little fish, big pond..so what?

heading north away from the drawing table for a few days.  i'll take along a sketchbook, a sharpie, a couple of microns, and a no. 2 pencil. it's a challenge to keep drawing while i'm on the road - i'm out of my comfort zone. i'd like to get past that and be able to sketch in public or even make a drawing with someone looking over my shoulder.

big daddy d-fly

i drew this baby last night and just had to share it.

a crappie process

every drawing starts out as a possible disaster. i think i know what i'm doing in the beginning but about halfway into it i start losing it. i've learned not to despair at this critical juncture and to keep on working it, to keep on scrubbing and modeling to see if i can save it. most of the time i can accept the results.

i wish i had the pro chops to lay it down, from start to finish, and know that my hand, eye and brain were in perfect synchronicity. some day. some day.

here is a crappie. a happy, go lucky fish, who likes the shallow, sandy shoals. he is based on a friend i had in high school who was funny and full of crap. i decided to etch out a line drawing first (not always my first choice) and to bring the color afterwards. comic book style.

the hula popper lure

one the best things about fishing was the gear. the rod, the reel, and a little tackle box with only the essential lures and hardware. as a kid, i kept these items stashed in the corner of the garage, ready to go at a moments notice. the one lure i always had was called a hula popper. this is a drawing from memory so i've taken a little artistic license while trying to remain true to character of the lure. after i made this drawing, i looked up the hula popper online and realized that it seems to have changed from what i remember. the thing is, i never caught a fish with the hula popper but i loved trying. it was fun to cast it out near some lily pads or a shady bank, where a frog might be likely to jump in, and then play it with little movements so that it would wiggle and bubble for a few inches and then stop. wiggle, bubble, stop. eventually, i'd give up and take it off and try something else. the hula popper was always wreaking havoc with my other tackle, it's big treble hooks getting tangled with other hooks and lures and inevitably jabbing a finger.

the one that got away

the fish i always wanted to catch was walleye. and that's what i was thinking about when i made this drawing. it doesn't look anything like a walleye, that was just the starting point. but i was listening to that old tom waits song - the one that got away - and everything came together. this big fish has snapped the line and taken a prize lure and now he's lurking in the depths.

coolest bug on the planet

has to be the dragonfly, right? where i lived as a kid, dragonflies were everywhere, usually close to water, cruising the evening sky snapping up mosquitoes. i'll admit that i don't know much about them except through observation. i read recently that dragonflies have been around for more than 300 million years and that back in the day they had a wingspan of two and half feet. now that's a big bug. i draw the occasional dragonfly and i like to draw them larger than life (nowadays). here's a detail to show scale...

sometimes a fish is just a fish

all the time with the fish you're saying already. that's just what i'm into right now. somehow, they become characters while i'm drawing them, which, for me, is kind of magical. take this blue-nose bass for example. i think i'll call him larry...

getting in while the getting is good

i don't know what that means but it's something my dad used to say. and so, i dedicate this, my first blog post, to the late, great wayne mann, my dad and all-around nice guy. when i was a kid, he used to take me fishing in remote, way back in the sticks, lakes, where there was nothing but forest along the edges and sky above. we were often the only ones there. paddling our canoe to some spot that he thought the fish would like. and, he was usually right. i think it was there that the imagery of animals and insects and fish and birds began feeding my imagination and started me drawing. but it wasn't until much later, when i was all grown up and the old man was gone and those lakes were so far away, that something clicked inside me, and i started drawing again.