Doing the caricature thing in St. Petersburg last night!

Got the prep work done a couple days ago. Added watercolor while painting live during the Art Walk in Mt Dora at Julianne’s Coastal Cottage. I still need to work on details in the illustrations to get it to pop out more.

Penciled this during a meeting tonight as I prep for a series of watercolor paintings I need to get done. It’s part of a Swampy’s Florida series that will soon be available to interior designers through a Miami company. There will be two series. One much like this of Florida locations and Florida critters. The other series is of beach scenes around the state.

This is just the pencils of the artwork. Next I prep the art to be watercolored. I’ll be painting the art  this Friday during the Art Walk in Downtown Mt. Dora, Florida, at Julianne’s Coastal Cottage store. I’ll be doing it live. If you’re in the area, please come by and say ‘Hello!’.

I did the penciling during a meeting of the Springs Alliance which I’m involved with. Certainly an appropriate time to be working on artwork about the Rainbow River.

This is from a photo taken by a friend of a half fallen cypress tree on the Rainbow River in Marion County, Florida

Last caricature gig of the year and drew a terrific assortment of attendees. Most in the event business themselves.

Re-Discover Florida by Hampton Dunn

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Florida historian, Hampton Dunn, tags a series of Florida historic locations with one page reviews and history. The state is well covered by being broken up in three parts, Central, East and West Coasts. The volume is dated and a number of the locations are either gone in inaccessible at this time. Still, all are well written and worth the view of Florida history in 1969.

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Guide for Hire by Gladys and Ed Fortner
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

For a book from 50 odd years ago, this one sure does cover it’s intended territory as a guidebook of a portion of interior Florida in a rather complete and creative way. Graphically it reflects it’s time period, but in ways that would be over done in today’s digital onslaught. A ton of information is scattered in nooks and crannys of the graphics, thus providing more than the narrative provides. It’s a terrific piece for it’s time, but also an example to take note of in today’s guidebook design.

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A group of fellow artists got together in Orlando at Stardust Video and Coffee Shop last Wednesday night. We get together around this time of year to catch up on the goings on in the past year. Above are Pam Treadwell, Paula Large, Jerry Darkey and me.

Here’s Swampy, Rob and Marcia Gaedcke, President of the Titusville Area Chamber of Commerce with a page of art for the upcoming ‘Swampy’s Florida: Titusville’.

Been penciling and inking and penciling and inking and… I guess ya get the idea…

Got lots done on the upcoming ‘Swampy’s Florida: Titusville’. Lots more to do. And that’s besides this Swampy book!

Here is a step by step of a watercolor caricature I painted on Halloween.Above is the pencil and preparation for watercolor.

Here I’ve added the watercolor.

Finally, I brush in the line work.

Here’s a piece of artwork I’m drawing of the upcoming ‘Swampy’s Florida: Lake Wales’.