Penciled and inked quite a bit today. Here’s one of the pieces – a dancing gator for Swampy’s Florida. This is set to be one of the prints that will be of a single character. Also it’s planned to be used for one of the greeting cards. Now it needs to be prepped for digital color.

This couple from South Carolina have requested a larger illustration than I usually do. 16″ x 20″. They provided a good list of activities they are or will be involved in. I added the majority in to the drawing.

I’ve prepped the art and it’s ready for watercolor. I’ll get to painting it soon and post it here.

This time at a private event in Central Florida. This young lady wants to travel and visit places with black and white animals, like zebras, pandas, etc. First place she wants to visit: Galápagos Islands, not known for their zebras.

A few days ago I posted the setup for this watercolor painting. Here’s the finished artwork. It’s for a show of Florida artists at the Pine Castle Women’s Club in south Orange County starting June 1st. This will also be available as a Swampy’s Florida print (#38) soon.

The Pine Castle Women’s Club art show is comprised of Florida artists presenting Florida history in various mediums.

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

This’ll be a watercolor painting of early Florida orange pickers. This is the first step for me. Getting the general feel of the art in the image area. After this I’ll further prep the paper and then add watercolor.

I had to digitally darken the pencil art so you all could see it. The actual pencils are far lighter. The background, for instance, will be erased of pencil line and replaced with just watercolor. My add some defining lines, That will depend

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.

Last Friday, May 2nd, 2014, while driving through rainy conditions from the Florida Turnpike unto the entryway to the East-West Expressway in Orange County, I managed to hit a well known puddled area of the road and proceeded to spin across the curved over pass bumping off the concrete walls of the overpass. The car ended up more than three quarters across the overpass over the Florida Turnpike. The Sheriff’s deputy asked if I saw my life fly before my eyes. i might’ve if I wasn’t already doing all I could to get control of the spinning car. It was commented that my skill and vast amount of driving likely saved me from a far worse fate.

Best is that no other cars were involved. Plenty were around, but all safely handled their cars to avoid my careening vehicle.

The damage was in two corners of the car and I walked away a bit dazed and mighty upset. The Florida Highway Patrol officer refused to wait for Allstate to send a tow truck so we waited for him to send a tow truck. The reasoning, rightly, was that the car needed to be moved to get backed up traffic moving. However, I’m not sure if Allstate would’ve taken much more time than the other tow truck from Johnson’s Towing, based in Orange County. The FHP officer claimed he needed to give me a ticket and gave me my very first one for reckless driving, though I find that an odd finding. The officer gave me advice as to how I might get out of the ticket. All raising the question as to why he really gave it to me. He wasn’t real happy with me as I realized my car was, in essence, confiscated or impounded by the Florida Highway Patrol and a towing company – Along with all of my caricature equipment, supplies, overnight suitcase, etc. The towing company is known for being difficult involving access or retrieval of vehicles.

Well protected by an unelected bureaucracy, there seems little to be done about the confiscation of private property by contracted towing companies. One reason I learned to greatly dislike privatization by government was learning of actions by towing companies. That and my 20 years with the City of Orlando and nearly thirty years in politics.

I realized I needed to keep Swampy’s Florida through all this. So, i re-interpreted the incident in terms of Swampy and friends being involved. Came to my atention a few weeks ago that I need to better chronicle Swampy, the Swamp Ape, and his adventures in cartoon form by drawing my adventures as his. I did that this time. Not sure how I’m going to interpret my birthday yet.

The next trouble was that, accident or no accident, the show must go on. I was due to draw at, my friend, Joan Milligan’s 57th reunion of the Edgewater High School class of 1957. Due to a lot of fancy footwork involving borrowing my father’s car, I got to the event and drew the night away. The time was so close that my father had to come with me. One of the drawings from the event is above. I was surprised that I was able to draw at all. I was having a bit of dizziness at this point.

There was more show to go on in Cocoa Beach the next morning. So stayed at my father’s and headed to the next event – the Pitts Wedding – in Cocoa Beach Saturday morning. Got a chance to also collect information around the event location for future needs for Swampy’s Florida. Above is a photo from the wedding I performed.

After a night at my friend Jim Fern’s house, i had a much needed meeting with Tim Reynolds of The Knowledge Exchange about upcoming Swampy’s Florida projects. That same day was Free Comic Book Day and free Swampy’s Florida comics were distributed to Famous Faces and Funnies in Melbourne.

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Headed home in my father’s car Sunday from The Knowledge Exchange meeting and discovered the problem my father’s car has. Losing water suddenly. I had to pull over a number of times to refill water into the reservoir. The first stop had a HUGE help of the fellow above, Michael Gotti. Michael happened to be bicycling by as I pulled over to figure out what to do. He helped me get water into the car and then did something I would never have done – Find a spicket on the building where I stopped and refilled the storage container with water. Can’t thank Michael enough!

Later my cousin, who works at the Florida Turnpike’s Okahumpka Rest area, also helped get water in my father’s car. By then i was pretty good with getting water in the car. 🙂

The next few days had me heading back to the tow lot to get my car out. Thankfully the car started and the Allstate agent was extremely cooperative in helping me get the car out of the lot and to Apopka to start the process of getting the car looked over and repaired. Muffler Man of Apopka, Complete Auto Repair came to the rescue – again – for the car. A thorough investigation came up with the definite need for an alignment. The trouble with doing that was that other work, exacerbated by the accident, had to be done first.

Finally got my car back Wednesday and was able to head home. But I took the backroads. I prefer those anyway. Even more after the week’s ordeal.