Art Life Happening Now…

Well, It’s been a few weeks since I sat down to this. Besides having a ‘Killer Birtday Party” in April where over 50 of my best friends showed up in togas and wigs, I’ve been pretty busy with art jobs. Busier than I’ve been in a long time in fact. I just finished a creating a set of 7 cartoon safari characters for Odato Marketing Group. There’s a hippo, a monkey, a giraffe, 2 kids and a dentist. It’s all for a dental outfit somewhere out of state. I modeled the little girl after my unofficial God Child, Oliviana Walsh. (it’s her 2nd birthday tomorrow!) I’m going to give her one of the sketches. Once I learn how to post images I’ll show you some of this stuff, but for now you will just have to take my word for it. Over the last few weeks, I also designed a cartoon baskerville hound for Baskerville Advertising. Besides all that, been pretty steady with caricature gigs lately. Spring is an upbeat time for parties, graduations, proms and fundraisers. It usually dies down during the summer but then I have what I call ‘teaching season’. I’ll be teaching 4 weeks of Teen Illustration at Ringling College this summer. June 14th-July 9th. It’s not too late to register for that! Just call (941) 955-8866. Then I’ll be teaching “Drawing in Color” at Wildacres in NC in July 18th-24th and after that I’ll be doing my second “Passionate Pastels” weekend workshop at the Chastain Art Center in Atlanta July 30th-1st of Aug. Dang it, did I mention I’ll be teaching cartooning at the Jackaranda Public Library? That will be in Venice Florida the week of  June 7th-11th “and hey! It’s free!“.Oh the fun never ends. I hope to make enough money from all that to afford to attend the ISCA (Caricature Convention) in November in Vegas! Wish me Buck, I mean luck.

For now, I’m resting up from drawing caricatures at  the Brentwood Elementary School “Spring Fling fundraiser” last night in Sarasota. Then today  from drawing kids as comic book characters for ‘Free Comic Book Day‘ at the North Sarasota Library. Then this afternoon from teaching my teen students at Art and Frame of Sarasota, how to draw perspective! Yikes! I wish somebody taught me how to draw perspective at age 15! Every now and again, “I Rock”! So now….right now…..just catching up on some computing that’s gone ignored too long, like ‘My Blog’.

Well, It’s been a month and now that I have a blog, I guess I’ll have to blog! So let’s see……. I always get slow right after the Christmas season and it gives me time to catch up with some of my own personal art projects. However about mid March I start to get busy again and I guess now I’ll actually have to get to work soon. I have a few cool jobs in the studio right now. One is a character development ‘cartoon style’ job I’m doing for the local Sarasota design firm Odato. I just finished up a similar job for Baskerville Advertising helping them with a mascot for their business. Yep, it’s a hound, how’d ya know? In the mean time back and forth across the state for caricature jobs. Naples and Punta Gorda for the Edison State College, Ft. Myers for Delite Entertainment and just back from Safety Harbor where I did caricatures for a fundraiser benefiting the Cardiac Kids Foundation of Florida. In the mean time my teaching schedule has picked up at Ringling College of Art. I taught a caricaturing class I titled “the Art of Funny” and “Comic Strip Development” both as one day workshops. They were both wildly successful except for the one lady who was offended by the “Bad Half Betty” comic pages I displayed as samples of my work. I can’t figure out if she was upset that Betty gets cut in half or that she gets up and kicks the ‘heck’ outa the guys who ‘done it’?