drawing as entertainment

This picture was taken in April of 1991.

The skinny redhead with the marker in hand is me, age...er, just turned 9.


I discovered early that people are fascinated by artists. whenever you see a caricature booth at a fair or someplace, there is usually a crowd gathered behind the artist watching him create. artists like Winsor McCay used this to their financial gain with "lightning sketches" acts in vaudeville in the beginning of the century, and other artists later developed the "chalk talk," like this gentleman, Rev. Phil Saint, whom I met in 1992-ish, a year before he died at 80.this drawing was probably done in 15-ish minutes, with chalks on a cloth surface that could be erased afterwards. he was 50% colorblind, and had to have an assistant lay out the colors in order on the tray and memorized where they were, but looking at his paintings, you wouldn't know he was at all colorblind:
He actually attended the same art school as my own private art intructor of 10 years- they were classmates and friends. She actually taught some classes in "chalk-talk" techniques, one of which I took.

I still enjoy using the drawing process as a form of entertainment. When i know someone is watching me draw, i will try to surprise them by the things i do. I might create a tension by keeping the subject a mystery, drawing vague shapes and tying it together at the last minute so it suddenly makes sense, or i might draw a "normal" picture and at the last minute add a minor detail to make it humorous or bizarre, like drawing a bugs bunny head, and then placing it on a plate in a waiters hand, things like that. the surprise on the viewers face always tickles me.

It is just interesting to me how spellbinding a simple drawing can be when it is in the process of being created- the mystery of "what is it", the magic of creating images on a flat surface, all seem to hold an undeniable fascination....

...apparently even when it is a bad line drawing of YMCA building and a bicycle (i used to struggle with the construction of a bicycle when i was young- so many bars going every direction!). But hey, what can you expect from a 9-year-old with a brown Marks-a-lot?

a parade of sketches

this last november i went to see my kid brother play clarinet for marching band in a local parade known as the King Frost Parade.

To avoid dying of boredom, i took a sketchpad to draw people who were standing around waiting for the parade to pass them by.

My sister brought her camera and caught me in the act.

I cut a picturesque and dashing figure, no?

no? well, let's move on to the sketches then.
Most of these were pretty quick and rough, so i wouldn't get caught staring at people.

there were plenty of fat chicks smoking, and a number of punks with green mohawks riding skateboards around in the street.


fat men with windblown comb-overs, more fat chicks smoking (and drinking), a hispanic man with a stupendous mullet...


a twinkling old man smiled nicely for this picture, and at the bottom of the sheet is a depiction of an actual event. a little boy with an over-sized blow-up hammer was hitting his dad in the butt with it while he tried to set up a lawn chair for granny.

and there was a shivvering woman who wore odd pants that were slit up the sides and laced together like leg-shoes. the other person is an old man who stepped out of a restaurant as the shriners drove by in their tin lizzies, then went back inside where it was warm. (smarter than he looks- or at least smarter than me!)


The rest of these sketches are just pages from the sketchbook i most recently filled up. there are drawing from church, and wherever else I happened to carry a pencil and pad.
I drew this in an attempt to gross out a sibling who was watching over my shoulder as the picture took shape. GAG! what a shape!


Below is an odd mix of sketches that shows the abstract way my mind wanders while I scribble.











And these are some sketches I did after This Post got me thinking about Bigfoot, and wondering "what if Big Foot was actually a giant foot?"


Then i thought of that stupid penguin movie...

and sharing the space is a less-than-jolly old elf.

patterns

on a 4-5 hour road trip to New York, one must keep one's mind occupied or sleep. I chose the former for once, and instead of the usual cartoon doodles or sketches, i decided to bend my brain in a different direction. see how many levels of complexity are derived from this mass of triangles. if you're color-blind, there are probably not as many patterns in this design as the rest of us see. If i had a larger paper, I might have continued the pattern that began here, which would have resulted in even more complex patterns all interwoven...but we got to our destination before I went completely mad.

creature

Peace on Earth

Merry Christmas to all, friends and enemies alike!

bunny trails

today I was doodling on a telephone note pad, just idly exploring graphic shapes, and as ideas emerged, I expanded to a larger drawing, and a complete character design eventually resulted. this is that story. All names have been changed to protect the innocent.

While watching Woody Woodpecker cartoons, I had a little spark of an ideas in my brain, and grabbing the nearest scrap of paper, I began to scribble. I started with a couple loose drawings of a wolf biting a large bone, then, wondering what the body would look like, I drew a pair of legs on another paper, and from there, sort of "bunny trailed" along, scrapping the wolf, and re-building the drawing, first with the legs, then a pair of crossed arms, and finally a head. On a larger paper, I traced the separate elements to make a rough estimation of the whole. Seeing the overall effect of these graphic elements, which had been designed for their shapes rather than based on anatomy or even traditional cartoon construction, I then set about figuring out how to construct that graphic shape with actual anatomical features in a more solidly constructed fashion. once this was accomplished to my satisfaction, I traced over this cartoony skeleton the details of fur, eyes, etc.My initial sketch was a definite improvement but this was not satisfactory. The body was pretty much how I wanted it, but I didn't like the way the hands and head looked, so, having scanned this draft, I used photoshop to push the shapes around, moving the neck back to where it would look like it joined the body more naturally, and tilted the head so it better flowed along the line of action of the rest of the body.

This I recreated on a second piece of paper with my pencils, then scanned again so I could blow it up, as the fingers still troubled me due to the small size of the drawing. printing out a larger copy of this third draft, I traced over again, and replaced the fingers until they were acceptable. then i inked and colored the final draft. Whaddya think of the final product? I think it has potential...

gross layout- stretching my long-dormant painting muscles

perhaps i was overconfident, or just feeling brave, but last week i attempted to reach beyond myself and grasp at the stars... or at least a couple distant planets known as Milt Gross and Art Lozzi.

The original art, courtesy of Milt Gross:

My first attempt at this combination of a Milt Gross drawing with a HB bg painting style was
rather rough:
I lost the original forms- all the shapes turned to mush after a couple layers of paint were slathered on too hastily, and the brushwork left much to be desired. But it gave me a general idea what colors i wanted to use, and i used this as a reference on my second go-around. This time i selectively added textures to the painting. the long brush strokes are a bit shaky since the painting is only on a standard-sized paper, but overall, the results were more satisfactory.


after I finished, I retraced the characters in pencil and placed them on top with colors to see if they read properly against the painting. judge the results for yourselves.


interestingly, the composition of the drawing changed dramatically without the speech bubbles crowded in the upper left quadrant of the picture.

well, If I get to feeling REALLY audacious, I might have to record dialogue and animate this as a short scene!

The Jay and Brock Show

A buddy of mine from college who is a radio DJ sent me a message the other day asking if I could
make a caricature of him and his co-host. Naturally I said yes.

Here are some pictures of them I used for reference: And my first rough sketches, pencilings,and inkings:

spidey and a caricature

I have several sketches i took a at a parade, but I'm feeling too tired to scan them all right now, so this is what you get: a caricature of one of my friends, and a sketch of Spider-man.

I Left my Art in San Fransisco...

Okay, not really, but I have certainly been slacking off in the visual department, mostly due to my being in Thespian Mode as opposed to DaVinci Mode. Last month I auditioned for a part in a local theater, and in preparation for that audition, I was spending more time brushing up my acting chops than I spent brushing paint on canvas or brushing eraser crumbs off the pages of my sketchbook. I did take the sketchbook to my audition to give me something to do in the time that I was not otherwise engaged, but ended up with only a couple drawings, as during most of my free time I chose to peruse a volume of the Complete Peanuts Collection I had brought with me. However, since then I have gotten to do a few pieces of "art," but mostly of a more graphical nature, in the form of some poster designs for a coffeehouse event that I am involved with in church.

Here then are those poster designs, as well as a sketch from the audition.
yeah, I know, this is a pretty half-hearted attempt. I promise to do something better for next time!