Age 26

I found this self-portrait (or "elf-portrait") in a box of old photos. I think I was about 26 at the time, working as an engineer for GM and about ready to be a father.

Yes, this freak was fruitful and multiplied.

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Don't Fight the Graphite

Pencils don't get the respect they deserve. What with the popularity of digital image processing, vectorized line work, and - what's that stuff called? - oh yeah, paint. Sadly, it seems the pencil has been forgotten at the bottom of everyone's Art Bin along with the Pop Tart crumbs and that rock-hard tube of Liquitex Medium Magenta.

But I ask you, who doesn't love the feel of a bright yellow Ticonderoga #2 wood pencil twirling in your fingers or tapping on the edge of your desk? Nobody, that's who.

Read on...

I say the wood pencil deserves to return to its iconic stature, with the makin'-it-happen end sharpened to a long, acicular point, and the pretend-it-didn't-happen end gnawed into an unrecognizable wad of crushed metal and moist rubber. Stick it behind your ear. Chew the paint off it. Hold it flat in your hand, thrust your arm upward, slap your wrist with the other hand, and watch your beloved writing implement rocket skyward until the point embeds itself in your office ceiling. Despite written claims to the contrary, Heaven is a place stocked with an endless supply of sharp wood pencils and thousands of square miles of acoustic ceiling tile.

The pencil is a nearly perfect writing instrument. It's also a darn good drawing tool, as any bored art-kid stuck in High School history class will tell you. It can track a thin line that's so faint, you'll swear one of your arm-hairs fell onto the page. With a firm overhand grip, that same pencil can lay down a heavy pool of slick, black powder that, despite your best efforts, will end up partially smudged on your cheek. And with a skilled hand, it will create smooth, luxurious washes of silvery grey in any shade imaginable.

I've always been comfortable drawing with pencils. I've loved them all my life. Hell, I'm 46 years old and I still have a visible piece of pencil lead imbedded under the skin of my right palm from a John Bonham style drumming mishap in the third grade.

Today I use a Ticonderoga No.2 wood pencil for nearly all my pencil-roughs, layouts, contour drawings, and sketches.

But as much as I love them, I don't use wood pencils for shaded renderings. That's a job for artist's graphite pencils like these. Sometimes called "woodless pencils," these are thick bars of solid graphite with a clear lacquer coating to keep your hands and Chinos clean.

They can be sharpened in any standard pencil sharpener, though I've been told that the preferred method is using a sheet of fine-abrasive sandpaper. They're available in several hardnesses, though typically a 6B will do most everything that I need for shaded sketching.

In pencil parlance, the hardness of the lead is graded by varying levels of "H" for "hard" and "B" for "black" (*). HB stands for "Hard Black" (**) and is equivalent to the classic No. 2 pencil. Softer - and therefore darker rendering - pencils are labeled with increasing values of "B." A 6B lead is much softer than an HB, and 9B is softer still. I find that 6B is amazingly versatile for shaded renderings, able to hold a decent point while still laying down a pretty funky bass-note when asked. I suppose having a super soft 9B on hand would be helpful for deep black areas, but I haven't yet found much need for one yet. Harder pencils can range up to 6H, even harder. A 6H pencil makes a very thin, very light line, and is more comfortable in the hands of a draftsman than a sketch artist. It also doubles as an Exact-o knife.

Now, you'll notice that the art pencils don't have erasers attached to them. That's because artist's are nervous critters by nature, and we'd chew them off before we finished our first layout. So, we buy separate erasers, either of the soft block or kneaded variety. Be warned: these are not interchangeable! The block style, usually made from firm chunks of vinyl, erases using an abrasive action. It literally grinds out the graphite particles from the tooth of your paper. It's useful for removing large areas of goof-ups on bond papers, sketch pads, and Bristol board because these papers absorb (sort of) the graphite dust and need a rather aggressive approach to clean-up. Kind of like my 14-year-old stepson.

Kneaded erasers are more like Silly Putty; they are sticky, and they work by lifting graphite right off the paper. You don't usually rub a kneaded eraser across your work, you dab it right onto the area you want removed. Because they're kind of gooey, you can even mold kneaded erasers into pointed shapes to pick off tiny spots without disturbing the surrounding work.

Because of its hard, dense surface, Vellum is an excellent substrate for the combination of a soft graphite pencil and a kneaded eraser. For final artwork, that set-up is the diggity whoop, yo.

I also use a mechanical pencil. Specifically, I use a Koh-I-Noor 0.7mm drafting pencil loaded with F lead. F is approximately halfway along the pencil hardness scale between HB and H, and I suppose it would be similar to the No. 3 lead in a classic wood pencil, though I can't prove this. I don't know what the F stands for, but let's call it "Fine." The F hardness in a 0.7 mm pencil is very useful for fine detail work, thin contour lines, or anytime I need to draw a hard edge along a metal, cork-back ruler.

Mechanical pencils like the Koh-I-Noor are also available in an absurdly thin 0.3mm variety, and I own one. I just never use it. I do sometimes use the uber-fat 0.9mm version for heavier line work. That bad boy gets H ("Heavy," slightly harder then HB) lead.

One other snazzy gizmo I use often is the eraser shield. It's basically a stainless-steel stencil that masks the work you want to keep while exposing tiny lines, dots, or arcs that you want to attack with your eraser.

Oddly, the majority of the real estate in my graphite drawings is produced using a blending stick, not a pencil. These tightly rolled sticks of paper push the graphite dust around the surface of your page to create those smooth gradients of gray.

Like a pencil, they can be sharpened to a point to help get into tight corners. My process is to lay down a light layer of squiggly lines over a large area with my 6B artist's graphite pencil. Then I spread the love around using the blending stick. If an area looks too dark, I use the kneaded eraser to remove the excess graphite then hit it again with the blending stick. Again, Vellum is my choice for paper here. Because most of the graphite sits on top of the surface of a Vellum sheet, those little dust particles are as easy to push around as an asthmatic preschooler. (Hey, I was an asthmatic preschooler, so I speak from experience.)

After the base layer of gray is down, I can start adding shade and shadow. Again, I lay down a heapin' helpin' of graphite in the darkest areas, then feather it out into the lighter areas using the blending stick. Here, the quarter panel area behind the headlight has been blended out while I'm starting to shade the rocker panel.

The key is to start light, then build to dark. It's tempting to fill in all the heavy shadow areas early so that the image will pop. But you must resist. The danger is that you'll smear all that graphite dust over your drawing as you work on the finer details. Details first, shadows last. Also, never let your bare skin touch the artwork; always rest your hand on a clean sheet of bond paper. Your skin has oils that will smudge and yellow your artwork.

Finally, when I've gather the strength to stop obsessing over impossibly small details and can finally call the drawing finished, I spray the entire sheet with an acrylic fixativ. This locks the loose graphite dust down to the surface to prevent smearing. The good stuff won't yellow or get all crinkly. Some artists use hairspray. Some artists also use drugs. I don't use either.

See? there's no need to fight the graphite. Make it your friend. Speak kindly to it. Go ahead and smear it on your face. It's going to end up there anyway.

Now back to the drawing board.

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(*) Linguists in the audience will recognize that "black" is not the opposite of "hard." This is because language is a left-brain activity and art is right-brained. It's hard to get the two sides to agree on anything.

(**) I've also heard the "HB" stands for "Heavy Black." This doesn't make sense to me because HB is the hardest black lead you can get.

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DNS is working.

As of this moment, the domain name server is now correctly directing www.theagilebadger.com to my portfolio site rather than to this blog. Emotions are running high here in the badger burrow. Much coffee has been drunk. Colorful language invoked. Success is fleeting, I know, but it seems things are going as hoped, at least for the moment.

From now on, to get to this blog, you can either go to www.theagilebadger.blogspot.com, or just click the "Blog" button on my portfolio site.

I need to figure out how to update my RSS feed to correctly grab Blogger. But that's a whole new bag of snakes.

Back to the drawing board.

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Portfolio Website Up!

All decent, respectable illustrators who operate their business in a professional manner should have a portfolio web site.

So why do I have one, you ask? Good question, smart ass.

Well, justified or not, I have one. And hopefully within a few days, my domain name "theagilebadger.com" will point directly to my portfolio site rather than to this blog. The site will have a "Blog" button that will send all my faithful readers (my mother-in-law, my wife, sometimes the dog) to these pages, which I intend to continue updating on a regular basis. The portfolio site will showcase only my best work, and this blog will concentrate more on describing my process and lessons-learned.

Once the site is fully active, you get to this blog either through the site, or by navigating directly to http://www.theagilebadger.blogspot.com/. You'll figure it out, I'm sure.

For now, you can see a beta version of the new site here. Please let me know, either through email or by commenting in this post, about anything that doesn't look right.

Now, back to the drawing board.

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Good-Guys 7th Midwestern Nationals

What an incredible weekend at the Kansas Speedway! Thousands of hot rods with over-the-top fat tires and gargantuan blowers, hot dogs that cost more for one than an entire six-pack of my favorite beer, and of course, lots of good old fashioned Kansas sunshine.

Check out these beautiful beasts:









You can see all my photos of this event here. Read on...


For those of you whom I met and talked to, thanks for chewing the fat with me and helping me to learn more about these amazing machines. And if you're just stopping by this blog because of the business card I left for you, thanks for checking it out. Much obliged.

One of my most marketable skills is drawing hot rods, either in exaggerated form (like here) or in more realistic portrait styles (like here). Photos are great, but there's nothing like a custom artistic rendering of your one-of-a-kind hot rod. Tee-shirt designs and promotional posters are also in my bag of tricks.

Leave a comment here or drop me an email through the About Me widget. We'll talk. S'all good.

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Faster Than Hell Poster

(Cropped Image)

Just your typical werewolves on motorcycles band promo.

Motorcycles by me, werewolves and poster design by Justin "Killer" Kite. To see the full poster, visit the Killer Kite website.

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Gear Grinder Hot Rod Show

Do what the bad ass poster tells ya. If you don't go, prepare yourself for deep sadness.


Illustration by The Agile Badger; poster design by Killer Kite Productions.

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Bitchin' Camaro! Bitchin' Camaro!

Here's a 1967 Camaro SS that's going into my personal stock images collection for future use. It's modeled after the Deathproof promotional poster. Duh.

Disclaimer: The title of this post in no way condones the behavior depicted in the lyrics of the song "Bitchin' Camaro" by the Dead Milkmen. I do not believe that running over old ladies is a good thing. Really. So chill out already. It's a cool song though.

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I'm a WIENER! No, I mean, WINNER!

Maybe I'm both, actually.

Anyway, I just won a free copy of Swift 3D from the good people (person?) at Bittbox.com! Swift 3D is modeling and animation software that integrates with Adobe Flash, a product that came bundled with my beloved Adobe CS3 along with Photoshop, Illustrator, Dreamweaver, and a wad of other programs that I'm sure includes Tetris and Solitaire somewhere. My imagination is swimming with ideas, and as soon as I've mastered this electronic Lego kit, I'll be able to offer my web clients a world of creative possibilities for their sites.

And that won't be too difficult to achieve, I'd warrant. I spent over a decade performing 3D modeling and analysis of aircraft and automotive components for the likes of GM and Rolls Royce. Now that I have a copy of Swift 3D, I'll be able to relive those wonderful days as an engineer, only this time I'll actually have fun doing it! And the best part is, no more ties, high-water Chinos, hip-pocket calculators, or socially awkward moments with icky girls.

Now, back to the drawing board.

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Software Logo

The client, Dru Sellers, wanted a logo for his new software application that manages data traffic through a very complicated system of...well, trust me, it's complicated.

To emphasize the bulletproof quality of their coding, he wanted to use an image of a bus that looked so tough, it couldn't be busted by a sledgeroller, which is his term for a steamroller made out of sledgehammers. (edit: The term "sledgeroller" actually belongs to my buddy, Jim Sowers, who is known among his peers for highly creative use of language, as evidenced by his nickname for me, "Slappy Bitch-Pants.")

Here's the logo we came up with:

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New Website Up and Running

My first toe-dipping into web design has turned into a full-fledged cannonball into the deep-end of electronic commerce. The web site for Aveena Natural Cleaning Services is now live, and aside from a few CSS tweaks to accommodate the fussiness of MS Internet Explorer, I think it's looking pretty good. If you see anything wonky, please leave a comment so I can get it fixed.

I'm happy to report that the client is pleased. And that's especially important because I'm married to her.

Now, back to the drawing board.

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Craft and Commerce

"In commerce, the musician makes music. In craft, music makes the musician."

That's a quote from one of my favorite guitarists, Robert Fripp from King Crimson. It's always refreshing to hear musicians speak about their profession in thought-provoking ways rather than the usual, "How hard to we rock? SO F***ING HARD!!" Anyway, Mr. Fripp wrote it in a short blurb he called, "Craft" which appeared in the May 2006 issue of Guitar Player magazine. He's a smart cat, Mr. Fripp, and the line has stayed with me for quite awhile. Recently it's been popping into my head quite often, mostly as it applies to illustration assignments that I'm tempted to refuse. I use it as a mantra of sorts, and it reminds me that no job is too big or too difficult.

Read on...

Though he wrote the quote and the column for guitarists, clearly his point applies to any creative profession, including illustrators. On the surface, it appears that he's trashing the idea of art made for the purpose of commerce. I don't think he is, though; it's really a refreshing and encouraging take on the age-old dilemma of commercialism versus creativity. Rather than seeing the two forces as an "either / or," I think he's seeing the two forces in the light of "both / and." Creating artistic work for the marketplace does not necessarily mean an artist is selling out, nor does the artist's work have to suffer in the name of commerce. And artists who can survive independently of the marketplace - pursuing their own visions without concern for its marketability - are the exception rather than the rule. For the rest of us, seeing both sides of the art/commerce coin is more than just survival, its truly inspirational.

Here's an example. The next time you're asked to create an illustration that at the outset may seem beyond the current state of your abilities, remind yourself that it's not you that's making the art, but it's the art that is making you. If you view your job as entirely a commercial endeavor, then you'd be tempted to tell clients with seemingly impossible illustration assignments to find someone with greater abilities or experience. But viewed in this new way, there's no other answer to give but, "Yes, of course I'll do it. And I'm gonna rock your little world, sucka!" (The "sucka" part is optional, and not typically recommended for most clients.)

Confidence comes from knowing that the art - the creative vision that's just waiting to be placed on paper - is going to pull you through the process. The art will make the artist.

Then, of course, the artist will make money.

Back to the drawing board.

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