Thursday, March 17, 2011

"Nice Try Lao Che"

For those of you who don't recognize this, it is of Indiana Jones from the second movie as he is about to get on the plane to escape Lao Che, not knowing that the plane is owned by him, Indy taunts his enemy. The inspiration for this piece was twofold: 1- Indiana Jones is quite popular around our house right now. I let my oldest watch them and she really likes them. My other daughter is chomping at the bit to watch them and my son is starting to develop interest due to Lego Indiana Jones video games. As a result we checked out the first volume of the Adventures of Young Indiana Jones from the library. This leads to the other inspiration - 2- One of the special features is a documentary about Norman Rockwell. One of the comments on this was that Norman Rockwell captured moments in time or snapshots in his illustrations. This lead me to think that I could do that with DVDs and pause on a moment and capture. For a still unknown reason to me this is the moment I thought of and wanted to capture as a drawing. It turned into more of a technical challenge than I anticipated. My DVD player in the Living room goes into a screen saver mode a few minutes into being paused. The one in my bed room does not, but sitting on my bed drawing is not ideal. As usual, I began with a mechanical pencil and finished with a woodless pencil. Due to the fact that I was drawing Indy in a White Dinner Jacket I also used my gum eraser to return some white highlights.

Friday, March 4, 2011

The Ripple Effect


This drawing was inspired by a sermon at church on 02/13/2011 "The Character of God". I began by just challenging myself to see if I could draw a picture of water rippling like the one that was in the bulletin at church that Sunday. As I listened to the sermon a couple of ideas stuck with me. One- was The love from Christ to us becomes the love we give to others. The love for Christ to us found it's ultimate expression on the cross, bearing God's wrath for my sin upon His son. This also reminded me years ago of a song performed at a Good Friday service called "One Drop of Blood" written by Ray Boltz: One drop of bloodFell to the scales-It covered their transgressions And all the times they failed-The enemy was mighty He came in like a flood-He was defeated by one drop of blood-No greater sacrifice has any other made-Oh yes he paid the price With every drop he gave-. The idea then came to me to show the ripples of love coming from one drop of blood from the crucified hand of Jesus. I completed an initial sketch of the drawing in church. At home I re-drew it, ironically I struggled more getting the hand right than the ripple. As usual both the initial sketch and final drawing were done with a mechanical pencil with some shading done with a woodless pencil to finish it off.