Enrico’s blog

The next global drawing marathon is next saturday!! Hope you can join in the fun and help us spread the word; twitter or facebook take your pick and let the world know! Come by the forums and see where people are sketching around the globe. We have almost one hundred different locations participating, amazing!! If you are in San Francisco we’ll be drawing around Crissy fields and the Palace of Fine Arts. The meeting is at the Warming Hut at 10:30. We’re also gonna be raffling a special item: Chris Ingram of Ingram Fine Arts has donated one of his nifty StudioOnTheGo portfolios. Be sure to check these out, very cool option for SketchCrawlers. See you next saturday.

My daughter got into painting her first watercolor yesterday, two handed! One brush isn’t enough. She was so absorbed in it, she was at it almost half an hour. So great to see her try every color available and figuring out dipping brushes into water.

What an unlikely trio uh? But I’m currently reading these three books. They are all three wonderful reads. “I Fellini” is irreverent and funny, “Open” is a total page turner and “The Little Prince” in Italian is a treat.

I saw a compelling theater/butoh performance last night “The crazy cloud collection” by InkBoat. Here’s my squiggles in the dark from the night. Strangely while I draw them in the dark I feel they are probably not working or not worth my time …. but then when I look at them in the light, usually the next morning, I always find them really interesting … they are a little bit like contact drawing, in their rawness they seem to capture some essence of the movement I saw the night before in a deeper way then if I had been drawing them in the light. Fun.

I did some book shopping that made me quite happy this weekend. The first is a kids book I got at Konokuniya by the prolific Taro Gomi, Kingyouga nigeta. The Goldfish escaped. Been really loving gomi’s work, it’s so much fun to share it with Fio. I was also really impressed to read that this is a reprint, the book actually came out in the late seventies. Amazing how it doesn’t look dated at all. The second great find are some great pamphlets and booklets about old planes at a used books store. Mostly machines from world war one or between the wars. I absolutely love to read information and see old photos of this type. Makes me want to draw and watercolor some planes!! Tons of great reference.

My good friends Dice Tsutsumi, Soosa Kim and Lou Romano have a fantastic art show coming up and its opening is this friday at gallery 1988 in SF. I’m very much looking forward to it … be sure to check some of the amazing pieces that will be on display here on the exhibition’s blog.

The forums are bustling with activity with artists posting drawings from almost one hundred locations around the world, really amazing, be sure to check it out. Here in San Francisco we spent sketchcrawl around downtown with a nice and large group of artists. Here are my contributions from the day, all people drawing for some reason. Ronnie and I sat at Coppola’s Zoetrope cafe and we had a great view on this character (bottom page).

I was pretty unhappy with this drawing of my co-worker Duncan at the ferry building, felt really rusty, so I mixed it up a bit with a Mercedes Benz … go figure … but the result is more passable.

I was having a hard time composing the page yesterday, I’m rusty since I don’t draw as much as I used to at work lately … but I liked single drawings here in there … for example these three sitting on muni on the way back home for example … and the guy taking a photo had a great flow to his pose.

That was it for the crawl … though last night I watercolored some older pages from a past chinatown crawl I hadn’t got a chance to get to yet. I focused on a little drawing I like: the crawler sketching away, the old guy with arms crossed above him was fun too.

Ok, that’s a wrap, next crawl is on July 31st, mark your calendars!

No, it’s a flying Fio.

Some sketches from a nice dance performance we saw last night at the headlands, called “Please love me”.

Have you seen Angus Maclane’s Cube Dudes? I’m blown away more and more with each new character he tackles, he’s like an impressionist painter, only no paint just little lego pieces. By day Angus is a star animator here at Pixar (he also directed the excellent Burn-E, the short on Wall-E’s dvd), but by night he’s the CubeDude. If you haven’t heard of this you’re in for a treat, here’s his Flickr set. Some of my favorites: Gundam, Mazinger, Predator and George Lucas. His extensive set of characters is also a fun puzzle, how many can you recognize?