Ghosts of Wrestling Past

Looming in my mind.

Partially Accidental Wrestlers

It's hard to ignore wrestling entirely. After all, I hadn't even really got around to properly drawing LAST year's Wrestlemania.

Also, I rather like drawing things I've drawn lots of times before... it feels richer than faffing about with new novelties every week... It's building upon previous hours of gloriously pointless studying.

Because I have drawn them so much, wrestler-like entities crop up in my doodles without my really intending it. Accidental wrestlers account for at least 66% of my output.





I was rather inspired by a thread on UK Fan Forum called 'draw a wrestler in MS Paint'. The innocent efforts of internet wrestling fans spurred me on.



































































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Let's all have a nice Melt

I feel so uncomfortably exposed putting my learning drawings up, it's like exposing my naked intestines to hungry parrots.

So here are some distracting other unblogged lumps of unfocused pseudo-erumpence

The old enemy Orton doodled while on telephone









Elmer Elephant has a bounce, possibly followed by a stroke and a melt









Love innocent cartoon Elephants... I have the soul of one inside a cat called Hal.





NB my scanner is just old and worn out. I must replace it with a youthful one. It's a little bit sad.

Mike Brian Dennis Carl Al Batista Randy and Leppy the Leopard

Mixing up Beach Boys and Leonardo's grotesques... will lead me somewhere





Also continuing to study said boys as part of my warming up. Dennises less good than Brians, but still got something of him in them.





Then I found an old drawing of Batista. And finished it with new lines.





But wrestlers made my life too easy with all their extraneous lumps. They already looked otherworldly. That's cheating.

















It's always hard planning leopards.

Scary Ass Paintings from the Wrestling Phase

I just sort of... sort of finished this Ric Flair based painting, started a couple of years back. Feel ambivalent about it. Very weird perverse palette, with cadmium red purple and light kings blue. The face is good. I found it hard to make the rest harmonious. Maybe it was never meant to be.





And with similar raw wet on wet pinkness, here is a painting featuring Randy Orton and Chris Benoit, done before the unpleasant end of the latter. I was reluctant to even show this to anyone because of the kind of darkness it brings to mind.





On a more light and lovely note, I posted a myspace blog about the drawings of J.H. Dowd... click the picture for more...

Going back to boring

Here are some drawings that have been done for a while but that didn't make the blog because of being the first stage, the conservative drawing, the boring drawing, not fun enough, etc. Just studies. Just doodles. Just learning. No particular place to go. Unfocused. Likenesses only loosely grasped.

But I was looking at some of them and thinking, they're not so bad.






Besides, I'm thinking in terms of getting more subtle, rather than getting more wild and crazy. Retracting my claws. Retreating to a state of measured moderate centredness in order to find the truth that way.





I quite like Beatrix Potter at the moment. And her scientific naturalism and love of fungus.









This next one's a mess. But sometimes, mess is what one makes.





Gosh, aren't I chaotic. It won't do. Still there's just so much nice stuff to look at in the world. It's not easy to decide.





Here is one of my last wrestler studies. Randy's uglier inner qualities are seeping out increasingly.





I've actually cancelled my Sky Sports subscription and am on a break from watching wrestling. I have broken up with it. Still, I have plenty of material still if my ambivalence lets up.

Here's when I suspended my judgments and tried to look anew at these two faces. I had been overly mean to John and overly kind to the other one, possibly. There are lots of aspects to a face. It's almost like they're alive.





Here's Katie the moon scientist before she was pink.





'Hair not pretty' I wrote.





Here's Bob having fun in zero gravity and having no boundaries.





Note the Rex rabbit 'studies' in this one.





Meditations on a waxed sex monster. These drawings often threatened to become something obscene and riddled with rudeness. But I never quite went there. That would be... a niche.





So I shall make a nicer taste by leaving the last word to Jeremy Fisher. In this picture I identify with Jeremy. Jeremy is me, or perhaps you, and the stickleback represents all the scary things in life.





NB. sorry if any of these have actually been blogged before. It's hard to remember everything. They're all familiar to me, but I hope it's from real life and not from prior blogging.