January 2010 Archives

Back Octoberish, at the Gargoyle Centennial weekend, my pal Adrian Choy was passing around a piece of bristol to the artists in the room, getting us to pencil in some characters. Besides me, Cathy Fisher and a few other folks did some, too.

I drew exactly four characters, all of whom should be terribly obvious to anyone who's browsed the gallery here.

NOTE: The below illustration contains nudity and crude humor. Please do not click it if you do not enjoy these things.

Adrian did a beautiful job with the inking and coloring, as usual. Apparently this is the back cover to the latest issue of the Gargoyle, too!

Watercolor and ink. 2.5" x 3.5".

A friend's cat has an important business to run.

You may not be aware, but Neil Gaiman recently had a fairly public ordeal involving his little cat Zoe, who had cancer. He had her put down on Monday. I follow the gentleman on Twitter and read his blog because he's an author whom I like, and the whole sad affair with Zoe resonated with me profoundly. I have been in the same place so many more times than I ever wanted to be.

So I drew this on the back of a postcard and sent my consolations to him. Because it felt like the right thing to do, even though I don't know him. I'm not sure if it's creepy or if it's weird, but I thought the drawing might convey the kind of understanding that words can't. So off it went.

I really wish I'd brought the Polaroid with me on my winter holiday, because the results would have been a lot less anticlimactic than the actual first Polaroids of the new year.

I was trying to take a picture of the artist trading cards on the Polaroid first, but for reasons unknown to me, it malfunctioned and spit two pictures at me instead. They are abominations:

And since I hadn't taken a picture of the dog for a while, here is Sadie.

I think some of my gentle readers may not realize exactly how tiny the artist trading cards are. So here is a photograph to assist you:

The images as they appear on your screen are actual size, basically. Painting in acrylics at this size is a challenge.

I meant to finish this last year for a friend who was studying abroad in Australia, but it just never got done for some reason. But now here it is! Platypuses may be adorable, but they are poisonous, like every other animal in Australia.

Acrylic on canvas. 2.5" x 3.5".

Happy guinea pig.

Acrylic on canvas. 3.5" x 2.5".

Acrylic on canvas. 2.5" x 3.5".

A friend on deviantART posted this challenge: draw ten different dog breeds and make them look distinct. Her reasoning is that a lot of people draw one kind of dog and that's it.

I know I draw a lot of pit bulls and I draw Dalton (a bull terrier) basically constantly, so let's try to remember the differences between those and eight other breeds with minimal or no reference.

I wound up using a reference for the poodle and the English mastiff. And to check whether Boston terriers had tails. Everything else was from memory.

I finally caved and got a Tumblr for posting all the dumb/awesome stuff I find on the Internet (and in real life (but mostly on the internet)) without feeling obligated to write useful commentary about it.

Subscribe to it and enjoy.

The "Finds" category will still be operational here, but it will only be used when I don't feel like exercising my skills in brevity.

Depressingly, Art Clokey, the creator of Gumby, died this morning. As a kid I was completely crazy about Gumby: I had the Gumby board game, a bendy Gumby doll that I took in the bath tub (which I think rusted the wires in it because it eventually stopped being bendy), smaller Gumby and Pokey figurines, and this one VHS tape of Gumby cartoons ("Gumby and the Moon Boggles") that I watched over and over again.

From that tape, in honor of Mr. Clokey, here is my favorite childhood Gumby episode, "Mystic Magic":

I'm actually not entirely sure why that one appealed to me so much. Not much of a story there! But it did include the terrifying prospect of accidentally transforming all your friends into inanimate objects, at least.

And Prickle! Prickle was my favorite Gumby character.

Now I think it's time we all also watched "Robot Rumpus" again:

Scene that will appear in the distant future of Dalton.

Kinda also want to make a painting of this.

In case you wanted nightmares tonight.

I'm pretty sure there was a conversation that led up to the mouths-for-eyes guy, but I don't remember who it was with.

The swarm inside the horse at the bottom is a character for Dalton. His name is Nicholas.

It has been raining ash for one hundred days straight. The bears are not doing well.

I'm back home, and I've got a mean case of the post-vacation blues. There are two different ways to gauge how much I've enjoyed a given trip: how unbitten my fingernails look right before leaving, and how crappy I feel when I get home. Those fingernails were lookin' great before I went back to work.

I had a pretty excellent time. Saw family I hadn't seen since last year, met up with a friend in Michigan for an evening of drunken fun in East Lansing, and then took off for Toronto to see my friend Sam, who is always a delight (and his family is so lovely putting up with me, such wonderful people). Due to the way the weekends and holidays fell this year, everything was unfortunately cut a little short, but I had a superlative adventure regardless. We went to a burlesque show on New Year's Eve instead of just getting roaring drunk, and it was the best thing ever. Ribald entertainment! My favorite kind!

Sam got a new LOMO camera for Christmas and consequently he took a ton of cool-looking photos while I was there (including the one above). Check 'em out. The fisheye kind of makes it look like my eyes are trying to wander off the sides of my head in a couple of these, but the effect is pretty rad. I probably should have brought along the Holga or the Polaroid, but I was a little strapped for space in my luggage as it was.

So I had a great time. You may be wondering what my New Year's resolutions were, but I don't really believe in making them, so you will need to be disappointed in that regard. But here's to a new year and a new decade, hopefully vastly improved over the last one.