In the years that Julie has been a mom my cards have usually depicted Milo either incubating inside her or in the process of emerging from womb. This year, as Milo nears the age when he will regularly attend school (and as he becomes generally more independent) Julie and I will perhaps soon be able to resume a portion of our old life together. I see our love as for each other as having the potential to be reborn but forever changed by the process of having become parents.

On Valentine’s Day morning we went to a new little coffee shop in our neighborhood called Steeplechase. Located on the outskirts of Kensington just before Brooklyn spreads out with Greenwood Cemetery on one side and fast food chains and auto body shops on the other, they have great coffee and pastries and it’s not too crowded. The barista was a pleasantly slackerish fellow. Apparently Brooklyn is so hipster-saturated that now they even live and work the Kensington hinterlands. Remarkable. Julie and I got caffienated. Milo got hopped up on blueberry muffins. Then we hunkered down and set to work, to the sounds of tastefully generic indie-pop, on this collaborative valentine:

This was a collaborative Mother’s Day card by me & Julie. Julie in red, me in black.

Not a typical Mom’s Day card, but she’s not a typical mom! Note Milo with balls spelling “Mother’s” and Frank in his Prius.

I am in the primitive stages of learning After Effects. Julie suggested that a good way to dive in would be to take one of our collaborative drawings and make it move, so that’s what I did. Here is the first in what will hopefully be a series of one-minute improvs.

Remember when you were in school and you would draw the names of your favorite bands all over your notebook? Well, I couldn’t sleep last night but I also couldn’t will myself to work on any of the multitude of things I should have been working on…so I regressed to my adolescence and made a fanboy doodle. Probably not many of the same names I would have put in when I was 15, but some are the same, certainly. Size and boldness generally reflects importance, but not entirely consistently. Also, I ran out of room or just plain forgot a lot of names. It was late, gimme a break.

Well, not really. I’ve been frantically busy…but most of it has been work I’m getting little or no $ for. Anyway, I HAVE been lazy when it comes to this blog, and since finishing the work for my show with Julie, I haven’t made any more garbage bag paintings. Hopefully I will soon. In the meantime, here’s another illustration from Elliot & The Goblin War:

Me luvs me wifey.

Deadlines and other obstacles have conspired to keep me from my daily drawings, so for the next few days I’ll be running Father’s Day drawings by my lovely and talented wife:

Things got hectic near the end of last week and I had scanner problems so I was unable to post the rest of the series. So I’m doing it this week: