There Must Be More To Life Than This

But if there isn't, it doesn't matter, because drawing Queen is aces!

 These drawings were drawed with paint.

Wrestlemania Triple Threat Optical Confusion

Interrupted Cow Boys

I started drawing brokeback mountain cowboys but I got distracted.





Angel cats landed in my ideas.





Then there were the Colepexies.

My bats and my boys get linear.

So here are some drawings of wrestlers and bats, those two great staples of great great art.





I’m sort of trying to refine them toward some kind of sort of design for a painting at this stage.

But I also had to draw some big heads, to get that big head thing out of my system. Here are Randy and Ric. They have ‘chemistry’, as they say in the trade. Or at least I think so.





Learning Ric Flair’s face would be like a ten year project. In the meantime I’m still preoccupied with Randy, cos I haven’t quite perfected whatever it is I’m doing with him yet. Getting this far and quitting would be both stupid and unforgivable!





That one absorbed some spillage. I wasn’t drooling with lust as you may have assumed, I merely toppled my beverage.





As you see here, the cheekbone was generous and as such, enabled some bat emergence. Also you see evidence of other brain damaged scribbles indicating an impatience to get on with some proper painting composed of elements and not exclusively heads.

With the wrestlers, I think I could take more notice of the variation in the bodies as they’re just as distinct and trademarky as the faces. Not just the shapes but the way they move may prove important. Important in post apocalyptic bat confrontations.





Because bats don’t mess about!





The end,

Love from Chloe.

Everybody loves me! I'm freakin' adorable

This week I have been intent on capturing the wrestlery thumb-like pink cuteness of Kurt Angle the wrestler.... with varying degrees of success. (The title of this post is something he once said.) I think I’m building to something. I like doing at least two people on a page. Peoples’ faces are so gorgeous and so ridiculous. It’s nice to have two in order to milk the comedic and miscellaneous chemistry that occurs between a pair of mushes.

I’m also still a beginner at this caricature business, and I haven’t quite figured out what I ultimately want from it, apart from the obvious cheap thrills. Now let’s see….




The above page was my breakthrough page. I think a key factor is the regrowth of Kurt’s eyebrows (in real life) after several months of overzealous silly plucking. They add a lot to the expressiveness of his face, and it was his distinct expressions that helped my Kurtify my Kurts in this instance.

The big one on the top left ended up looking more than somewhat like Slimer from the Real Ghostbusters. I regret this a bit because Kurt is cute. But he does have a big rounded intense manface.

The demonic gargoyle biro one in the middle at the bottom looks nothing like him really, but I liked the way the process was taking on its own momentum and getting towards some way out places.






Then I noticed that the problem is a cartoony Kurt gets a little bit Disney. Like a cute Disney goblin sidekick. That didn’t interest me.






Nope, still in loveable babyman territory…

I felt I almost had to go wilfully nuts at this point, or try to see him anew. To get a bit bad at drawing or a bit very good. I got a little somewhere.







I wanted to try to get across some of the startling bigness of his eyes without them getting too… obvious.

It helps to include the bod.








Kurt’s big pink wide eyed neckhead has even found its way into pre-existing oil paintings. He looks like he’s just fallen in love! (This isn’t finished.)






Next time: Stuff that’s not Kurt!

Here’s a bit of a preview of something else. It’s a very poor blurry photograph of a hermaphrodite Ric Flair Britney Janus Wind God detail from a nearly finished epic landscape painting.






I love all your comments and interest and stuff.

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.

I Have Gone Off My Rocker: Boy Fun

Soon I have an assignment to do a cover for an ‘older children’s fantasy book’. At least one. It’s not an actual commission so I’m not being paid. Don’t be silly! Of course not. It’s to prove to unimaginative book publisher types that I can do this sort of thing. The people who represent me in the commercial world have suggested that I do this thing.

On of the comments I had on one of the previous posts made me think that I want to find fun ways of drawing Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys again.






I used to set myself the challenge of drawing the cover of the album in the time it took to burn a CD.






I’ve got this nutty idea in my head about doing deranged pop culture pictures then making them sparkle and twitch and flogging them to the youth on MySpace.

I probably don’t have the technical skills to follow this through… but it’s an intriguing exercise is purposefulness.

In that vein, I’ve been making studies and doing little thumbnails of Randy and John the heart throb wrestlers, which has taken me to some cutely homoerotic visual places. Slightly unnerving places. This stuff was all knocked up in the past couple of days. It all qualifies as ‘provisional’ and ‘sketches’ and I’m not sure exactly where I’m headed.







All of this is sort of an exercise in trying to follow through the energy and spontaneous fluidity of my biro sketches to something on a slightly more substantial scale.










I’ve been inspired by Katie Rice and the cute energy of her girls and got this crazy idea in my mind that I want to do something deranged, energetic and cute with lumpy yet charismatic gym rat boys. But it’s quite a task.

And I haven’t got a clue if I’m cut out for cartoons exactly… it’s all a work in progress.

I think one of my fake book covers will be a Harry Potter one since I’m cocky enough to think I could do it justice. Hmmm… trying to kill two birds with one stone… is there any way I could subtly cast Brian Wilson as Ron Weasley?

Oh and if anyone in the world owns the game Elder Scrolls: Oblivion and has screenshots of minotaurs they wouldn’t mind emailing to me, I would be jolly grateful. I plan some more ‘damn celestial’ minotaurs (thanks to the clown ninja for that comment, I appreciate the comments) and I’m going to have to get myself back into a more generally celestial mindspace for my book cover project and temporarily put aside the deranged biro scribbled WWE men.

Usually when I’ve depicted women, they’ve ended up kind of wispy and dreamy like this Shirley Temple.