Frankenstein's Animated Monster

 

Graphite on paper

Post Haste

 Sometimes I have a pen, a moment of downtime and am within close proximity to a stack of Post-It® notes. This afternoon was one such instance. 

I regret nothing.

King Of The Surf

 

"King Of The Surf" ink pen on paper.

Hi there. I figured since I done gone and told the internet that I was opting to not actively engage in social media much any longer, and stated that the place to see whatever I was working on would be this here blog, well...I figured I should probably actually post something. 

First thing's first. The note I posted on my Instagram account (see below) stating that I was choosing to step away from the platform, was in reference to the inundation of "Suggested Post(s)" and thoroughly obnoxious Tik-Tok-esque videos that jam up your content scroll. It was getting to the point where the accounts I was actually following were making up a thin minority of the content I was seeing. 

It's annoying, it's distracting, and with a finite lifespan of unknown duration, it's a detriment to my quality of life. Perhaps that reads much more dramatically than I actually mean it. All of the friends, acquaintances, artists, musicians and other random accounts that I personally chose to follow on the platform, I will still check in periodically to see what they are up to, but I won't be actively posting anything there. At least not for a while.

Besides, I much prefer long-form posting like this, where some substance can be paired with an image, rather than just zine-scrap picture bombing. And keyboard typing is much more my style than fingertip-tapping out hashtags. 

The sketchbook doodle above was an exercise in drawing a complete image from scratch with an idea for inspiration but no reference material in front of me. Just a blank sketchbook and an ink pen. The pen contained dark blue ink, whether or not that translates across the scan or not. The idea was to do something in the vein of the illustrations paired with fiction in the old Men's adventure magazines of the 1950s, 60s and 70s, like MALE, For Men Only, Man's Adventure, All-Man, Stag and other laughably titled publications. Of course I had to put my own spin on it, finding zero interest in just drawing a scowling he-man who is present to improve the world or save the day with the inherent level of his manliness. 

Little Richard

Cráneo de vaquero

"Cráneo de vaquero" colored pencil on paper

I've never been very skilled with colored pencils as a medium. I guess the same could be said about other mediums as well, but I've been watching some tutorials and trying to get more into it, since I got a spiffy new box of colored pencils from my employer recently. This was a simple layering exercise, blended with some nail polish remover. Still some trouble areas to work the kinks out of, like pulling darker shadows out of the greens without making them too muddy or adding black, which sort of grays everything up. 

Howdy

Some days I'm just wasting ink and paper.

Consider Worms

Sketchbook Therapy

Sometimes, when life's little downturns and inconveniences have me irritated, I find the best therapy is to whip out the old sketchbook and pencil and start to doodle the stress away. Conversely, when I'm sitting there staring at a blank sketchbook page, pencil impotently clutched in hand, that aforementioned irritation compounds like guinea pig poop.

Last night my television stopped working. Boo-hoo! you might chide. First world problems! you may sarcastically sneer. Yeah, I get it. It ain't exactly the end of the world. But I generally watch one  television program on one station, and I don't have cable. So when 7pm Central Standard Time rolls around this Saturday, and I flick the idiot box on to immerse my troubles in MeTV's Svengoolie, and see that my digital antennae has suddenly stopped functioning, I get a little chafed. Yes, I checked to see if it was plugged in, before you ask.

Well it turns out the channels needed to be rescanned or some nonsense, but for the night my television was out of order. After a good fifteen minutes of glaring at the thing like I might be able to magically fix it or cause it to explode with childish vengeance simply by glowering at it, I decide that that's maybe not the healthiest or most productive way to spend a Saturday night. So's I whip out the little pocket sketchbook and the mechanical pencil and I start to doodle; as a result I come up with this scribble about how the world might change if cats had pyrokinesis.

Halloween 2019 Creepy Consumption Day 4: Svengoolie

Day Four of Creepy Consumption continues with a quick sketch of the Patron Saint of my Saturday evenings: Svengoolie. While not a horror movie or a television show per se, Sven is the cool ghoul who hosts the Universal Monsters classics, along with The Three Stooges, Abbott and Costello, and a plethora of other Hammer Horrors, Universal and Warner Bros. monster mayhem from the golden age of monster movies, all wrapped in a heady helping of Vaudeville-esque humor (aka jokes your grandfather would tell).

If you don't know what Svengoolie is all about, go here, or check out MeTV on Saturday night, 7pm Central Standard Time!

Doodle Doodle Doo

Yeah, I'm back with more Doodle-A-Day cards. Two more drawings of two of my favorite things: robots and dinosaurs.

Happy Halloween!

It was a pleasantly low-key Hallow's Eve here in the Secret Basement Laboratory. I made some baking powder biscuits, tried to calm my animals with each chime of the doorbell, and watched two Halloween-themed episodes of The Andy Griffith Show: "The Haunted House" (Season 4, Episode 2, from October 7th, 1963; also the episode that formed the foundation of The Ghost And Mr. Chicken when Don Knotts left the show to start his film career), and "Three Wishes For Opie" (Season 5, Episode 14, from December 21st, 1964). In the former Opie loses a baseball in The Old Rimshaw House and Barney, Gomer and Andy go in to retrieve it. The house appears to be haunted, but in fact is a front for moonshiners. The latter finds Barney with a fortune telling kit that has an eerily high batting average with granting wishes via the power of Count Ivan Teleky! (Even if some of them are based on misunderstandings.)

And while I was watching, I drew this guy!

I'm all about the simple pleasures.

Yes, in case you were wondering, I am a seventy-year-old in a thirty-seven-year-old's body. I believe someone once described me as "an old soul", which, in the parlance of the kids means that I'm a real square. A real L-7, daddy-o! 

Scribble Art

Jimmie Lunceford

Here's a Doodle-A-Day card with a quick portrait I did of big band leader/ alto saxophonist Jimmie Lunceford. You can see him in action directing his swing orchestra in the 1935 short below.

Kong Goes Surfing

Here's another Doodle-A-Day card from yesterday.