back to the drawing board: 2013

Hello all. I just rediscovered some of my early work and thought I'd post them here. The following is a blast back to the distant years of '05-08, before I understood how to take a good photo of my etches.

This self portrait is from '06, but the picture it's etched from older yet.

Yup, this is the keychain Etch-A-Sketch. They can be quite finicky to work with, not to mention painstakingly difficult. As you can see, the left eye decided not to work. I went over it 6 times or so, but it kept on filling in behind me.

Albert Hoffman

Dali and Warhol kiss hello at Club 54

Oh you dreadful robot!

This one took 3 or 4 days just to fill in. That's one of the reasons I stopped using the big Etch-A-Sketches, and stopped doing solid black fill.

Uprooted. This one serves as a great example of a multiple image process on an Etch-A-Sketch to create a grey scale. A primary image is drawn, and the bottom of the E.A.S. is tapped lightly to fade it. Redraw, repeat, redraw repeat.... If you are VERY patient, you can wind up with gradual shading as opposed to hatching.

This take on "Sunflowers" worked out really well, too bad the photo didn't.

I used to draw these squiggles for an hour or two before I took on serious work, just to tune my fingers. I would cast it aside and shake it up. It took me a couple years to realize that I should save them too; and several more years to adopt the style as my own brand of grey scaling. This is the earliest example of this my warm up technique. Much of my newer stuff revolves around these squiggles. The squiggles themselves reflect largely on the line and form of the "graffiti" styled work I was doing in the 90's....

I started doing a lot of flyer and album design in the mid 90's. I have very little in the way of a portfolio to show for it, aside from this textless, backgroundless phonograph. ...Bad artist! (slaps hand)