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.

some but not all of the characteristics of a bee

Have you ever wondered what Ric Flair would look like if took on some but not all of the characteristics of a bee? Yes I thought as much.





So there was a drawing that had some semblance of shape about it. Here are some that are barely more than undignified puddles of regressive finger leakage. Yet they may hold the very keys to the future.

These aren't the kind of drawings I ever plan to post, then time passes and they are what I have as the traces of my thought, which I suppose is what blogging is.

And sometimes the lines I draw so fast I barely know what I've done can be the key to growing something communicative. In the meantime I hope your brain can bridge the shortcomings of these barely existent gnat farts of scrawl.









This was my pencil's initial response to Dusty Rhodes:

























Then there's this (next) one, which is really rather conservative and doesn't live up to the promise of the weird squiggles... it's like a neatly coloured in little girl's birthday card, and yet it's just another signpost on the way to somewhere.

note to self: always leave plenty of room for the bottom half of Cena's face.

Also his expression isn't nearly dopey/benign enough

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...

Drawing Equivalent of Salon Hair Clippings

I've done so many loosey McLoose explorational sketches lately that I've accumulated enough oddities for a 'miscellaneous' post, which is what this is.

Here's a man slapping a duck upside its duck head:





And more cemetery reverspective confusions:












Here's a sketch of me in pants. I suppose you could call this self-portraiture of a rather low-key sort. Oh hang on, if you're American, they're not pants. Let's just call them knickers.





The bunnies and minotaurs never quite made it past the bumpy phase of their relationship. Perhaps I ought to take them to couples counselling.





Here's a sort of Mary Mary (Quite Contrary) scenario.... How does my garden grow? Kinda scribbliliy, With Rex Hackelberg beast studies and Randy Orton smugfabulous heads looming out of the bosom of the earth like smug expansively cheekboned cabbages.





This was a little cameo that might still become a painting. I posted it to my old friend Tom on myspace (not MySpace Tom)...





And Tom interpreted it for me (if you click this one, you'll find his space with his music on):





Then there was the time I got fed up with drawing Edge the wrestler and his preying mantis eyes and henceforth decided to put some effort into turning him into a cat. But then what happened was at a certain point I ended up with an entity that was neither Edge nor Cat, but some frightful abomination of a kind no one needs to see.





P.S.

My Cafepress Store still exists!





bye bye!

John Cena is A Bump-Lunk!

Maybe that doesn't quite rhyme with 'erumpent' like I wanted it to... never mind.






I've been suffering for my art... I just said 'Right! If I'm going to draw John Cena, I'm going to do it properly.' I had been floundering in indecision, but now I was going to make the sacrifices necessary to see this task through.

But sifting through the reference material was not always easy on the peepers.



(I also referred to this problem on my wordy blog)

Bless his big flat topped rectangular foam wax head.





With this subject, it was kind of a case of 'You can't spoof a spoof'... I actually found it quite hard to get the drawings funnier or more strikingly extreme-looking than the original.

Or... to capture some aspect of the uniqueness of the original and play on it til the cows come home.

He does look sometimes like his arms are on backwards. And that's not the only feature he has in common with Fred Flintstone.





In the past I compared Cena to Poochie from that Simpsons episode that parodied focus-group thinking. Well, that was a little bit unfair. Even though it was true. Cena's designated wrestling persona did in the past make him into an extremly undignified human vehicle for the most unedifying corporate version of the 'tude' that John K described on his blog recently....

But he's a good stick really, is Cena. Watch him fly!









In real life, he appears to possess no 'tude, no pride, vanity, shame, grace, or feminine characteristics. He's also a walking epitome of 'uglycute'. Well, I say 'walking'... he doesn't appear overly good at activities that involve coordinating more than one limb.










When I do these drawings, I start off comparatively careful, with my observational head on...





But then there comes a stage where I'm suddenly faced with a plethora of possibilities... oh no!









Sometimes when I feel I'm gaining control, it makes me feel drunk with power... other times indecision leaves me befuddled. What is my ultimate aim? Moody intense paintings? Cute lighthearted cartoony designs? Involved, extreme caricature? The ability to draw Cena from memory? A striking image for a myspace comment (that's slightly depressing..)





A lot of the decision seem to boil down to 'mood'. Do I want to do something joyful and silly, or something that caters to all my high faluting serious propensities...

Not that the two things HAVE to mutually exclude each other, it may be like a continuum... or it may be that I have to find a way to be serious while infusing my pictures with joy.





I have said that I find it possible to 'get past' a subject and into my own intent once I learn the subject really, really well.

Well gosh I'm having fun with this for the time being.

P.S. apologies to John C and his friends and family, I didn't mean to be mean or anything. All insults are delivered with affection.

John Cena, drawing, cartoon, caricature, WWE, lunk, uglycute

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!

Nipper Eyes

I’m sorry it’s been so long since the last update. I have been painting with a view to getting some things finished. Painting is time consuming.

I’ve thought about posting stuff that isn’t my work, but then I thought that might get confusing and I like the purity of this blog.

I’ll give you some boring updates on things I had already started last time first.

Like I’ve been working on this monster painting with lots of red and green and yellow. I remember thinking when I chose the palette that I wanted the red and green to rub up together in an optically awkward way. There’s too much yellow in it at the moment, I plan to make it more cloudy and moody. Then when I’ve finished it I’m going to do something I’m more in the moment and passionate about. This is a strange exercise in problem solving at the moment, but it is improving as I persevere.

Then there was that pink ink one which I’ve ruined by putting other stuff on top. But it will get better before it’s finished.





And the one with the wrestling and the orc and the by now familiar cat man… This one will look a lot different by the end too. This is more sandy. The other one was more wiggly. It’s got everything and the kitchen sink in this one.





Then the bat one, that has grown. It’s acquired some colour and some new pecs. This is part of my perverse wrestling imagery Chloe revolution reaching beyond the comfort based tyrannically cool school of imagery choosing and reaching toward the transcendent power of enriched vision beyond culture. And it has a bat.






I wanted to get to grips with the somewhat fascinating graceless rectangularity of John Cena, as those of you who vaguely follow the incoherent babblings of my grey blog may know. So I started drawing him, I started the big one in the bottom right corner wanting it to be purely done with coloured pencil since I hadn’t tried that for a while. But I felt I copped out when used watercolour and ink too. Also it looked too conventional or professional or something, not very interesting. Because he already looks like a cartoon or an action figure, there’s nothing clever about this drawing really. If there are elements of him which are unedifying, I wanted to try and make my drawings in some sense edifying despite the odds.






So what I did was I redid that entire page almost purely in coloured pencil, to see if I could take it to somewhere more interesting and uncover my purpose a little bit more.





In the top centre one, in his eyes I made him look a bit like me age three and apprehensive about being photographed. My motherly instincts and compassion seeped out, I couldn’t make him entirely hideous.

And working in coloured pencil took me back to age thirteen when they were my main medium. The memories were surprisingly potent. That was an age when I significantly started developing my own ‘techniques’, which had been a private milestone, I realised. I’m quite soft and gentle with them, which is interesting as a counterpoint to all the other media I’m using in less puritanical ways. I’m re-educating my seeing at the moment.