Pencil Tests

Here is a link to a very nice blog if you have any interest in animation or the process that goes into it.

Walking in the Shadow of Ghosts

Boing Boing linked to this site recently and I was intrigued because long ago, in another lifetime, I spent a few years in Berlin. Some of the pictures presented on the website are haunting, literally, from the juxtaposition of today and yesterday.

Sergey Larenkov has artfully fused the past and present to give history a new perspective. Contemporary pedestrians walk through the venerable spaces where fallen combatants from history lay, with little idea of the ghosts that inhabit that dimension.

Graphic Design

I came across this website and immediately bookmarked it. Producing a “perfect book” caught my eye, but the love this guy has for graphic design oozes out of every page and dribbles from each word. I’ve only just begun to sift through all of the articles and I look forward to poring over them all.

Celebration

It’s been a long, hard road for a lot of people over the last year or two. I guess I don’t need to mention that unemployment numbers are unlike anything most of us have seen in our lifetime, but I did anyway.

I’ve sat and commiserated with a good number of unemployed people over the past year, a truly shocking number of them highly educated and until recently, with very successful careers. CFO’s, CPA’s, IT guys, directors and managers of all sorts, many of them have begun to get extremely discouraged and frustrated, wondering when they will start drawing a regular paycheck again.

But last night I was able to celebrate the wonderfully unexpected success of one of those people, a corporate jet pilot, re-entering the workforce and best of all, as a contract corporate jet pilot. As you might imagine, those positions are not easy to find these days, given the current political view toward corporate owned jets. And to add to the wonder, I think my pilot friend wouldn’t argue with me if we simply said that he has a LOT of hours in his logbook.

So to quickly get to the point of this rambling post, I would like to offer my friend the most heartfelt congratulations, wishing him blue skies and tailwinds always. Fly safe, Tom.

Zodiac Crayons

Like every other child on the planet, crayons were my first drawing medium, and as an artist, they hold a very special place in my heart. Diem Chau has taken crayons to a completely new place that I could have never gone. In my mind’s eye, I see picking one of these up and having to fight the overwhelming inspiration to draw with it. By the way, but my favorite is my sign.