Pneumothorax
One reason I draw at all is because it helps be figure stuff out. Last Sunday I was introduced to the incredible world of the pneumothorax. I was skateboarding at Pier 62 in Manhattan and fell 6 feet, flat on my back on the bottom of a cement ramp. There was a loud, weird popping 🔅🔆noise and a dude ran up to me as I lay trying to gain my breath after having the worst wind-knocked-out-of-me I’ve ever experienced. He thought I broke my wrist. Nope. My (padded) wrists are good. My back hurt though. So I ran back up the ramp with my board, took off my pads (I forgot to wear a helmet - so so so fucking dumb - and lucky I didn’t hit my head) changed shoes, slung my backpack 🎒 over my shoulder and walked about 3 blocks to a cab 🚕 . The adrenaline 💉 was wearing off during the traffic choked ride to Brooklyn and holy shit - I started to finally think, what the fuck did I do to myself?! I changed the destination of the cab from home to the emergency🏥 room near to where I live and checked myself in, barely standing, pouring sweat from the pain. Craziest ER experience of my life. 30 hours long - no sleep. It was like a corny Norman Rockwell painting: me laid out on an ER stretcher with my skateboard taking up 1/2 the bed where my legs should be. So many crazy 😜 stories/patient encounters from those 30 hours. I eventually learned I have 5 broken ribs, one of which punctured a lung and collapsed part of it. A pneumothorax is where there’s a hole in your lung from which air escapes and collects, trapped in the pleura surrounding your lungs. There isn’t much room for extra shenanigans in that area (our bodies are so amazingly 😉 incredibly evolved and efficient!!!) so the large air bubble starts to shove up against your heart - which could spell disaster☠️. So they insert a tube under your armpit and thread it toward the air sack to suck the fuck out of it (plus to get the liquidy gunk that collects there) out of the way. That way your lungs can reinflate properly and your heart isn’t in danger of malfunctioning. Glad I’m not a smoker 💨 because it would have been way worse, and recovery would have been more painful and take longer. Pretty amazing procedure - from the very idea to do it, to the material science🔬 that goes into the flexibility of the tube and the system they use to insert the tube - to the vacuum unit they hook up to it to monitor the stuff it sucks ⚡️out. I love that shit!! After 3 days of lung slurping in the hospital (and being attached to the weird vacuum thing) it worked perfectly. They pulled it out (holy shit the burning 🔥 during that short yank) and slapped a shitton of bandages 🤕over the hole. Now I just gotta keep my lungs inflated 🎈 and let my ribs 🍖 heal on their own. Also, pay the medical bills 💸 and try to show my wonderful and amazing loving wife ❤️ how much I appreciate her help and support (while she was taking care of our kids and working full time).
Dogwood inking starts....
First layer of ink over graphite started today. Several more layers of ink to prefect the linework and then layers of watercolor after that. Click for more like this.
Lilly Mugshot
I love to obsess over [drawn] lines. How it's not just a 'line' but how each side has a surface and that there's a variable difference between those to surfaces - they have a relationship to each other. I went to grad school for printmaking but really I only wanted to learn more about drawing. I wanted to know stuff that I never understood, like when, where and why to make lines thicker and thinner. I'm still learning about it and not unlike skateboarding - learning a new trick opens more doors to learning more tricks - more tools to keep in my toolbox. I still love looking through my toolbox and thinking about what to use on a drawing and maybe (hopefully?) know why to use that tool. But often it's just me taking a tool from the toolbox and using it because it seems fun and seeing what happens and inevitably learning something cool from it. Click for more like these.
Hibiscus Color test
9" x 11" graphite and watercolor test for larger drawing. More botanical stuff here.
Filthy Rose along Ocean Parkway in Brooklyn
progress of sketch to large finished watercolor - images added as they are completed in stages... more like this
Cross Orbweaver
I've been working very slowly on a small drawing in my studio for about 2 years, and this is the final piece I need to add before I ink and then watercolor it.
Sketchbook activity
True story: we found an old reel to reel tape recorder in the basement of a log cabin in the Catskills this week. It was lying on a table next to a human skin-bound copy of the Necronomicon but the power was out and we can't read whatever that weird blood-ink language was written in. Probably for the best.
The Log Cabin
Back to Nature
Looking back two sketchbooks ago I found some pleasingly beautiful botanical and seascape studies. I'm interested in seeing what they would look like scaled up (22" x 30" and 50" x 30") and drawn with pen & ink and intense watercolor.
[secret band] poster progress
The whole word measures about 21" across but will be shrunk down to 15" or 16" as a silkscreen print.
Drawing varying line widths is the most satisfying part of the inking process. If I don't exercise patience when applying 3, 4, 5 layers of ink I inevitably smear wet ink spots with my wrist.
A portion of the drawing for a Primus silkscreened (edition of 200) show poster for the summer.
![I rejected this first round because proportions were off (a painful exercise because this took a couple of [wasted] hours to draw). I especially didn't like how high the letters reached into what will eventually be the middle of the poster. It looks…](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5005fc2ee4b09ef22529406a/1491511218590-3JJM459QF2KBWIQCAKT9/image-asset.jpeg)
I rejected this first round because proportions were off (a painful exercise because this took a couple of [wasted] hours to draw). I especially didn't like how high the letters reached into what will eventually be the middle of the poster. It looks weirdly blocky because I always draw these with straight lines to get relative measurements correct before curving the, uh, curvy parts.
