Digital Babies last few months

 

(That last one is from last night)

Life drawings

Drawings of my life.

Dennis + Nelson: Nennis

What the heck, a post with ill-matched stuffstuff in it.

Let us all come to terms with the nineteen-sixties.

It will take me a little while to figure out firstly what I am doing with the Beach Boys, and secondly how to draw the Beach Boys better. But I am going to try and get my teeth into them as it were, because well, why not the Beach Boys, and I need to get my teeth into something instead of flitting from thing to thing... I need to get into stuff with depth and intent in order to get satisfying results.

The move back to Beach Boys is a return to something with soul-meaning for me, and I hope to be able to apply the body-meaning I learned from the wrestlers.

And to do it with some kind of dynamic humour, but also truth-depth, so I'm asking quite a lot of my self-taught little skills.

So obviously Dennis is a good place to start.





I had a dream about arm wrestling Dennis. And winning! I think my dreams were trying to give me picture ideas lately. I'm too ashamed of being an artist by day.









If you are not familiar with Beach Boys lore, I think it would be fair to say that Dennis was the Sex Beach Boy. I don't think any of the others would try to dispute that. Though in fairness, I am fairly sure that Brian would have been the Beach Boy I would have been crushing on. In fairness. Not just saying that because of hindsight. Dennis didn't sit down much. I couldn't have been doing with that. To be fair.

(Thought that paragraph could do with a couple more 'fairs'.)


















On a kind of related note, I also drew Nelson Bragg from Brian Wilson's current band. Because he has been very nice to me. Oh and he's a talented chap.





He looks slightly worried and slightly like a wuzzle-farmer in this drawing.

Here is a tiger of the old school.

Booby Lady

Here is Smiling Booby Lady II!





(I might change the title one day.)

She's a bit ghoulish, but she was mainly an excercise in using up paint.

Make it come true

I'm now trying to paint some 'beautiful paintings' that combine together all the best things I've learned from drawing lately. The kind of paintings that would be self-justifying, even if I never wrote blogs or tried to be clever. I have to think the word 'beautiful' to myself to make it come true.

But in the meantime here's a lady with awkward composition. I don't think she minds. Except she's lacking one of her eyes.

I think I unintentionally made her look a bit more like some of the female members of my immediate family than she oughta.

Elvis Looms In the Centre of Things

In this doodle you can kind of discern me trying to combine the sad leopards with the jumping boys.

Also in the middle perhaps you can spot Elvis, who's popped up to give me clues about how man faces and decorative beauty can be combined.





It's mixing things up in the right order that provides half the challenge...

Nature's Colour is Most Beautiful if we can but see and understand it

I haven't got a nice neat little collection of pictures today, partly because I'm trying so jolly hard to get better at everything. Yesterday following the suggestion of Bill Wray in the comments, I found these lovely mostly out-of-print books by Andrew Loomis, online in their entirety.

Originally I wanted instruction on perspective, but these books cover a lot more. Absorb! Wondrous free resources for those who crave knowledge!

Click on the image to find the rest of the book 'Creative Illustration':





I was thinking that maybe could write more on this blog about who and what I'm trying to learn from.... and why.

I like these books' extreme heterosexual male 50s-ness. I like that it's about 'commercial art'. It could bee seen to be a nice counterbalance for my silly-headed womanly English hippy tendencies.

I also like them because the author seems to genuinely care about teaching well.... communicating... in the clearest terms... but he has his own voice, he's not bland. I like it when people speak their own words.






Perhaps the only reason I ever didn't want to be 'an illustrator' was the crapness and mundanity of a lot the stuff I saw at illustration degree shows etc. Doing fine art seemed... well it's more glamorous, but that wasn't really it... it was more challenging, I could sense the frictions I was in for. Unfortunately they weren't so much sexy frictions as a nasty cultural labyrinth of poo, from which there seemed no escape.

Luckily now I have clear-headed mid twentieth century American chaps to help me into the land of sufficient competence. Screw postmodern cynicism, bugger ambiguity and 'interestingness'-masturbation.... Enough questions! I want answers! I think I'm entitled! I can handle the truth! I want to be good! I believe in truth and beauty! Gsaahh!

Remember the five Cs!





As I haven't assembled any sort of pictorial thesis of the crisp 'John Cena is a Bump-Lunk' calibre (but I'm working on it), I have a teaser picture, it's some boobies I painted with oil paints. The painting also has a head in it. I'm getting back into oils, gradually, between frenzied drawing sessions.

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.

Dreamboats and portals

Time for some actual new bits.

That was one.

Not finished.



Well I told the wrestler Gregory Helms I was going to draw him. Then he seemed quite keen on the idea, so I thought… OK I’d better make it look a little bit like a MySpace profile picture.

But that might mean it needs to be a bit boring and flattering…

He proved tricky because he looks more like a real human being than the lumpen hypergrapplers I normally favour doodling.





I wanted to do like an otter with Gregory’s face to accessorise him, never quite got round to it…

Could make his likeness more weird and interesting if I found the energy…

Maybe I’ll work on it before sending any of this crap his way.

Here’s Gregory and his wooden brother, but which is which?






I’m not quite sure what to say about this next one….








But my favourite’s still the endlessly lovely Randy.

Now there’s a face with funlumps.

I took it upon myself the other week to begin the process of cross breeding him with some holly.

Here’s how we began:




I saw the potential for holly-derived lines in Randy’s facial contours. I picked some actual holly on my way back from the gym, and found the actual leaves were a right old pain in the bottom to draw… I dispensed temporarily with the actual leaves, but retained some of their prickly influence.





Randy moves his smug boyman face in an artfully loathsome fashion.

I love drawing him… his face seems like some kind of portal to way-outness.





Sigh… isn’t he dreamy?

Now… remember this old chestnut?






It’s still not finished. But I seem to be making a tradition out of posting its progress.


There’ll be more to say or more to see soon…

I want to return to one of the original stated purposes of this blog, and condense some of my big thoughts into digestible form here.

When I was talking to Marlo about blogs and blog performance anxiety, I theorised to her that it’s good to update regularly because it helps people to feel like they’re in touch with you (more relevant to her since she actually has fans)… but I need to take my own advice.

Cartoon people teach me lessons about eloquent & concise little lumps of communication…

So stay tuned while I redefine my purpose in front of your very eyes!