tattoo design

My friend Kim asked me to design a tattoo for her. She really wanted her kids initials (J & A) using an elvish font. She was hoping to incorporate their birth dates as well (10/2 & 10/7). She wasn't sure how to bring all of this together, so that's when she called me in. Since she is a big Lord of the Rings fan I decided to incorporate a design from the movie. When I saw the White Tree of Gondor, I thought that would work well with the initials:

This is my initial marker sketch.


This is the cleaned up vector image.

Doodle on Crack

I doodle a lot....I couldn't stop adding to my doodle from a few days ago and it got a bit out of hand.

It's been a while

I haven't had much time to draw or paint, but here are a few random sketches I did over the Memorial Day weekend.

This is another ink drawing I did....I'm still not happy with it, but there are some things I like. I was trying a different technique that I read about, but I don't really think it worked well so I probably won't be doing it that way again.


This is just a quick sketch of an old SUV that I did with markers.


Another marker sketch. I think I went overboard with the circles at the top, but this has the potential to be something really cool one day.

Don't resist

I just discovered the gouache resist technique and I fell in love with it! This is my first attempt. The only gouache I had was an old tube of white, so I decided to draw a polar bear. When rinsing off the ink, I rubbed too hard and ended up tearing the paper. The ink I used was also a little too watered down (I don't think I'll add any water to the next one). I adjusted the levels in Photoshop to make the black darker (it was more gray in the original). After the entire piece dried, I went back with some watercolors to add color to the sky and some shadows. I think I'm going to love this technique! I just bought a cheap gouache set, so stay tuned for more!

Kira: ink & colored pencil in my moleskine

My second attempt at ink drawings....better than the first, but I still have some issues with shading.

Science in action

A lot of my job is sitting around and waiting for results. Today I had 15 minutes in the lab with nothing to do except wait. So I decided to covertly sketch a new employee who was busy doing her training. I managed to get the basic shapes down, but didn't have time to do much shading before I had to get back to work.

Fridays off!

I've started a new schedule where I work four 10-hour days with Fridays off every week. This means I don't have time to work on anything new during the week, but also that I will have an entire day to myself that I can spend drawing & painting. With nice weather fast approaching, I really want to spend those days off going out to different places around the city and just sketching for a few hours. Of course it rained all day on my first Friday off, so instead I spent the day finally putting pics from several trips into photo albums. I decided to sketch a few of the photos, so here is the first one. It is the California Lighthouse in Aruba. I went there several years ago....long before I ever thought of a travel sketchbook. The sketch is done using a Micron pen and my travel watercolor set in a moleskine watercolor book.

pen & ink drawing

A quick sketch I did in my Moleskine sketchbook using a 35mm micron pen and a photo reference. I had a hard time shading the face, but for my 1st ink drawing it's not bad.