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A nice little surprise dawned on me today. A lot of my digital drawings are very reminiscent of the Brandywine style (although my technique still needs work).

The Brandywine style puts a little more emphasis on brushwork, and usually has dramatic lighting. I fell in love with the style a few years back while browsing through my book, Treasure Planet: A Voyage of Discovery. The Disney artists used a variation of the Brandywine style for their background artwork, though they often had to tone down the brushwork so as not to distract the viewer’s eye too much.

Perhaps I’ll play with some different Photoshop brushes to get a better recreation of this beautiful art style. The Brandywine style also uses more dramatic lighting & poses, and focuses less on details.

I recently had a memory flash of my High School art teacher. I remembered that she used to have what are called “source books.” A source book is a thin book that is filled with nothing but artistic clipart that can be copied and used in arts and crafts . . . usually royalty-free.

In school, I never thought much about them, because they usually had to be copied and enlarged using an inaccessible copy machine. Getting an image enlarged to the right size can be tricky. Plus, where on earth do you find these types of books? Nowadays, the images can be easily scanned at high resolution right from my computer.

Of course, many source books now come with the images on CD-ROM. I doubt that I will ever use the CD-ROMs, because I’d rather be original. But, the books alone are invaluable reference materials that can inspire.

I did a search for these lost treasures on Amazon.com (tons of products), and found a publisher that creates some very nice source books. What shocked me was how many are available, each with their own theme. To begin my collection, I bought Treasury of Victorian Designs and Emblems and Banners, Ribbons, and Scrolls, both by Dover Publications.

Inspired, I am already thinking of re-designing this website. Maybe. I’m thinking of an early Americana design.

Disclosure of Material Connection: Some of the links in this post are affiliate links—as an Amazon associate, I earn from qualifying products.

This past Saturday, I was dragged to an unofficial family reunion. Okay, I admit that I went freely. I love family gatherings; there’s always plenty of food, family, and love. Since I had not seen so many relatives since I was a kid, I decided to bring along two of my portfolios (one for artwork, and one for paper craft), and all of my business cards. I assumed that my portfolios would get a few glances, and only a few cards would be taken. Boy, was I wrong!

My portfolios were passed around like crazy with promotional help from a couple of my aunts. I received a lot of complements, and was referred to as the “famous artist.” The things that people couldn’t wrap their minds around were the paper models.

“What are these?”
“Paper models.”
“What are they made of?”
“Paper.”

It’s such a simple explanation, but they still were not quite sure what to make of them. Paper doesn’t have to be flat.

With yet more promotion by my aunts, my cards started flying out of the boxes. Most people took two or more cards, especially my brand-new cards from Moo, which have different art samples on one side of each card.

Me oh my, what a fruitful day.

I also want to give a shout-out to my Aunt Nellie, who attended her first Grammy Awards. Although she didn’t win anything that night, the Polka Family Band has been nominated for a Grammy on several occasions. I recorded the show just to try to find both her and my cousin Greg in the audience (fifth row from the front, I later discovered). We’re all very proud!

Here’s another early drawing. It’s an alien character that I sketched only a couple of times.

The site updates archive is getting a complete software makeover (bye-bye, Blogger, hello WordPress) as part of the latest phase of site updates as you can see. It will be a day or two before it looks like its old self again, but it will be back to semi-normal as soon as possible.

Here’s one of my old drawings from High School. It’s a caricature of one of my friends, Jeremy.

Today, I went through all of my old artwork. Not the drawings, sketches, and doodles of my early years, but the large pieces from High School, college, and recent years. Boy, that was like an archeological dig, exploring and finding old artifacts. Now that I have them out, I’ve decided to archive them in digital form. It may take a while, but I’ll be able to pull up any piece that I want and make copies, prints, or post them online.

Well, my hardback book came in today, and it’s really nice. I was expecting it to somewhat look like it was printed on a laser printer, but it does not. The pictures are clear and colorful, and the dust jacket is glossier than I expected (glossy is good).