I took the night off last night. I went with my friend Paulette Elkind (a fabulous make-up artist) to a lecture by a new author, Sil Lai Abrams. She was introducing her new book "No More Drama". I took notes around my constant doodling. Here's a picture of Sil Lai:

Sure we had heard similar ideas before - things like practice love, humility, and charity. But SilLai felt a need to spend her time really focusing on that. She had a good way with words. And she was speaking/writing with real integrity. Life gets so complicated. Sil Lai's simplified process of starting with The Truth of any situation, and then going on to Acceptance Action Commitment Focus and Faith - We walked out feeling empowered and happy.

Graffitti. It's finally sinking in. That we don't just get the feel of the letters we are going to write and then write it. It needs a predraw - to figure out changes in the letters depending on the word and the space.

Here's the word 'train' that I wrote with a new style of Graffitti that Elgin Bolling recently dreamed up:

There are so many wonderful people in this world. An appreciative client just sent me the following two photos from her daughter's recent Sweet 16. And I'm so impressed with the photographer too!

When I take the photos, I just click my camera - hoping to at least get the person and the picture in the photo. And I have trouble with a time lag - even if I wait for the appropriate expression, the camera pauses between the button press and the image acquisition anyway. But here, I see that the photographer really managed to photograph the same thing I was seeing when I drew the pictures:

I enjoyed my gigs this past weekend. I like my life.

Saturday I worked upstate. The ride going up was beautiful with the trees changing color this time of year.

I was drawing very well at the event. Right on likenesses, pretty pictures. But it was freezing out there. He didn't have a very big turnout. So when some boys came back for second pictures even though they liked the first ones just fine, I obliged. Didn't feel I had to work so hard this time, since they already got pictures, so I just took out brightly colored markers instead of the usual black markers. I drew easily, without a predraw. Yes! I remember this technique! Such a painless way to make finished pictures!

Sunday, I worked 2 parties. The first one was a huge Wedding Shower on Staten Island - I had been hired specifically to do just black/whites. The second one was a 60th Birthday Party in Wading River. I do not usually take one-hour parties, but since this woman agreed to pay my two-hour rate, I agreed to work a one-hour party.

At the first party, I drew as easily as the day before. I used a black marker with gray shading, as the client requested. That combination makes it look real tuxedo.

At the 2nd party - the one-hour party - I had planned on my own to do black/white line-only (no shading. To make one-hour seem like something. But having had the experience with the colored markers the day before, I ended up making most of the pictures in color anyway. It went just as fast as black/white because I just used a colored marker in place of the black marker. Sometimes I was satisfied with the pictures just like that. Usually I added just a touch more color or shading.

I didn't take the camera out with me this weekend. I don't plan on taking more photos until I post some of the thousands that I have piling up here.