Earlier this year (around the time of the first Jameson vs. Scott (all right, the only one (so far))), I was getting pretty into Photoshop. It was at this time that I started exploring vector art (the style of the film adaptation of A Scanner Darkly), learning from online tutorials and working with personal/friend’s photos. One of my unfinished works from this winter is below:

Original photo credit and the band name “Tropic Flannel” goes to Jameson. I posterized the desaturated original to about 8 or 9 different shade values and worked on my and John-Michael’s faces (I stopped at his hair). A while ago, while thinking about making a personal portrait, I decided to revisit vector art, but using much fewer values. I also added some significant contour lines, which I think are necessary when working with fewer values to delineate facial features and separate the figure from the background. To see the two I worked on most recently, read on:

Apologies for the late post, everyone. I promise there’ll be another (albeit somewhat less momentous) tomorrow. The reason for the delay should justify your wait. The reason, and I hope you’re ready for it, is that I’m in the process of creating a real website for myself. It’s not to say that WordPress isn’t fabulous, nor that it doesn’t serve many of my needs. But, in a year’s time, I’ll be considered by the world-at-large, and perhaps more importantly, the art world, an adult. A professional adult. And professional adults have professional websites. The site to which I refer, and on which I will over the course of the next several weeks and months raise through its infancy, adolescence, and eventual adulthood (to match my own), is:

http://www.scottdonaldson.net/

Scott Donaldson dot net

Catchy, yes? Easy to remember, I hope. Both links take you to the same (very unfinished) home page. Feel free to explore, but the site as a whole is pretty sparse as of yet. I’ll move some of the works I have here on my blog to the portfolio soon enough, and make it more graphically pleasing. The “blog” link currently sends you back to this site, but eventually I hope to run this blog from my own website (sorry, WordPress).

Until the site is fully functional, I’ll continue to blog and update you of my various doings hereabouts. You, in turn, should feel free to contact me either through a comment (below), or a friendly email at scott@scottdonaldson.net (nifty, yes, it’s true).

Ciao!

How much fun is it to draw the random images you think of during the day? My answer: a whole heck of a lot of fun. After a quick Google search, I discovered that there is no image of a sunflower (or any other flower, for that matter) smoking a cigarette. Don’t read this as a picture that condemns or supports smoking, or sunflowers. Instead, enjoy it for its absurdity:

I drew it in Sharpie originally, then scanned it and did the colors in Photoshop. I’m also back to a strict MWF updating schedule here. Your thoughts (on the sunflower, on my blog, on life)?

The more and more you look at the title of this post, the less it looks like real words. That’s true for me, anyway. In any case, here’s a watercolor/pen drawing that I did recently:

Kudos to anyone who can identify the three faces shown here.

P.S. Kudos as in ‘congratulations,’ not the candy bar.

Happy July! This means that we’re halfway through with the calendar year of 2009. As I’ve been creating a lot more art this year than I ever have in the past, I’ve also been listening to a lot more music this year. Yesterday I swapped some with my friend TJ (who blogs much more often about music than I do), and I imagine I’ll be listening to the stuff he gave me for the next several months. Anyway, I’ve gotten a surprising number of albums this year that were actually released in 2009. So I decided to make a list of some of my favorite songs that were released the first half of this year. In a purposeful listening order, they are:

1.  The Rake’s Song – The Decemberists (The Hazards of Love, March 24).

• The Decemberists often make very dark music (”A Cautionary Song,” “The Mariner’s Revenge Song”), but this one might take the cake. The singer, we find out, was a bachelor who got married and had three children before the fourth “died on delivery, mercifully taking her mother along.” The bachelor, or rake, decides he’d rather not live alone with “three little pests,” and decides to kill them, even burning the final child’s body for “incurring [his] wrath.” It’s got a great, simple chorus, and I think will be what 2009 is all about: child murder (shout-out to The Pillowman).

2.  Live Alone – Franz Ferdinand (Tonight: Franz Ferdinand, January 26)

• Another (albeit somewhat less) dark song, about a person breaking off a romantic relationship because of the inevitability of its ending, despite the longing to return to what once was. The album as a whole deals with partying, womanizing, and their after-effects. The bridge of this song suggests the singer might consider playing for the other team: “…when I get in a taxi / I say “man” to the driver / So he’ll say “Man, I could imagine having a drink with that guy!” A few other Franz Ferdinand songs imply a gay singer/narrator (”Michael,” “Do You Want To”).

For three summers (’05 – ‘07) I worked as an employee of the Milwaukee County Parks system. It meant a lot of time in the sun, by the wading pool or cutting grass, and a lot of farmer’s tan as a result. In 2006, I worked at Alcott Park in Greenfield, a southwest suburb of Milwaukee. Alcott has a lot of open field space, two untended softball diamonds, a pavilion building and wading pool. Every 4th of July there is a big County Parks celebration, where the parade ends, with events all day and fireworks at night. I spent most of my time there by the wading pool, however. Here are two drawings I did during my stint as a “wading pool supervisor”:

Both were done in some sort of marker/pen, and I believe both are on the back of wading pool daily operation forms. The first is a view across the pool, toward the park’s playground. You can see the fountain of the pool in the foreground. The second looks out of the pool entrance toward the fields of the park. A light pole and softball batting cage are featured prominently. Looking back on these, I’m reminded of how an artist doesn’t need expensive materials to create works. At the time, creating art wasn’t figuring in my future career plans, but I’m also reminded of the choices I made and how they logically fit within my path as an artist.

On another note, here’s a terrific video of my friend TJ, who visited me at work one time: TJ in the wading pool.

12.  A Bunch of Sketches – Bananas bananas bananas! This is one of the few times when we’ve had a series of related vignettes when we don’t disperse them throughout the show (for example, Wolf Andy, Captain Obvious, Gerald Winkler, etc.). The first vignette asks a question that I think we’ve all asked ourselves at one point or another, “Do bananas have butts?” This is Tim’s debut as a bananas on stage, and Laura’s as a (human-headed) gorilla. What happened to the mask? We have no idea. The second features Jae Jae and Lizzie as two laundry-folding stay-at-home (I guess) bananas. It’s interesting that each vignette portrays a different anthropomorphized version of bananas (these two can use their hands, while Tim couldn’t). We finally arrive at the third vignette, where everyone is eating (real) bananas! I have so many, so many bananas, and I fit so much banana meat in my mouth. So much that, when I burst out laughing at Leah on the ground, it all spills on stage! The inside jokes you may have missed:

• The bumper music between each of the vignettes is the theme song for Nannerpus, a delicious-looking food that was in a Denny’s commercial during this year’s Super Bowl. Personally, we think it’s a failure of a commercial in that Nannerpus, which is not meant to be appealing, actually appears to be hilarious, fun, and tasty.
• I’m not exactly sure how you can have a direct view of a banana’s anus without seeing its butt, but I’m not in medical school. Maybe someday.

Remember how I used to do Dee-rector’s commentary for all the Lenny Dee shows? Well you’re about to make some new memories! …With the third installment of Dee-rector commentary for Lenny Dee, focusing on Lenny Dee: You’re Outta Line, the Spring Term 2009 show. It’s been several months with only a few changes to the Dee’s line-up, so you should have a pretty good i-Dee (pun) of all the members by now. We’ll start with the sketch that wasn’t actually a sketch, but got its own YouTube video:

1.  Dee-Rector’s Intro (Vote for Chase Kimball!) – In which Tim and I introduce the show, but not before passing around a petition to have Chase Kimball on the ballot for CSA Senator (or something like that). A few people asked me if the pie exchange of questions and answers was scripted, and I can assure you that it most certainly was not. It came about as the result of Tim Carroll’s razor-sharp wit. My answer to what it’s like to be Tim was less razor-sharp and more rambling and nonsensical. And then we get the signatures, and we start the show! The inside jokes you may have missed:

• Tim’s favorite Chase story actually has very little to do with Chase, and much more to do with ManZone, a “Northfield community [unintelligible] for men and those who love them.”
• “Chase your dreams. Chase your Kimball.” might be the best campaign slogan ever.

An explanation for the lack of recent updates: my laptop charger and/or charger plug-in area has been acting very funny in recent days. Not funny like Robin Williams or Colin Mochrie funny, but funny like it isn’t working. I’m on a computer in Sayles right now, and hopefully I’ll have a working charger by Monday, at which time you can look forward to more Lenny Dee commentary!

Out.

This year for Carleton’s Politics and Culture magazine, The Lens, I did a series of drawings of the departing seniors, as opposed to photographs in the past. I used a similar contour style as I did some months ago for Morgan Freeman and the many other Scott Donaldsons. I think here I downgraded from Micron pen (specifically made for drawing) to a regular ol’ Uniball. I’m just as pleased with the results, though, and with a few exceptions I think the drawings are fairly representational of all the students. Here is a collection of the 12 drawings of the seniors (I originally drew them on four separate sheets of paper):

I’m very fond of representating the face with few lines. Don’t think it’s the last time you’ll see me do that.