Dennis Jones
eclectic artwork & other random things
Ostrich
A quick Saturday morning sketch before I go out and mow the yard. We finally got some rain here in Indiana so the grass is growing again. Too little, too late for the farmer’s corn. Forget about investing in gold, I’m stockpiling Frosted Flakes before they are ten dollars a box.
Dog Days Of Summer
The heat has kept me inside most of the summer. I can hardly wait to see what temperatures August has to bring.
Katniss Everdeen
OK, OK, this is not Katniss Everdeen… but it is a cat and I did read the Hunger Games books just to see what all the whooplah was about. Turns out they are a pretty good read and I’ve discovered my comprehension level of juvenile fiction is off the charts.
Dogged By Bad Weather
We here in Northeastern Indiana are currently going through the worst drought in ages. Get ready to pay through the nose for corn in the next few months.
Monday Morning
Monday morning… back to work.
Daniel Cover
This is the cover to a little soft cover book on Daniel I did a while back.
It’s Alive… And Eating Popcorn!
Jones brothers, sisters, inlaws, outlaws, nieces, nephews, kids and miscellaneous others traveled from all over the country to my Mother’s house last week for the 4th of July. With over 30 people in Mom’s house a bunch of us had to find other places to sleep when evening rolled around. As my family was leaving for the hotel the first night, my nephew Kyle said, “Hey Uncle Dennis, can I play around with that puppet of yours tonight?” I said sure and left it with him. When I showed up the next morning he had created this test clip with his MacBook. I love the way my goofy little sock puppet snaps to life in it. I think it’s fabulous!
Catapult
This is a picture I did quite a while back, but it’s still one of my favorite cats…
Animal House
I haven’t really done very much drawing in my sketchbook over the last several months, but I did manage to kick out this page of animals yesterday as a summer storm blew through our area.
ModBook Pro Digital Tablet
Ok, I think this is probably what digital artists everywhere have been waiting for. Modbook has combined a MacBook Pro base system with a Wacom digitizer that delivers 512 levels of pen pressure sensitivity to create a truly portable digital tablet… the ModBook Pro. There is no price on this right now and I’m sure it will be expensive but at this point I would be willing to sell my firstborn son for one… (he’s in Seattle right now, I don’t think he’ll even notice).
Holy Cow!
It’s the end of the day, I run across this old sketchbook page in a computer folder and I think maybe I’ll just throw a little color on it and see what happens before I go eat dinner. Here’s what I came up with…
My Front Porch
The rockers that sit on my front porch have gone through about 13 harsh winters and the tiny bit of paint that was still trying to hang onto them would come off on your backside every time you sat down in one. I finally got around to cleaning the chairs and table and gave them all a fresh coat of paint.
The table became an interesting sort of project. The center top lifts off and a backgammon board is inset beneath it. Unfortunately, time had treated it quite harshly.
I rebuilt the backgammon board with MDF and give it a little dimensionality.
I also gave it a pretty snappy faux tooled leather surface.
I cut out a new lid from MDF and sawed lines into it to create a weathered slat look. On the flip side I attached a checkerboard.
The checkerboard is the front and back sides of masonite. One side is slick and the other side is kinda furry.
I was surprised at how heavy the table top was when I was done. MDF and masonite are both fairly heavy materials, but I guess the real weight came from the 256 screws I used to attach the 64 checkerboard pieces with.
My Somewhat Unconventional Pencilling Process
Over the course of the last several years, I have worked with a lot of high quality art materials; expensive watercolor papers, high end illustration boards, hot and cold press bristols, you name it, I’ve worked on it… so it was a bit of a shock when I looked down and realized I now work on cheap card stock from Walmart and copy paper from Staples. How in the world did that happen? Here is my somewhat bizarre pencilling process…
I really like the feel of Georgia-Pacific Card Stock to do my loose pencil work on, but it only comes in an 8.5X11 size. That is a bit small and I usually run out of room.
On this picture, I ran out of room on the right side of the page, so I just taped a little more paper onto that side. Then I needed more space at the top, so I taped a little more up there, too.
Very professional, eh? It is now time to do a clean pencil to work from. For this I like the feel of Staples Laser Copier paper.
Of course, it is too small also, so I tape a couple of those together and use a light table to redraw a tighter version of my loose sketch.
I scan that tighter pencil sketch into my computer, fire up Photoshop and I’m off to the races with the color work.
A New Bible Story
I’m working on a new Bible story. Sadly there are no exciting car chases or explosions in it, but the guy does get to drive around on a pretty snappy, late model donkey…
My New Facebook Page
I just created a new Facebook page, and I need 30 or so “LIKES” in order for all the back end components to kick in, so if you wouldn’t mind shooting over there and pressing the LIKE button, I would appreciate it.
As I was loading the new Facebook page up, I was thinking… I finish out all my artwork on a Wacom Cintiq with Photoshop and send digital files to clients across the nation via the internet. Over the years I have blogged on Xanga, My Space, Blogger, WordPress, and the cutting edge (at the time) BrotherJones. I’ve listened to music on LastFm, PureVolume, Pandora, Slacker, Rdio, and Spotify. I use YouTube, Vimeo, Twitter, Facebook, DeviantArt, Tumblr, ImageKind, Society6, Dropbox, PayPal, YouSendIt and many other web services. I shop on Amazon and my purchases are delivered to my doorstep the very next day.
About 15 years ago I boldly told my oldest son as he was leaving for college, that the computer would NEVER replace my paint and paintbrush and that I really couldn’t see any reason why I would EVER need a computer or the internet for ANYTHING. Since that time I seem to have softened my bold stance on the subject just a bit.
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Dennis Jones 