, I could make my very own brushes. I quickly made a set using my own drawings, including the bat skull drawing I would have otherwise posted today in its traditional format. The result is Griffin & Sabine-ish (for you non-Nick Bantock fans out there, check out his art books...), and there looks to be much graphic design potential to be tapped from this technique.

Perognathus longimembris is the Pacific Pocket Mouse, with a teeny tiny little skull.

Depending on how long you've been perusing my blog, you may or may not be wondering, what are all these skulls for? The Mammal Atlas? OK so what's that for? You can find out a lot at:
http://www.sdnhm.org/mammalatlas/

Basically, there's been an initiative based out of the San Diego Natural History Museum to study the biodiversity of San Diego county (one of the most biologically diverse counties in the US). The information can be used for conservation plans, and understanding the effects of wildfire for instance. The illustrations are only a small part of the guide; there are also gps generated distribution maps, species accounts by specialists, info on conservation status. It's a huge collaborative project with some 30 contributors and 15 or so organizations involved.

Puma concolor, also known as Puma, Cougar and Mountain Lion. It's one of the few charismatic megafauna that I've had to draw. In illustrating this mammal atlas, I've come to appreciate the plethora of uncharismatic minifauna out there. Many of them are bats and rodents.

Now that I'm almost done with mammal skull illustrations, I'm wondering what to do with all the original drawings. It seems a waste for them to sit in an unceremonious pile on my shelf. The actual book only needs digital scans for publication. I could give some to select friends, maybe auction them off (I imagine all the whale skulls would be sold first). Some of my early drawings look so amateur to me that I wouldn't want anyone to see the originals (they have since been altered in photoshop, to be less ugly).

Mus musculus, the House Mouse! Another rodent with which I have had personal experience. A family of them made a nest in an empty area behind our kitchen cupboards. When we returned from a trip, we were clued in to their presence by a scattering of chips over a floor cushion, and a chewed chip bag. Then if we stood real still in the dark kitchen, we could hear the pitter patter of little mouse feet working their way through the cupboard woodwork.

There are not many more skulls to draw. Three years ago when I first embarked on this project, the prospect of drawing 80 sets of skulls seemed like a never-ending task, but the end is near! I will still have to edit the skulls, once the drawings have been run past a mammal skull expert. He'll point out things that I don't know, like that's a crack in the cranium, not a suture, etc.

Here we have a squirrel, Sciurus carolinensis. The Eastern Grey Squirrel, probably the squirrel that you're most likely to picture when thinking about squirrels. I was bitten by a squirrel once, when I was about 5 or 6. I was feeding a squirrel peanuts, and Chomp. My parents rushed me to the hospital, no doubt fraught with worry about the possibility of rabies. Oblivious to these concerns, I remember marveling at the purple antiseptic that dyed my finger. I did not have rabies.