Something Sketchy

I've been trying out a sketchbook prompting technique that artist / cartoonist Charles Burns has discussed employing in interviews and books of his work. Essentially you tape a reference image to the backside of the previous page (or inside of the front cover, initially, I guess) and then rework the picture out in your sketchbook, in your own style, incorporating your own aesthetic choices.

The following are just a few of the examples of my own exercises in this.

I have no idea what "The Snake Pit" is, or why this Famous Monsters of Filmland trading card is labelled as such. The trading card set came out in 1963, and indeed features stills of creatures and ghastly shots from established horror films, largely AIP teen monster flicks and peplum films. After you get to card 20 or so, of the 64 card set, the images are either misidentified, oddly cropped illustration from movie posters or pulp magazines, and images of contest winners done up in their contest-winning make up creations. One such is the above image. The blurb from FMOF identifying the winner is below. 

Above is country music legend Ernest Tubb. 

I'm not a sports fan in the least. I have zero interest in watching other people play games and get paid millions upon millions of dollars to do it. You might as well have regional Yahtzee players making seven figures with crowds of beer-swilling idiots crowding around them, threatening the referees after each official dice roll count. 

Vitriol aside, this is some baseball trading card featuring Kansas City A's pitcher George Brunet, who was apparently traded often throughout his career, and eventually made his way to Mexico, where he pitched for the Mexican league into his fifties. All of that info came from a cursory internet search. I chose the card because of the unibrow, dyspeptic expression and oddly elongated neck. And while I find professional sport boring, I genuinely can't stomach "professional" sports analysis, particularly when it's a bunch of self-styled oracle blowhards sitting around, pitching speculation about what a certain team needs to do to win an upcoming game. The gist of it is always "I think what (insert team name) needs to do to beat (insert team name) in tomorrow's game, is to win it!"

 

Gods & Monsters 2022

I have been invited to participate in the Otherworldly Arts Collective of Minneapolis's "Gods & Monsters 2022" Halloween art show! An open invitation was placed online and after submitting digital samples of my work, I was chosen to participate. There is a two piece maximum per participating artist, due to space restrictions. The actual show is in October, and I'll post more information regarding that later. 

The two pieces I'm bringing to the show are posted below.

"Tombyard Troubadour" acrylic on gessoed cardboard.

Music plays a large part in my life, and obviously, as a result, is something I draw a lot of inspiration from. "Tombyard Troubadour" is the result of a number of colliding influences. I enjoy country, country western and "hillbilly" music from the 1920s through the early 1970s, and believe it or not, there's a lot of darkness to the genres. Aside from seasonally appropriate novelty tunes like "Tennessee Hill-billy Ghost", which has been cut by Eddie Arnold, Red Foley and others, there are a lot of suicide and murder ballads as well. I had the idea of a sort of guardian ghost musician wandering around a secluded backwoods graveyard, strumming out spooky tunes on a coffin shaped guitar. I wanted something that would fit perfectly on a bubblegum card, a bright, poppy image that would sort of tell a whole story or set the tone for a whole visual world in one image.

"Zombie Surf Punk" acrylic on paper.

I love comics, but one of the biggest missed opportunities in the comic page/panel layout, as far as I'm concerned, is how artists don't do anything with the word and thought balloons aside from plotting out how they're going to position the artwork around them. In the world of the comic cartoons, so much of the page realty is taken up by the dialogue bubbles, that you'd think at some point someone would treat them like a functional part of the reality and incorporate them into the action. That's why my risen-from-the-surf Surf Punk Zombie's speech bubble is draped with seaweed and dripping water. Our undead friend has surfaced, potentially to attend a Circle Jerks show or something, and his words have risen with him, thus they are subject to the same ocean detritus that he is. 

The Otherworldly Arts Collective can be found online at their facebook and Instagram accounts.