New digi... nude idgy... nidgy

Life is mainly parenting based... fond memories of when blogs were the thing

 So here are some of my recent digital pictures. Can you identify the celebs?

 I do these to scratch my art itch and keep myself more or less sane. I do rather like digital painting and its comparative lack of baggage. It is weightless unburdened play. I do like mucking about.

 I like dollies, and I want to do pictures like pop songs but good happy sad ones

 Fliffle floffle piffle poffle pop pants

Queen in Brush Pen

 Hoorah for phases, hoorah for Queen, hoorah for pop music and guitars and astrophysics and curly hair and Live Aid and leotards and teeth and eyeliner and overdubs.

Smudged Pillocks

I'm not obsessed with wrestling at the mo, but I should have a show of my wrestling drawings coming up, so I've been wrestling with drawing through wrestling drawings. Ultimate Warrior!





I want to use pastels more and hone my techniques through honing.





The explorations felt valid, the muse came and went in a floozily fickle fashion.

















Peculiar bonus: the cover of my diary beginning 10th December 2001, ending 16th July 2002. Different times. I was at once more and less confident.

Monty Python series entry no. 1: Palin

Palin: volume 1 part 1: first Palins

It made sense to start with Palin, he's the cute one. When he was young his face was kind of soft pink and squelchy. As he got older things got more leathery and crevicetastic.









I'm still comparatively new to watercolour as the versatile medium that it is. Here is Palin as groupie.









Palin has sparkle, possibly the first tangible attribute I started finding attractive in men. I was susceptible to sparkle long before I gave a toss about pleasantly shaped deltoids.

Brian.... almost

So last Tuesday I saw Brian Wilson at the Royal Albert Hall. Brian looms large in my imagination. Since breaking up with wrestling, Brian's been looming anew, in a different way.





Even though I've drawn Brian in the past, I've not had a really bold run at grasping the specific forms before now.





So these are quite 'early' artefacts in this particular process.





Going back in time... with biros and a grey marker pen I sort of began to loosen up. Hard to be fearless with lovely Brian.









Promise to go mental soon.

Sexy Nature Boys

So I'll do like in the early days and post lots of drawings that are mainly based on wrestlers. But this time it's wrestlers Ric and Shawn, oak matured and aromatic.





Ric retired in March of course. Much emotion oozed from faces.









I like desert flowers and their manly shapes, spiky and wiggly simultaneously.





Then there is Shawn the wrestler. He wears a cowboy hat that makes a shadow over his eyes.










Although he kind of has eyes that make a shadow over his eyes.















My next work is likely to be simpler, more cuddly things.

Wrestlemania Triple Threat Optical Confusion

All about the Pexies

This is my 100th blog post! Bloody hell.

Let's call these an experiment. It's over now.






Bob can't figure out what the heck's going on this picture. Ah well.

'Roaming the beautiful downs of Dorset is the mischievous goblin colt with flaming red eyes called the 'Colepexy'. He enjoys nothing more than to mislead domesticated horses and travellers, but his favourite prank is luring unsuspecting people to ride him, and once mounted he takes them on a wild ride across the wettest and thorniest country before eventually throwing them into a ditch or stream.'

'In Hampshire and Dorset the name colepexy (= coltpixy) is given to a mischievous fairy appearing in the form of a horse. The fossils known as belemnites are called cole pixies’ fingers and fossil sea-urchins cole pixies’ heads.'


"In Dorset also, the Pixy-lore still lingers. The being is called Pexy and Colepexy; the fossil belemnitos are named Colepexies'-fingers; and the fossil echini, Colepexies'-heads. The children, when naughty, are also threatened with the Pexy, who is supposed to haunt woods and coppices. [a]
"In Hampshire," says Captain Grose, "they give the name of Colt-Pixy to a supposed spirit or fairy, which in the shape of a horse wickers, i. e. neighs, and misleads horses into bogs, etc."

Men and their Heads and my Line Frenzy

Here are some pictures that say unto you that I still draw wrestler heads.

This one's from ages ago. I did it whilst watching a whole episode of What's New Scooby Doo, which isn't a very good thing. But I wanted to know who did it.





And these were done in preparation for an illustration that ultimately went in a letter to Mick Foley, illustrating my concerns about how John Cena might respond to my depictions of him.





And this is a video of a caricaturist called John Kascht drawing Rudy Guiliani. I liked watching him draw and his descriptions are as eloquent as his drawings. It made me realise I draw in quite a frenzied way... professionals are smooth. There's a link to his other videos drawing the other candidates on the right.

Many Tiny Lines

I've been arting... I got a book about Durer's drawings with my book token so I have done some studying Durer and his lines, but also thinking about kitties and kitty breeds.

Here is a Pixie Bob and a turban.





Here's a Havana Brown cat that looks like an otter and Durer's Oriental King.

Moving towards controlled playfulness

OK drawings now.

I've been following through on my bats and men, in fact the two things have rather fused in the middle.

Facially, as in the following:






Some of those have a bit of Triple H, the well paid big nosed wrestler, looking kindly, as he often doesn't.

Some bats, I think they're called horseshoe bats, have holes in the middle of their faces. The graphic possibilities are many.

Then some bats like to get intense down at the gym...

Randy and Edge are a tag team now. Unfortunately for Edge, he looks rather a lot like an ordinary mortal man, although his chin is so extensive I look at it and can't quite believe it's all made of face. Anyway he's below on the left.





The bat-man thing got so it was something I had to get out of my system. This kind of had its peak thus far in the next drawing.





While I was drawing that, I was watching Mark Kermode interview Steven Spielberg. They were talking about Munich and Mark thought that it wasn't that great cinematically and that he preferred Spielberg's popcorn fodder. Spielberg kind of said that he made that film to get it out of his system, and that's how I felt about the man-bats. I felt like a ten year old boy when I was drawing them. One they were out, I felt I could move on.

Bless John Cena and his quasi-box-shaped head.





I felt I needed to return to Randy's head to redress some imbalances. I'm still a beginner and I'm learning about caricature as a process, and I've come to realise that if you get in the habit of exagerrating a certain feature it will be at the 'expense' of a different one. Like in recent drawings I had been making Randy's cheeks all massive and rounded, and forgetting that he has a habit of pointing his chin at people and pouting in a distinctive fashion.









One of the reasons I think I return to this head is that it's quite open to interpretation.





I'm still scribbling manically in my sketchbook, splurging thoughts out with only slight coherence. Hey, now I have a new computer, so photoshop won't make it burst. I think I'm figuring out how to aim for where I want to be, in a never-finished kind of a way.





(This next bit also appeared in my myspace blog)

I've been having dreams which take the creative visual excitements from my life and push them deeper into magic.

This is a drawing based crudely on a memory of a dream in which I was at a Stanley Spencer exhibition and there was a painting in it of men in a winding tunnel, clusters of men, with radiant light shining out of their heads which fragmented the surrounding forms with its rays.

You can kind of see where I scrawled 'clusters of men'.






Then in a later part of the dream, there was a special secret library with massive volumes devoted to Spencer, Goya and of course, the famous fish bowl expressionists. That book mainly seemed to be filled with multiple colour variations on the same painting of a fishbowl. But it had special esoteric meaning, the colour, of course.

I have a lot of dreams about book shops, second hand book shops in hidden cities, and the important part is that in them I find the books that I need to find. The special books with the knowledge that takes me where I need to be. Because the thing is, my waking attitude is similar, I do think there may be one or two or three books hidden in the world somewhere that are the books I need to find.

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And this bit didn't appear on myspace, it's an exclusive: I had another dream the night before last in which Marlo invited me to her home, an apartment in a sort of intimidating pearl white castle labyrinth.

But she was kind of a superhero, I think this was directly based on her wonder-inspiring real life drawing skills. It seemed that my visit had enticed some kind of egg shaped red haired begoggled lady archvillain to Marlo's house, so Marlo kindly shoved me down the chimney hole in order that I could hide/escape. I became swamped in soot.