Over the weekend I worked on a scratchboard illustration of a general who lost several times in the Civil War and still ended up with a mountain range in Arizona named for him (along with a fort and a road):
The challenge: how to illustrate General McDowell as a loser without denigrating his character? Well, how about with a broken sword, and a riddled coat and his arm in a sling, but still standing defiantly? The McDowell Mountains near Scottsdale are studded with some of the most expensive homes in the U.S. with Steven Spielberg and other movie elites rumored to have houses in a pricey subdivision called Troon. Some irony in a mountain range named for a losing general ending up as a desert refuge for the mega-successful, eh?
On the way to "The Question Jar Show" featuring Mike Doughty on Saturday night, we encountered a dramatic nocturne sky with a brilliant moon breaking the edge of a spindly storm cloud. Got up Sunday and tried to capture it in a quick gouache study:
"It takes time to succeed because success is merely the natural reward of taking time to do anything well."
—Joseph Ross
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