Archive for the ‘Portfolio’ Category
Sneaking
Sunday, February 14th, 2010Desktop image: sunset gradient
Tuesday, October 27th, 2009To prepare for launch, pull the lap bar toward you.
Wednesday, September 16th, 2009Egress or Ingress? But I digress…
Monday, August 17th, 2009Tonight’s story on The Twilight Zone is somewhat unique and calls for a different kind of introduction. This as you may recognize is a maintenance service elevator, still in operation, waiting for you.

While not the same image you may see on the attraction from which this quote comes, my sketch of a door drifting into a starry field certainly brings the scene to mind.
The illustration is ink & blue highlighter on 3-inch-square “sticky note”.
Tree Hill
Friday, July 31st, 2009Rhetorical Question Mark
Sunday, June 28th, 2009I was thinking about how the written word sometimes doesn’t quite convey the manner of speaking intended by the writer. Consider this sentence:
That “a bit ‘O home” may sound to the ears of those on the review board as somewhat uneducated hadn’t occurred to me but, what the heck, what’s done is done.
Of course the whole of the English Language is a hot mess ( [dialogue], [wiki] ); but as I see it what the heck is a sort of rhetorical question. Would a special mark help the reader? Probably not, but it was fun to design one anyway:

Introducing: The Rhetorical Question Mark
With my new invention (©2009 Mike Figueroa) you can craft sentences with rhetorical questions all you like, pretty neat huh 
All this silly/serious talk reminds me of Victor Borge, awesome as he is:
Serengeti-type markerscape
Thursday, June 25th, 2009Zombie princess!
Friday, June 12th, 2009Gnomish Treestump Fireplace
Tuesday, June 2nd, 2009Once & some time ago, while dreaming up other things, an image came to mind of very little folk living in a damp and ancient wood. I wondered about the sort of ways these tiny forest masters might make their homes, and how they would spend their time.
I did a few quick (and now lost) sketches, imagining these little gnomish fellows at a variety of tasks:
- Mending a mouse’s broken tail,
- Placing a baby finch in a grass-weave basket and carrying him back up to the nest from which it fell,
- Collecting wild berries and leaves,
- Helping possums to set up traps (presumably to ward off wild cats).
But there was one activity that seems to me both idyllic and daft. I thought, “Perhaps they may like a fireplace to gather around.” Yet, in the stead of perhaps more conventional building materials such as stones, I sketched them using something more unexpected: wood, by way of a felled tree’s stump.
I wanted to explore the concept, so I started with someone’s very nice drawing of a tree stump I found online:

Then, I added lines on top to visualize what it might look like:

I also made a small excercise of the idea in clay:
Now you’re probably thinking it unwise; or that it may be a short-lived actvitity to place a flame inside of a tree’s stump. I can only think they would not do so if it didn’t work quite well, so spare your naysaying should you happen upon such a chimney.







