Last Tuesday I went to my first class at a school within the past seven years. I’m taking Life Drawing I at Chandler-Gilbert Community College.

Jessica works for the Maricopa Community Colleges and so because I’m her spouse I get the opportunity to take courses fairly inexpensively.

Due to my want to be able to draw the human figure, coupled with Jessica’s persistence in me taking the opportunity to do so, I just recently enrolled.

No real work to show for the class quite yet, as tonight is my second class. I do have the supplies though and hopefully it will be a good learning experience.

Last Friday Jessica, her boss Rod, and myself went to the art walk held in downtown Phoenix for an event called First Friday. A bunch of small, oddly designed galleries located within once-vacated buildings were set up to display the work of the local artists. Sculpture, paintings, photography: you name it.

There wasn’t a lot of work present, or at least not as much as you would expect from a art festival. There were a few good pieces, but for the most part there was less stuff then what I had assumed. It still was an interesting night.

One of the more clever exhibits was being held in the back of a U-Haul trailer. An enterprising individual simply hung his digitally altered photographs from the rungs along the trailer’s walls. He installed a large flood light, extended the hidden walkway, and he had an instant portable gallery. Quite ingenious.

The other notable artist from the evening was a painter named Lisa Albinger. Her pieces are created using cotton swabs, paper towels, paint, and a lot of imagination. I heartily recommend checking out her work on her site. It is quite impressive.

I’m often amazed at the sheer number of amazing artists out there on the world wide web. Seems that every other day I find the work of an artist whose work blows me away.

Today is no exception and I was linked to the deviantart site of Carlos Gomez. The pic above is just one of his many works.

Hopefully I’ll be able to improve my skills just a bit so I can attempt pieces like this. Hopefully my upcoming Life Drawing class will help to get me back into drawing and other physical artwork.

Today’s entry is a link to another quirky animated piece with even quirkier music. Take a bit of odd sounding jazz, mix in some smooth animation made from hand-drawn art and voila, you have Basin Street Blues. The whole design scheme and French Quarter scenery make this a winner.

I found another site created by the owner of MyPetSkeleton.com. In addition to the awesome JohnnyHollow.com site, he has also created the new Jakalope.net.

I wish I could build sites like these… go check em out.

We started working on Halloween this weekend, putting up our hand-made tombstones from last year. This year’s project should be interesting to say the least. It’ll take a lot of man hours to finish it.

This past week I also found an illustrator who’s stuff I’ve grown very fond of: Ronnie Del Carmen. His style is a style that I’ve always wished I was proficient at, and I’m determined to at least take a couple of practice swings at it. Mr. Del Carmen has a couple of self-published books out called Paper Biscuit that I’d recommend. Did I mention that he works for Pixar?

A while back I bookmarked a site that had a very intriguing flash game with an interesting side soundtrack. With the holiday approaching, I revisited the site and found its sister sites as well. I strongly suggest that you visit theskeletonshop.com, johnnyhollow.com, and mypetskeleton.com. All the sites are a quite dark and gothic, and not quite for the kiddies.

I’d suggest if you just visit one site, visit johnnyhollow.com. They have an amazing flash based navigation with great art, haunting audio, and the best use of riddle/reward system I’ve seen yet. If you get stuck with the riddles, send me a line and I’ll help you out.

I tried to finally make a art/wallpaper design that I’ve had in the back of my head. It didn’t turn out quite as well as I hoped, but at least it should be a good exercise. You can check out Floating Cat vs Airplane by clicking here. If you like it, please let me know.

In other news, I had lunch with my High School friend Julie Cotton whom I haven’t seen in a couple of years. It was nice seeing her again.

I hope you didn’t come here looking from content from me. You won’t find any of that here at the moment.

Instead go visit Creatures in My Head. The artist, Andrew Bell, has a drawing of a different creature every day for the past few years. It actually got me to start doing daily drawings. I did 100 pages/days straight, but then grew tired of it. Regardless, as far as the Creatures go, here are some of my faves:

this one
this one is good
oh and this one!