Hindsight

I saw ASP’s Timon of Athens on its opening night, and deeply regret that I don’t have time to scan the sketches right now. I’ll post them next weekend. In the meantime there are some nice reviews here and here.

We went to Montmartre and Sacre Couer. We climbed the many steps. We avoided the scammer who wanted to weave a bracelet on one of our wrists. We went inside, and were blown away by the architecture and by the amazing mosaics.

We wandered around Montmartre a bit, looking at the artists’ stalls, tile rooftops, and very nice views of the city.

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We swung back by Notre Dame — on the weekend there had been a long line to get in, but there was no line today, so we went in and marveled, especially at the ornamental gates throughout, and the cool relics they have tucked away in one side of the transept. Alison got some lovely shots through one of the stained glass windows.

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We slept really late, and then got off to a slow start, having breakfast in the apartment and looking at guidebooks and such, so Day 2 turned out to be kind of short.

We swung back by Notre Dame. Right across the river is the famous bookstore Shakespeare & Co. (about which I’m sure Alison will eventually blog at length, so I’ll say no more about it)

Then we went to a nearby flower market where they also have birds and other animals on Sundays (like these adorable sleeping ferrets).

I drew this cool old church in the neighborhood.

We headed over the the Arab World Institute, a very cool building with patterned metal shades that iris open and closed like camera shutters.

Unfortunately they were closed, so we went on to the Jardin des Plantes (Botanical Garden), where I sat and drew for a while while Alison watched the kids playing. They have a pretty horrifying sculpture next to the playground, of a bear mauling a hunter and his bear cub prey. I guess the message is something like “don’t mess with my kids or I’ll rip your head off.”

Hey, there. Sorry I’ve been so quiet lately. Alison and I took a 16-day honeymoon in Paris and London, and since we got back I’ve been trying to catch up with work, scan all the drawings I did, and go through all the photos we took. Rather than write a novella-length post with hundreds of images, I thought it might be cooler and more reasonable to tell the whole thing on a day-by-day basis, almost as though I were blogging in real-time but with a several-week delay.

We flew out on April 23rd, just as flights were starting to return to normal after the volcanic eruption in Iceland. We landed in Paris early on the morning of the 24th. We had rented an apartment in the Marais area (found on VRBO.com), and arranged for a driver to pick us up at the airport and take us straight to the apartment so we didn’t have to do any navigating in our exhausted state. We got unpacked and then headed out into the city, with the ambition of doing stuff that would keep us awake another ~14 hours until bedtime so we could get ourselves on Paris time as quickly as possible).

Our apartment building had a great stairwell (with a TINY elevator running up the middle of it). It is located very close to the Seine.

Great neighborhood, with tons of charming shops.

Not far away is a humble little place called Notre Dame, which was my first drawing stop.

Then we went to Alison’s favorite Cathedral, St. Chapelle (I should mention that Alison had been to Paris before, but I had not). There was some renovation in progress, which slightly spoiled the full affect, but it’s still beautiful, with a number of quirky details.

Then we headed over to the vast, sprawling art edifice that is The Louvre.

After that we had a lovely dinner and then melted into a puddle of goo.

Tune in for more tomorrow!

The final cover for The Odyssey has appeared in Candlewick’s fall catalog, so now I can finally post it in all its glory. The book is scheduled for release on October 12th.

A few months ago I got a call from Harvard’s Widener Library about using a drawing I did of Memorial Hall for a bookplate they were designing. This bookplate (if I understand correctly) is for books purchased by the Katherine B. Loker memorial fund.

I just got my samples of the finished bookplates. I think they’re quite elegant.

Alison and I love dogs. But there are lots of reasons why we can’t have one right now. So we were delighted to discover recently that Fresh Pond has not only a lovely walking path, but a little auxiliary pond in which dogs are allowed to swim. And boy do they! So now one of our favorite things to do on a sunny weekend is to go sit by the pond for an hour watching the dogs play, and occasionally making new friends (of either the two- or four-legged variety).

Here are some recent sketches, some from last week, some from yesterday.

Last week:

Yesterday:

Paul Falcone at Wellesley Public Access put together this nice interview, including a few clips of me doing aikido as well as discussing my work and my influences. 15 minutes long.

http://paulfalcone.blip.tv/file/3448565/

I’ve been playing around with Manga Studio, which is a drawing program specifically tailored to drawing comics. It’s got a lot of crazy features, and I’ve barely scratched the surface, but here’s a quick inking test I did. The pens have a nice feel to them, and this is drawn with vectors, so it’s resolution-independent and fairly easy to scale or manipulate line-by-line.