Creating the Taxi Trailer Painting

By Jay | Published: 05/09/2013

This post documents the creation of a watercolor painting based on a double trailer I saw wheeling naked Ford Escape taxis through Hoboken. This will be the largest painting to date in my Trucks series. Updates are in reverse chronological order.

May 9th, 2013
I’m glad to finally get back to working on this picture. I wanted to execute a couple smaller watercolor paintings before starting on the double trailer. Last December I finished the 14″ Dump truck and I’m putting finishing touches on the 28″ Pipe trailer pictured here. Both are pen, watercolor and colored pencil on stretched 140lb Arches paper.

I created engineering drawings of both trucks in Illustrator and printed them out at 10% black, giving me a skeleton to draw and paint atop. The gif below shows both my vector drawing and my final painting.

I’ll be creating vector art for the Taxi picture also and it will include drawings of all the Ford Escapes. I plan to make one taxi drawing and clone it for the 9 spots on the trailer. This will space them out well and they’ll be a consistent size. I found this side view on the NYC gov site “Taxi of Tomorrow”.

February 23th, 2012
I stitched together the photos of the taxi trailer. There’s a total of 9 cabs.

October 14th, 2011
I was outside the studio in October of 2011 when a double trailer full of taxis drove up Jackson Street. They were probably bound for New York City but their lack of decals made it unclear. They were bright yellow Ford Escape “Clean Taxis” loaded onto a cobalt blue double trailer. I saw it from a block away and ran up the street to intercept it at a stop light. The NJ Transit light rail train stopped traffic long enough for me to snap a series of pictures spanning the full length of the truck.

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Mancala Games

By Jay | Published: 03/28/2013

Mancala is an ancient counting game based on the agricultural practice of sowing seeds. It is traditionally played with stones and wooden cups but here are a few digital versions:


Awele/Oware- Mancala uses a photo-realistic background of a large wooden Mancala board. This iOS game allows one or two players to compete.


Mancala FS5 is an iOS game with different skins for the game board, including the jewelry box seen here.


Mancala Snails: This version includes instructional levels to help understand the mechanics of the game. Unfortunately the stones are rendered as yellow snails and the uniform color across the board makes it difficult to count how many pieces are in each cup.


Novel Games Mancala has a rainbow colored set of stones, making things a bit easier to count. But turn down the volume. The music loop will have you pulling your hair out.

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The Animated Doodles of Dan Berry

By Jay | Published: 03/13/2013

Here’s a cute music video for Jim Guthrie’s “The Rest is Yet to Come”. Artist Dan Berry made a panoramic background with simple animations of watercolor drawings. The result is a slow pan across a landscape of musicians, leaves and fire.

He provides a peek at his process by posting pictures of the video in various stages of production. His main software tools are Photoshop and After Effects, along with a good scanner and watercolor paper.

Dan Berry hosts a podcast where he speaks with cartoonists and others about their creative process. It’s called “Make It Then Tell Everybody” and is available on iTunes.

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Drawing in Hoboken

By Jay | Published: 03/10/2013

The Impala in front of Carlo's Bake Shop
I’ve drawn Carlo’s Bakery in Hoboken a couple of times. The “Cake Boss” is right across from City Hall and there are benches facing into the street. Usually my pictures will include the crowd of people waiting to get into the little bake shop, but on this day I found an old Impala much more interesting.

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The Labyrinth in the Tube

By Jay | Published: 02/27/2013

Photograph: David Levene for the Guardian


In celebration of the 150th anniversary of the London Underground, artist Mark Wallinger was commissioned to create artwork for all 270 stations of the Tube. He developed a series of enamel painted labyrinths, bringing together many classic circular labyrinths into a common visual language of solid black and white, with a red “X” as a start and end point.

This video contains an interview with Wallinger as well as a glimpse of the production process.
A labyrinth differes from a maze in that there are no dead ends and there is just one way in and one way out. I have been exploring the form, drawing both labyrinths and mazes in sketchbooks over the past couple years. It is a relaxing meditative practice, and encourages seeing of the entire page as an overall space, with the path traveling across every inch of the page. It’s encouraging seeing this often disregarded art form taking center stage in a public space.

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Solving puzzles in “The Heist”

By Jay | Published: 01/21/2013


The Heist is a beautifully designed collection of different puzzles for iOS . It contains four puzzle types, most consisting of sliding pieces. The structure of the puzzles will be familiar to many users because they borrow elements from other games, such as ThinkFun’s Rush Hour and square sliding tile toys. But the game is rendered so beautifully that it brings it all to a higher visual level, making it satisfying both to the mind and the eye.

As you proceed in the game the puzzles get more challenging, but you may jump from different types whenever you’d like. Ultimately you need to solve a full set of puzzles to unlock the “vault”, opening up yet another set of exercises for your brain. Available for iPhone and iPad.

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