Art by Lawrence Washington

Gotta love my daughter. Her needs are simple. Every time she sees daddy drawing, She asks me to draw her something. This time she wanted to be a butterfly. So I drew this up real quick. Only took me an hour. Her birthday happens to be next Tuesday. Score!

Hard to believe, but after all these years, this is my very first normal picture. As in, not connected to a theme or Holiday. Weird. It's certainly not the last, either. I got all kinds of ideas lately: I got the idea for this piece from the famous "James Dean in Times Square" photo. I wanted to do a version of it, but not a complete 'rip-off'. I like the use (or non-use) of color. Black and White pictures have a certain quality to them that I can't describe. Perhaps the lack of colors force me to be more creative. I like the mood this piece sets. I like it so much that I made a framed version of it. I want to keep it, but I also think it would make a good gift. Hmm, decisions, decisions.

I may have stopped giving Valentine's out at work, but I still manage to make pictures for my girlfriend. This piece is another that I produced for the 3-D effect. I'll try to make more of these and get better at the technique. Deb loved it by the way: If it looks familiar, that's because it's a bit of a sequel to an earlier piece of mine, "The Patient Samurai". It's kinda nice not being alone on that bridge anymore. I had an earlier idea of drawing me and Debra in Japanese garb, but I scrapped it cause I thought it would be too cheesy. Maybe next year. ;-)

Two months into 2012 and I've been pretty busy art-wise. An old friend asked me to draw a picture of her boyfriend Jaime and his daughter Lilli. This is a bit of a departure for me as I usually only draw myself. Anyway, She wanted it jam-packed with pop culture references as the two subjects are huge nerds. See how many you can spot. There's also a couple of homages to a friend that passed last year. This project was emotional in many ways, so I wanted to do a great job on it. At one point while putting it together, I had an idea to make it 3-D-ish. I hadn't done anything like that before, but I think the end result came out pretty cool. You can kinda make out the effect in the pic I took of the final framed piece: