Isaac and the Awkward Situations
Comics, Vaudeville, Art Education, and Music
Tag Archives: illustration
Ocean and aquarium paintings
I teach art at Mecca some Saturdays. Here are some photos of my lesson’s results. 
This is a nudibranch I guided an 8 year old boy to draw. I broke it down to basic shapes and encouraged him as he went.
This young girl is drawing a whale. 
This child appeared to put on too much water. Cool skull though.
A sunken ship! I didn’t prompt them to draw that. Notice the crystalline trees to the right. Or are they houses?
You can see the bright oil pastels show through the blue water based paint. Sometimes the students use colored pencil or crayons. 
Coral and layered paint.
This was an example I made to show them how.
After drawing fish, eels, sea anemones, sea turtles, jellys, coral and sea weed, the children paint blue over with sponges.
Some students abandon their drawings, so I recycle their pages to guide other students. I like to not finish my projects so that students don’t imitate me fully. I like this lesson because it doesn’t have to be changed for older kids, just expect more detail out of them. In most projects, for some reason, I get push back from kids when I ask them to put in more when I think they aren’t done. This project usually has less of that, perhaps because there is always more to put in the ocean. I’m going to mail these to my niece in Amsterdam to put up on the wall around her cradle. I hope they aren’t nightmare inducing.
I even got my mom to try this lesson.
Didn’t she make a nice scene with layers of paint? Her fish have some personality. You can try it at home or share with children.
Portraits at Trapper Creek
In addition to drawing bands, I also drew some portraits of audience members. I chose people who were dressed interestingly or served me coffee. One person suggested I draw a self portrait, so I did.
World Music and Dance Concert at Fairbanks Summer Arts Festival.
I thought I’d show my pencils, in case that’s interesting for any of you.
THEY MIGHT BE GIANTS at Roseland, Portland, OR.
It’s not every day you get to see your favorite band play live in front of you. For many, they will never get the chance at all. This band started the year I was born (1982) and I have tried to learn to play their songs since I was 13. I have sang their songs in my head for at least 18 years. TMBG played with Marty, Dan and Dan at Roseland Ballroom May 8. They played many old songs from Lincoln, Flood, and Factory Showroom. They even played the bizarre, “32 footsteps” and the Cub cover “New York City”
They also played some of my newer favorites “Answer,” “When you’ll die” “Can’t Keep Johnny Down” and of as a finale/encore the entirety of “Fingertips!” which is insane and a total delight. I was blissfully singing along “I walk along, darkened corridors!” What a great band! I heard that at a recent show John commented “this song is from the middle of our career, 2001.” and John responded, “uh, I think THIS is the middle of our career.” If so they would play another 33 years when they are 89 years old! Well, I hope I can see them again and that it will be as great a show as this was. My cup truly runneth over. I am so blessed to get to see artists of this caliber and talent. We live in a glorious age for live music and graphic novels and media arts of all kinds. i don’t know what to say except: “I’m not a real doctor but I am a real worm, I am an actual worm. I live like a worm and i like to play the drums.” “32 footsteps leading to the room where the paint doesn’t want to dry… 32 footsteps running down the road where the door reaches the sky”
I found this great article over at Spin. Its an interview where they recall what they can about the process of recording every one of their albums. There are also interviews at the Onion AV club where they discuss the writing process, how they work together, and The process of writing songs.
I think seeing them has really inspired me to make some music videos. I made some last year for my raps about screen actors, but they were only “half assed” attempts. I should challenge myself to really make animation and maybe make a video for some other artist than myself first.
Daily drawing meditation
A brief trip to San fransisco resulted in these drawings of people buildings and flowers.
this was at the United nations plaza and civic center. There were many nice vendors at the market. I bought some jewelry, strawberries and some decorative coral.
Here are a few comedians I saw at a show at The Royale.
They aren’t all excellent drawings, but it’s good to practice buildings. They require patience, attention to detail, attention to perspective, and an ability to draw straight lines in symmetry. Thanks for looking!
Steam Punk Tea at Shelton McMurphey house
I went to a STEAM PUNK TEA PARTY at the Shelton McMurphey House and made drawings of guests and the hosts.
If you’d like me to do this as your event, just ask! These photos of me drawing are by Brenda Eley.
Everything looks better on women, especially men’s hats!
Steve makes working props in the style of steam punk and deisel punk and sometimes atomic punk. His creations are fantastic, he shows them in his gallery, and they are all functional. Here he is with his fortune teller. 
For more info on his incredible invention/sculptures/performance art
look at his site.
Three for Silver
One of the most delightful, talented bands I’ve seen in Oregon: Three For Silver. Some compare them to Tom Waits, I think they sound a bit like Dark Dark Dark and the Squirrel Nut Zippers! I do like to draw accordions. Andrew played clarinet at this show and played on their album. They said they were friends with another band I have drawn, the G String Orchestra.
Crushed Out! and Browntown
Crushed Out have an amazing retro sound: a very surfy wet guitar tone and peppy drums. A couple covers were quite welcome and got the crowd up and dancing. Someone might superficially call them a “rockabilly White Stripes.” Vocals are high and airy, like Elliott Smith or Crosby Stills and Nash. Lots of lyrics about love, birds, sharks and surfers. My favorite was “Sweaty, Sweaty Dress” and I’ll never get the epic riff from “To Sing True of Love” out of my head.
I tried a realistic look
Moselle- “We like to cook rice and a vegetable, a one pot cowboy meal. We try to eat out as little as possible. We eat souerkraut, mac and cheese with Kale, one treat we really like is canned trout from Trader Joes, on a stone wheat cracker with onions.
Raw onions?
“yep.”
She said the band raised money to record their album by playing in small New Hampshire bars in the Mt. Washington Valley. “We brought our own sound system and we’d play for 3 hours for a couple hundred bucks. We started a music scene, kids started bands just for the chance to open for us. We played at the Red Fox restaurant in Jackson, New Hampshire and it eventually turned into the weekly dance party in town. We read an article that listed us in the top 10 bands of New Hapshire and we said, “Who are the other 9? we want to be friends with them!” -Moselle
Was guitar your first instrument?
“I started playing when I was 11, to Led Zeppelin and Nirvana’s “Nevermind.” Guitar was basically the first instrument I stayed focused on.” -Franklin
Two of your songs have a very cool blues vibe, with turnarounds. (Early in the Morning and Wormtongue)
I think that makes them sound a lot like the White Stripes, ( is that what someone really unfamiliar with the blues guitar would say?) Is it really Mississippi John Hurt or someone older who popularized those familiar turnarounds? did you first play blues turnarounds learning Jimmy Paige songs?
I like how all the songs sound surfy, but they all sound different too.
Maybe “Mermaid Chant” has the most surf-like riffs, but “True Love” sounds like Buddy Holly or a girl group song.
I’ve seen some guitarists play with several delay pedals in chain. How do you get your delay tone? Are the same pedals you play with live the ones on the record?
You had two amps, right? what is the reason for that? does a different mix go to each one?
Is one clean and loud, and the other… a tube? with more of a crunchy or “tight” sound?”
“I have one delay pedal that is a ‘tape echo simulator’. I used a 1968 Echoplex tube tape echo on our album TEETH, but live the unit gets hot and stops producing echo in the middle of the show. So I’ve bought this El Capistan Strymon echo pedal. It’s almost identical to the analog tape echo. I have a Spring reverb running through a 1965 Fender Bassman, to get a surfy guitar sound. I have the tape echo running through a 1964 Silvertone 1483 bass amp so the sound is wider. Everything of mine is vintage but the pedals and my stratocaster, which is new from a builder in NYC.”
Here I went full on silly cartoon.
This is a monotype, I painted watercolor and water soluble markers on a sheet of plexiglass over the original drawing. Then I pressed it against a wet piece of printing paper and transferred the image.
to see the old post i made about this band look here. (the drawings are better this time.)
Brown Town from Corvallis
Isaac and the Awkward Situations 