Drawings made of lines (slight kitty emphasis)

Well, my line drawings seem to be the backbone of this blog so to speak. People don't seem to mind so much what they're of. Nothing else seems to get any comments. So here are some I've done, along with bits of their oddball missmatched stories.

I suppose the only somewhat running theme is an effort to integrate more kitties and leaping, because I'm planning a painting with a big monumental leaping kitty.





It's all too easy to turn John Cena into a sort of voodoo chinese gaping monkeyliger.

Or an overly chin oriented cliche Disneyish man lion. But I haven't included my worst drawing sins.





Here's some more straightforward kitty action.

I have found cat anatomy far less 'intuitive' to grasp than human anatomy. I'm not sure if that might be an entirely instinctive issue. Also soft furry cats have less graphic lumps and softer corners than chemically enchanced oily megamen.









Here things got a bit sinister. This could almost go into the 'macabre' subsection in Deviantart. Oh dear.





I had quite cute idea about kitties emerging from triceps, but I didn't get around to rendering the joyous cute version of it.

This next one is a drawing I did of my Dad's head on a day when I hadn't eaten or drunk anything at all at two o clock in the afternoon because I was going to have a gasteroscopy. I was a bit lightheaded and made him look like 30s Clark Kent or somesuch.





Meanwhile no-reference Randy was sulking because I had neglected him and was (unsuccessfully for now) attempting to draw Brian Wilson and his brothers.





And some hastily photoshop coloured formally dressed anger management lions were also a little bit miffed at not being drawn nice and neatly but rather in a manic frenzy indicative of an unquiet mind.





Meanwhile the clench jawed Cena lions were still struggling to shake off the cheezy Disneyfication of chin which was hampering their efforts to be taken seriously as artistes.





Then some of them ended up looking a bit like they had a mask on over their real face... I quite like that idea.





Meanwhile Randy still thinks he's pretty damn sexy despite the fact I've been studiously ignoring him.





Or abstracting him into nonspecific balloon pleasure boy





In this next one, you can see a poor drawing of Dennis Wilson's playful head in the bottom right quadrant. Something may yet come of this. It takes a while for me to get confident with certain faces and find a place for them in my currently active mythology.





But really it's all about the kitties, and struggling fruitlessly with them. Yay!

A tribute to my cats

I was going to post drawings, but I thought I'd stall and post some cats. I wouldn't want to get repetitive with all the wrestlers and the bats and all. Punctuate it a bit.

Maybe it's wet and soppy to talk about my cats. But they are a daily part of my life, for now they are my family in fact, and they are my only company during the day. I feel very close to them and I often worry about what might become of them if Bob and/or I have to move away. It's probably a silly worry. I worry, but I am working on it.

This is Joyce. She is the mother of the other two. She is very neurotic and possibly has cat obsessive compulsive disorder. She washes herself a lot. She's quite a tiny kitty. She likes eating person food, even if it makes little sense. She's upwardly mobile. Last night she chose to eat broccoli instead of corned beef.









Stephen is the favoured son, in that he gets wapped round the face by Joyce less often than his brother. Everyone loves Stephen. He is a massive, humungous barrel chested fat glossy bastard of a cat. He has the softest fur and ears in the world and he's so inky black that he's quite hard to photograph. He is extremely good natured and easy to get along with. He has emotional intelligence and therapeutically tactile stomach flab.









Then there is Hal, who is one of the most singular life-forms I have ever met. He was the runt of the litter, but he's not that much smaller than Stephen, he just has tiny ears and a skinny tail.





Hal spends all the time he can outside in the garden amongst nature, because he finds human things like doors and carpets scary and unpredictable. In the spring he sits and stares at a single flower for six hours at a time. He always knows when we're talking about him, even when we don't mention his name. He lets us know this by giving a unique squeaky staccato miaow. He has a exceptionally varied range of vocal expression, possibly because he doesn't really understand that he's a cat.

In fact, we had a theory at one point that he might not be a cat, he might be an owlbear.

he shakes his paws a lot and walks as though literally walking on eggshells. He has flaky skin and nipple crusts and scaly paws, and is technically a mutant, but may have the prettiest face of all the cats. You can see his soul knocking about inside.





Here's Hal on the left and Stephen on the right:





Here are Joyce and Stephen being affectionate on Bob's lap.

I think Stephen knows when he's being photographed and poses.





We were given the cats to look after when we lived in Brighton, city of posers and assymmetric hair decadence. It was originally going to be a temporary arrangement, so the names were only going to be temporary names. But they were the names that felt right.

I love them and value them a lot. It feels good for my soul to be friends with animals. They are a wonderful part of my life during this stretch of youthful semi-settledness.

Drawings and all that will follow.

P.S. Thank you Eddie for writing about me, and thank you the people who commented, that really made my day.

Escher Cheekbones and Heinous Seepage

I’ve kind of finished the infernal dragon. That’s that out the way.

(Click on any of today’s image for a larger version on Flickr. And you could even leave a comment there if you like. But if push comes to shove, I prefer comments here on blogger.)





In the last stages of this mixed media monstrosity, I used a lot of white lines with a thin brush and this stuff called liquid paper. I wrote a little note that said ‘white lines connected to my mind’. I could feel this an exciting little development that I will carry forward to the pictures wot I care about that have both grappling and nature in them.

I don’t normally do this, but here’s the photoshop mock-up that I used as the basis for the dragon painting, and liberties have been taken with perspective and picture fragments. It’s not much of thing in itself, but it kind of signals a little bit where I want to go with my next paintings, a more playful and hands-on approach to pictorial space.







I had been neglecting my other duties to do that. My last week’s wrestler mushes were sitting there begging to be more understood and stuff. Begging to be taken to the extremes of draftswomanship!





Biro frenzy! Unfortunately it seems that biro tends to seep through even the most opaque applications of acrylic paint. Bum bums! Does anyone know of some kind of biro-esque wonderpen that would refrain from such heinous seepage?





Now in the more recent two bottom drawings above, I used some of the information from the biro frenzy ones but tried to filter a bit of likeness back in. Particularly in Randy’s face I began to think about Escher, about getting some optical mischief in there with the wonky cheekbone adventures. I’ve seen some technically spectacular caricatures that are immaculately constructed, and look like Spitting Image puppets, but part of me thinks… why do it like that, when drawing on a 2D plane gives you so much more freedom, freedom to indulge in a play between illusionism and pure linear kicks. I think the bottom two would almost be more suited to being cleaned up like proper cartoon characters and have the shading and the scribbling beaten out of them. Also I would add that I was trying to make Randy a little bit more smug and bastardy, like he is, and that Kurt has got a bit crude and ugly here. He has features that lend themselves to just getting massive. So I still have work to do.

My latest grey blog is entitled birds do not require punk spirit to experience the urgency of life
, you could read it if you want to boogie some more with my thoughts.