Here are the pencils for two people who volunteered at Silver Springs State Park to clean up the Silver River and area around it. it’s figured they’ve raised some $3,000 in cans collected.

This is the pencil version that I’m sending in for approval. After approval, I have another step for prep and then adding watercolor. I’m sure to post the finished artwork in the next couple days.

I have a painting to also paint and plan to do both at the same time.

Announcing a Swampy’s Florida Kickstarter program to get five Swampy’s Florida books produced! In the past three years I’ve produced 14 Swampy books, 37 prints, 2 DVDs and seven cards. There’s lots more to come! However, I’ve poured a ton of time in all of this and have more than run out of resources to produce more without backing. Funding will ensure more educational and activity books available to help young people know more about the great state of Florida.

Click here to head over to Kickstarter!

There’s a goal to get five funded by June 21st! Lots of goodies! I’ll even try to hand deliver the goodies if the donor falls within my travels this Fall.

The five books are:
–  Historical Women of Florida
– Florida History Puzzles and Games
– A Short History of  trains in Florida
– Birds of Florida
– Fish and Aquatic Life in Florida

All five will be coloring and travel guide books and able to be used in home schooling or just for fun!

There will be constant updates here as I build all five books.

But wait! There’s more!
There are four other books involved that are left over prior to the new arrangement with The Knowledge Exchange. These four will also be completed at the same time:
– Polk County- Titusville
– Dunnellon
– Marion County ABC
The funding will also loosen my time to wrap up these four books.

All will be available by Fall.

I hope you will help me in getting these books out and to beter help educate our young people of Florida’s incredible history, heritage and culture.

Thank you to The Knowledge Exchange, for so much help, and Dave Stewart, who produced the video on the site and gave sage advice, for all their help putting this together. I’ll have to share the video here as the next month goes along.

Thank you to all that donate to this project!
I’ll be posting updates here as this Kickstarter program continues!

Here is the colored version of artwork for the Stick Marsh Veterans Bass Challenge being put on by the Veterans Resource Committee of the Melbourne Regional Chamber of East Central Florida. HEre’s the post with the black and white artwork –  https://robsmithjr.com/blog/?p=7260

It was day 2 of my drawing in a booth of HMS during the Blue Cross and Blue Shield conference at the Marriott World Center in south Orange County. Besides caricatures, I drew this Batman for the husband of the person who organized the HMS booth. He’s a huge Batman fan and collector. I rarely get a chance to drawing superheroes these days and this Batman sure shows it. Proportion off as are the legs.

Below are a couple of the caricatures I drew with a suprehero theme.

Here’s Alexis, that just loves lizards so much she won’t defeat the vile and evil Lizard Man !

Here’s the inked cover of the penciled drawing I showed yesterday. I used my many years with the City of Orlando in the Planning and Engineering Departments to map out a condensed, but doable, community. This is for a give-away during this week’s Florida Parent Educators Association annual convention by The Knowledge Exchange. This is to encourage ravel in Florida and beyond! thus, the mountains in the background….or it could also be a mountain version of the old Florida Festival tent that was once across from Sea World in south Orange County.

Working on a cover for an upcoming Swampy’s Florida item. Inks tomorrow.

Here’s the color version of the artwork shown earlier this week. I just finished coloring this after a very long day today.

I was out for the opening of a new bridge for hiking over the Withlacoochee River here in Florida. The path to the bridge was supposed to be a hiking trail, but ended up being a roadway for emergency vehicles and bicyclists. I have photos and wrote about it here.

This is the inked version of art I did for an upcoming fishing event in Melbourne, Florida. It’s to salute American military veterans and help some get out and fish.

Click here to learn more and maybe you can join in and help!

My next step is to digitally color the artwork.

Sketch Dailies had H.R. Giger as their subject of the day in honor of his death the day before. Giger was an artist known for his very sexually themed artwork. This included his designs of the alien in the film ‘Alien’. In fact, his sexual designs were meshed throughout the set of the alien’s lair in the original film. As the sequels were tacked on, the alien settings were toned down as was the alien and family members.

Back when the film came out it became a favorite topic amongst my friends Ken Cullota and Steve Gallancy and others. This was back in high school. It was at that time I attempted to work through Junior Achievement to create a humor magazine, much like Mad. Ken Culotta came up with a take off of the film renamed Alias. It was hilarious. Unfortunately, the funding part became pretty unreachable as I’m as incompetent in fiances then as I am now. We had an adviser that was also a publisher, but that didn’t help. It was just too much to pull off. I still have Ken’s script.

I picked up all I could of the film from movie books to Walt Simonson’s incredible graphic novel of the film. Thee best illustrated adaption of any film ever done, in my opinion. I’ve still got most all of it. The one thing I never got was a large Alien “action figure” around at the time.

Back then there was a comic book convention in Orlando that was run by, my friend, Jim Ivey. One of the guest artists was a local fellow, Ken Mitchroney. Mitchroney had a set of copies of his version of Alien that just blew me away! I’ll try to track them down and post them here. Mitchroney is still cartooning, but in California now. He just announced today his arrival at Warner Brothers Studio to work on a film. He’s a great cartoonist who should be better known.

Anyway, the Alien film obviously was a big part of my life after it came out for over a year and I got real good at drawing the critter. It’s been a rare time that I will draw the Alien character these days. When Sketch Dailies posted the opportunity, i grabbed it and tailored a bit of humor to go with it.