Harr matie, hold fast a moment and I’ll introduce the members of the Alaska Robotics Crew!

Sarah Asper-Smith

This Ruby of the North Sea has salt in her blood to be sure. She works undercover as a clerk for the imperial navy by day and spends her evenings marauding with the rest of her rugged crew. Her sharp sword and steady hand have already earned her a well deserved reputation amongst the locals as a true artist with a blade. One day she hopes to horde enough treasure to complete her master swordsman training.

Patrick Race

Self proclaimed captain, Race constantly fights off his scurvy with lime Popsicles and tall glasses of gin and tonic. He often gets caught doodling in his log book when he should be plotting courses and is constantly rigging fishing lines when he should be manning the rudder. Despite all of this day dreaming he hasn’t stuck the ship on the rocks and manages to somehow maintain an overinflated reputation in pirating circles.

Aaron Suring

Suring, the calm and quiet first mate can often be found reading in the crow’s nest or just gazing out over the sea. In his wilder youth he claims to have lost his leg to an ice giant and even served in a secret branch of the imperial navy. He has earned the moniker of the Red Ghost because of his pale skin, red beard, and tendency to vanish for days at a time, returning as mysteriously as he left. Without his steady hand on deck and keen eyes on the horizon this tiny ship would have been blown off course long ago.

Lou Logan

Logan bathes in whiskey and eats gun powder for breakfast. The word mischievous doesn’t begin to describe this bilge rat. He has no tolerance for planning and is easily distracted by attempts to blow up sea gulls. When he seems most volatile his personality will turn like the wind revealing a meticulous attention to detail and a fascination with the mechanics of the ship and the sea.

I’ve started to get bored with life drawing sessions so I’ve been doing more cartoons and focusing on drawing boobs to keep myself entertained.

Drawing boobs is sort of tricky but Lou found this simple, one-page “How to Draw Boobs” tutorial which is so wonderful I’ve decided to post it on the wall next to my desk.

Life Drawing 11/14/06

• Sketch 12
• Sketch 13
• Sketch 14
• Sketch 15
• Old Man Winter

Life Drawing 12/05/06

• Sketch 9
• Sketch 10
• Sketch 13
• Sketch 14
• Bunny and Turtle

Our Plastisol transfers arrived today and I cranked out my first shirt! The design is a cleaned up version of the squid sketch I used as a place holder image on the Lucid Reverie website. For me the giant squid represents adventure and this is the first step in a new one for us!

Here’s a picture of emo Aaron wearing Sarah’s tree tee!

Aside from the naked guy with a pumpkin and a visit from Super Girl, I thought Halloween was fairly uneventful this year.

It was certainly nothing compared to last year when Aaron and I got an invite to the Cirque Du Soleil Halloween cast party and had a chance to see the Rocky Horror Picture Show done proper.

The audience was almost as amazing as the show.  We were surrounded by midgets dressed as angels and all kinds of other gender-bending body-contorting lunacy.

I didn’t make it to life drawing today but here’s the stuff from the session on Halloween:

• Sketch 15
• Sketch 18
• Sketch 19
• Sketch 20

I’ve been experimenting with some different Photoshop textures and effects and it’s really easy to overdo it and come out with something crappy.

I get particularly annoyed by the repetitive patterns generated by tiled textures but what I think makes the biggest difference in these sketches is the soft shading. Sketch 15 is the only one with hard edges on the shading and it’s the only one of the batch that I halfway like.

I do like some of the lines on the others but they get lost in a mess of foggy shading and weak Photoshop crutch effects.

Speaking of Halloween, don’t forget to visit Cirigliano’s Italian Restaurant!

Here are some of my sketches from the Tuesday night life drawing session in the Ruby Room.

• Sketch 5
• Sketch 12
• Sketch 13
• Sketch 14
• Sketch 16

Next week should be fun, I hear we get to draw a middle aged man. Good thing too, I’m getting tired of drawing all these curvy young women with nice breasts.

My human figures from the life drawing sessions are starting to look less like androgenous sacks of potatoes. Here are some sketches from Tuesday night:

• Sketch 16
• Sketch 18
• Sketch 19
• Sketch 23

Lately I’ve been trying to start my sketches on grey backgrounds for the 5 to 20 minute poses since that seems to be the popular method for more traditional mediums. It gives me a lot more flexibility and depth since I can add highlights as well as shadows.

Alias Autodesk Sketchbook Pro is what I’ve been using and it works amazingly well for sketching but it isn’t very graceful when it comes to navigating your page or editing. I’ve been using the airbrush tool for shading but I’m thinking of switching to something a little chunkier or giving Art Rage a spin.

If I zoom out beyond 100% in Photoshop I start getting lines that look like something from turtle graphics so I pretty much just use it to color or edit and rarely use it for sketching.

By the way.. “Produce the Body” is a reference to Habeas Corpus. It means you have the right to petition if you feel like you’ve been unlawfully detained. More than half of congress apparently thinks that’s a bad idea.

I was told today that we don’t have any naked models in our life drawing sessions, only nude or disrobed. An excerpt from the Guardian Article, “Not naked but nude,” reveals one take on the differences between “Naked” and “Nude”.

It was the art historian Kenneth Clark who claimed there is a difference. A naked human body is exposed, vulnerable, embarrassing, he wrote in his 1956 book The Nude. “The word ‘nude’, on the other hand, carries, in educated usage, no uncomfortable overtone. The vague image it projects into the mind is not of a huddled and defenceless body, but of a balanced, prosperous and confident body … “

I can’t really argue with an excerpt from an article that came from a book I’ve never read. I don’t have any context and I do think context is what this is really all about. Words are easily modified by context. “Bad” is good in the right context.

So what did I learn here? Don’t use the Internet to research the differences between “naked” and “nude” or you might come across a photo of a man who inflated his scrotum for a peace rally.

Here are some of my sketches from naked time:

• Sketch 17
• Sketch 18
• Sketch 19
• Sketch 20
• Sketch 20b

I chopped up my first round of ink sketches and made art cards out of them for the First Friday show in the Ruby Room. It was a hasty cut and paste job but I managed to trade the happy bunny card for a tomato sandwich and some soup so I’m glad I got it done for the show.

We had over 200 cards on display and I have a lot of favorites but the best by far were submitted by a kindergarten art class. I don’t know what they feed these kids but I think it’s the same thing Salvidor Dali ate before he did The Persistence of Memory.

I also have to tip my hat to Lou and Carol Suring for the most creative materials in the show. Lou used acid burnt glass and Carol made beautiful little quilted cards.

Layout honors go to Mitch and Glenn from Copy Express. Mitch had a bunch of pen and ink people singing Roger Miller’s “You Can’t Skate in a Buffalo Herd” and Glenn made a mini comic about a miniturized Captain Perfect with some very nice overflowing panels at the end.