Newborn Maeve at Five Weeks: One-Month Check-Up, My Birthday and More

Happy parents Carrie and Joe with our 5-week-old daughter Maeve. We don’t have a lot of photos of the three of us together… this one was taken by Carrie’s brother Bob earlier today.

It’s been a relatively uneventful week for baby Maeve, born July 30th 2013, about to turn five weeks old as I post this. Yesterday, my wife Carrie posted some of her thoughts at one month. I am going to post briefly with plenty of photos and a few thoughts. I’ve been posting weekly updates on my our daughter’s progress, find earlier ones here.

Maeve sure looks cute when she’s sleeping and moving around

Baby Maeve at Two Weeks: Sleeping, Breastfeeding, and Being Wonderful

Maeve relaxing somewhat during a diaper change. She’s glorious!

I am trying to get in the habit of posting weekly with the progress of our precious young daughter Maeve, born July 30th 2013 – entering her 14th day as I write this. My wife Carrie and I each posted our accounts of her birth, here and here, respectively. I did an update at one week, here.

I am not going to guarantee any great parenting guru insights in these weekly posts. There are perhaps a few interesting thoughts, but it’s mostly a sort of electronic scrapbook that we can look through and share with others (especially our family and friends on the west coast.) I hope to keep posting a lot of photos of her – all the photos here are from this past week (click on images to enlarge.) Perhaps if Carrie and I post frequently enough, we’ll be able to see some of the arc of Maeve’s growth. Perhaps I will get too busy to keep posting as long or as frequently. I may to try to shift to a shorter format – getting short pieces out sooner. Maybe Carrie and I will write some stuff together. We’ll see.

Week two wasn’t radically different than week one. The new normal felt a tiny bit more routine… but Maeve is still doing lots and lots of sleeping and breastfeeding. In between these major pursuits, she takes time out to look around the room a lot. It seems like she’s just a bit more squirmy. During a lot of week one, she was sleepy and content in seemingly any position; now she wants to sit up when she’s laying down, or lie down when she’s sitting. She doesn’t like to be face down on my chest any more (awwww) because when I do this she goes into feeding mode: she smacks her lips, sometime bops around trying to find my non-existent milk-filled breast, then looks around for her mom. Week two she’s looking to her mom for comfort – maybe I just didn’t notice this in the whirlwind of week one. 

One Oak Two Hands

I was happy to see that my friend Katura Reynolds visited and sketched the Los Osos Oaks (near San Luis Obispo, CA.) It’s one of my favorite places to visit and to sketch. She posted a series of oaks sketches at her site The Humble Act of Sketching.

I was happy to spot that we actually both sketched the same tree from more-or-less the same angle. Here’s Katura’s version: (I like her caption: “Remember when that oak swallowed up the hobbits in Fellowship of the Ring? Yeah.)

Katura Reynolds’ sketch of one of the great Los Osos Oaks.

and mine:

Los Osos Oak tree sketch by Joe Linton

I enjoy seeing the way everyone brings their individual style to every drawing. There are so many ways to balance tone, line, color, texture, etc. Artists are always simplifying, deciding (often unconsciously) what details tell the story… what to include, what to leave out. 

Some of My Comic Book Cover Sketches

Jury Duty comics cover, from Sketchbook No. 44, 2001

In this blog, I’ve been exploring some of the vernacular language of comics – or “sequential art” as Scott McCloud and Will Eisner call them. Ways that stories are told from panel to panel fascinate me. For this post, though, I am going to toss out that sequential storytelling and, instead, dwell on the comic book cover.

The cover isn’t generally sequential the way comics’ interiors are… but I think that comic book covers pack a lot of punch. I think that, when done well, covers (of almost anything – books, dvds, etc.) have a certain iconography and power. Not that mine are done all that well.

I mentioned it in this earlier post about Mike Mignola: comic covers are an example of a metonym – or maybe synecdoche (I get those two fancy English Lit words mixed up a bit – and they overlap.) More vernacularly put: the cover is a single image that stands in for an entire story. So the cover sort of crystalizes the story down to a single moment. It tends to need a lot of energy, a lot of punch. 

Slideshow: My Second Thirty Sketchbooks

Woman from Sketchbook No. 44

A couple weeks ago, I posted a slide show of two pages from each of my first 30 sketchbooks, dated 1984-1995.

Today it’s the sequel: Sketchbooks number 31-60, dated 1995-2012.

The slide show below includes the first page of the sketchbook, where I generally somewhat-elaborately hand-letter recording the sketchbook number and the dates. After the first page, I’ve selected one image from the body of each book. Each of the selected images is among the better drawings in each book… but maybe not the very best… sometimes I went with variety, sometimes I picked stuff that reminds me of the that time in my life and what I was interested in drawing. 

Slideshow: My First Thirty Sketchbooks

Still life with newly organized sketch books, 12 August 1989, colored pencil on paper in Sketchbook No. 16

I have this other blog, my art blog, called Handmade Ransom Notes. I mostly use it to post new artwork – so it functions as a motivational tool to finish more art… and it’s true that I look forward to finishing and posting there, and I’ve kept it up ok… but it seems like nearly nobody finds my art there.

In addition to piles of artwork on paper, letters, and fliers, I have two long shelves of sketchbooks. I think my sketchbooks contain a lot of my favorite work (work by me, that is.) A lot of the pieces are pretty finished for sketches.

A friend of mine did a piece at Metro’s blog about sketching I’d done on transit. For that piece, I was looking through some old sketchbooks, and I thought that I really should scan and post more of my old sketchbook work… because some of it is really good.

I’ve posted some earlier sketches here and there on the Older Work page of my art blog… but that doesn’t get a lot of views either. So I came on the idea of posting a slide show that would walk through each book. 

Mom’s House (part 3)

(This is the third part of three – if you’re interested, start with part 1 then part 2.)

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This third post is sort of journey through my sketches of mom’s home – first interiors, then exteriors – each group in chronological order, oldest to newest.

Mom's Den - 1987 pencil on paper in sketchbook 12, 11"x17"

This one is my mom’s den nearly a quarter-century ago. It’s roughly the same view as this image. The glass table on the wooden sled thingie was in the middle of the den most of the time while mom’s four kids were growing up. When the grand kids started walking around, mom swapped it out for more of a wooden trunk thing. The configuration changed a bit then – the chair on the far left moves to the right, and the couch was moved to the be along the plate glass window in the background.

I remember mom didn’t really like this drawing, because it has a big messy pile of newspapers – in the middle left next to the chair.

Mom's Den 1987 pen on paper in sketchbook 12, 8.5"x11"

This one is slightly oddly cropped. That’s a TV in the bottom right. Sitting atop it, in addition to a couple of bowls, is a painting of mom. The painting also features my sister Liz, though she’s cut off. It’s an oil painting that I really like – one of my best, I think. There’s another painting on the ground, too, visible in the middle center of the painting. That one is a self-portrait – me. And of course, lots of books, which I wrote about a bit here.