Rower on Lake Michigan

The June 2009 challenge on Different Strokes from Different Folks is this rower on Lake Michigan. Please visit the site to see the reference photo and see the way other artists interpreted this image. More than 100 artists participated in this one. 5" x 7" watercolor.

New self-portrait and cafe sketches

I've been struggling with creating a suitable public image of myself to use on blogs, Facebook, etc. This is the latest creation. I held out the digital camera in front of my face, took a photo in bad light, and did a Live Trace in Illustrator.

I've also been doing a lot of cafe sketching lately. The sketch below was made at a local McDonald's. You would hardly believe it's a McDonald's. There are a lot of interesting abstract shapes. The first image is the cleaned-up digitized and vectorized version of my pencil sketches. The actual pencil sketches follow that.