The 37th view of Mount Fuji

I went to Hawaii this past weekend for the Eddie Aikau Big Wave Contest. I didn't win.
I also stopped by the Honolulu Academy of the Arts. They were having a special display of Ukiyoe woodblock prints from Hokusai and HIroshige, including all 36 prints in the 36 views of Mt. Fuji series. You might not know the series by name but you have probably seen the images.





When I got back to Los Angeles, I was inspired to draw my own view of Mr. Fuji. So here is the 37th view of Mt. Fuji. It's not a wood block print. It was done with gouache and scrap paper. I'm the person in the back of the airplane, in row 37 seat E. If you look closely, you can see that I am playing sudoku. You have to look really, really closely.




Also, here is a video of the raw footage of the giant waves at Waimea bay on December 7th 2009.

King Kong and Godzilla on Vacation

This morning while I was surfing I was thinking about monsters again. I think about monsters a lot. I was thinking mostly about King Kong and also a little bit about Godzilla. I was wondering what their hobbies are.
Usually you can only see them running around stomping on things with their big monster feet. That is their job, but after work, maybe they play baseball, or surf, or look at their stamp collection.
The waves today were only 2-3 ft (1 meter). They would be too small for Godzilla and King Kong. They would only come up to King Kong's monkey toe. Kong and Godzilla would need 60 foot waves just to surf head high. There are only a few places in the world with waves that big, and they only break a few times each year. So, King Kong and Godzilla would have to travel all over the world and neither of them can fly, and they are too big to fit in a 747 and too poor to buy a ticket anyway. They would have to swim and by the time they got to the spot, the waves might have gotten smaller, or they might be too tired and cold.
They would also need a 60 foot surfboard, or maybe 90 feet if they wanted a longboard. It would take a lot of trees or fiberglass to make it. They would have to hire a lot of people to build it, and neither of them have a job because of the recession.

Sometime I make a list with two columns "why I want to be a monster"and "why I don't want to be one". This is one of the reasons why I would not want to be a monster.