Illos for Invites

Here are some doodles I recently did in my sketchuh-ma-book that I thought my make some neat illustrations for some Halloween Party (or some other kind of party) invites. 

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. 

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!"

 

Print-At-Home Zine

You want a small, easy to manufacture zine you can make yourself? Great!

Here's how you do it!

Step 1: Save the 2 images below to your desktop.

Step 2: Print them back to back on one sheet of paper. That's double-sided printing, y'all!

Step 3: Fold the final printed paper into quarters. Feel free to use the handy-dandy fold lines already on the page! If you done did it correctly, all of the drawings should be right side up. 

Step 4: You're going to need a pair of scissors (get your parents' help!) to carefully cut the top two folds, so you have eight individual pages!

Step 5: Staple the pages together in the center of the crease between the 4th and 5th page!

Boom shaka laka! - You Just Zined Yourself!

Technical notes: The above images are scanned in at 300 dpi resolution. They're not going to look as spiffy as the originals, but remember, it's free! Also, the images are provided for the free zine activity only. Don't take one of these images and stick it on a t-shirt or a throw pillow or a pair of pasties without asking me first. Pretty please?! Thanks!

 ALSO: Please send me pictures of your finished zines! I'd love to see what configurations you get, putting what panels as the front, back, etcetera. I certainly had a plan when I started it, but you can get a few different permutations with this setup. Which drawing is your favorite? Why? LET ME KNOW!

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.

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.

Character Study

I’ve been doodling this guy in various forms over the last couple of days. Just some nerdy little guy who can fit all kinds of requirements in visual expression. Like having his face torn off or making a meek point of order.

La momia enmascarada

Some more sketchbook filler. Inspired by precode comics, The Wild Wild West and other zany pulp western adventure television and movies, and, well, the bizarre blender that is my brain.

Burgerhosen

Here’s some sketchbook nonsense from this evening.

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! 

The Cat In The Cactus Mask

The door separating the office block from the warehouse slammed shut behind me, and I pushed a hand through my hair to brush off the dust of the day as I crossed the parking lot to my car. It was quarter-past five, and being October, the daylight had already dwindled to dusk. I hadn’t seen the sky–or natural light for the matter–since my lunch break at noon. Since then the bright blue had bruised over for the most part, and the few rags of cloud sleepily floating in the darkened blue-grey, reflected in their folds the ember-glow of the setting sun, which had lingered at the horizon long enough to cook the lowest strip of visible sky medium-rare before continuing its slide to the other side of the globe. 

As I reached my car I paused, keys in hand, sucking in the welcome fresh air and weighing the ritual inanities of my personal life. What to do with one’s self on a lonely Thursday night? I could haunt the aisles of my favorite used book store, but I still had a small cityscape of unread novels waiting for me near my nightstand from the last visit. I suppose I could have stopped at one of the handful of small, quiet restaurants I frequent, grab a bite to eat before heading home to read one of those books and wait for sleep to drive me to bed.

The routine was comfortable, but in all honesty it had become a bit stale. The gears needed greasing with a liberal application of joie de vivre. 

Well, I didn’t want to fall into the trap of watching the sands of my evening slip to the lower half of the glass while trying to figure out what to do with it, so I got in my car and headed home. Halfway there I decided to pull in to the grocery store and find something for dinner, maybe break up the dregs a little. And it was there, in the vestibule between the two sets of sliding doors, that fate dropped a whopper into my shopping basket.

I didn’t see it at first, and I wouldn’t have at all if a little kid hadn’t pushed it on me. Or, rather, me onto it. I was walking through the skrish of the sliding door, into the carpeted entryway, as a little boy and his mother were coming out. The kid had one of those small junior shopping carts they give to children to push around so they can feel like they’re doing the shopping too; helping keep their little hands and minds occupied, so they’re less likely to get fidgety and cause a ruckus, and training them to be nice little consumers in turn. I heard “Ethan, watch your cart, honey!” and then found myself dancing to the left to avoid getting said junior shopping cart square in the kneecaps. I ran slam-bang into the cork bulletin board on the wall, feeling the jab of several plastic pushpin ends in my shoulder blades. They must’ve caught in my shirt, because as Ethan and his mother pushed through into the parking lot, her giving me an “I’m so sorry, he’s really a good boy” expression, without actually voicing an apology, I stepped away from the wall and heard them clatter to the floor along with a couple of the flyers that they had been tacking up.

I grabbed the handful of pages off the carpet—mostly ads for local Daycare providers, carpet cleaning services and lawn care businesses, when I came across this sheet of yellow paper with the most enigmatic promise on it:

OASIS SLIM PRESENTS: DESERT BLUES

ONE NIGHT ONLY

OCT. 6th 7PM

Maplewood Cultural Center

Desert blues. There was no description beyond the title and time and place; no picture of the performer or tag to the come-on “Desert Blues” to build up what it might mean. I have to admit I was intrigued. Normally I don’t go for local cultural events beyond the occasional movie on the weekend, but I had just been bemoaning how stale my routine had become. Maybe it was worth checking out. Having taken Friday as PTO for a much-needed three-day weekend, it wasn’t like I had to be at work in the morning,.

I bought my groceries and headed home, all the while pointlessly weighing the possible scenarios of what leaving the house and trying something new might bring. It’s a little head game I play with myself. All it really accomplishes is building my anxiety and keeping me a misanthropic shut-in; but I get excited about something and then create these two ideals in my head—one this incredibly fulfilling experience, the other a banal letdown—and then I let the two wrestle it out in the arena of my psyche until one dominates and I either pull myself up by my sneaker laces and go, or decide it’s probably not worth it and just stay in; maybe read another book or go to one of those handful of small, quiet restaurants and tell myself perhaps next time. 

It could be great, I thought. It sounded so exotic: Desert Blues. I was a blues fan—the old stuff; everything from Slim Harpo, Big Maybelle and Lead Belly to R.L. Burnside. I was still mulling it over when I got home. An internet search left me clueless and frustrated. Whoever Oasis Slim was, he didn’t have any semblance of an online presence. No social media accounts, no website, not even a cryptic review of a past show on some online bulletin board somewhere, and the Maplewood Cultural Center’s website had nothing to offer beyond what  bare bones information had been enigmatically printed on the flyer. Was it some local guy who played in his garage on the weekends? Someone more invested in the joy of performance than selling CDs or working a regular gig? If so, that would explain the lack of information online. Especially if he was older and maybe not so internet savvy. In that case, though, what if he was one of these boring suburban Strat’ slingers that considered Eric Clapton and Stevie Ray Vaughn the apotheosis of the genre? I wasn’t in the mood for an evening of middle-aged white guy bar blues.

Well, curiosity battered caution in the last round of deliberation, so I ate, cleaned myself up, and with a film of hesitance coating the inside of my mouth, headed to the Maplewood Cultural Center. 

I honestly don’t know what I was expecting. I pulled into the parking lot, a blacktop  patch in a cubby hole flanked by identical beige strip malls, and found myself nearly alone there. There were two or three other cars parked near the front of the building, which surely had to have belonged to whatever MCC staff were present. Maybe the date had been changed? I made my way through the front door of the Center, a squat redbrick building with some dark wood facade embellishments, and a foundation-to-roof A-frame peak on the front that led me to believe it had been a small church at some point. Inside I found two middle-aged women sitting at a card table, garbed in chunky sweaters, tasseled wool scarves, and fluorescent lighting so pale it almost looked green. On either side of them stood a darkened doorway.

Both of the women smiled as I approached. “Welcome!”

I proffered the yellow flyer.

“This is tonight, right?”

The woman closest to me took the sheet from me and studied it through her thick-lensed bifocals. “Oh, yes!” she replied, her smile somehow stretching even wider. “Right through the door behind me.” She jabbed a thumb at one of the darkened doorways. “It’s five dollars for the show, and the money goes right back into our cultural event support fund! Would you like some literature?”

There was a look of eager expectancy on her face, the way her hand went to a stack of folded pamphlets sitting on the table before her, but I really wasn’t concerned with their events calendar or whether the five bucks went to pay for future events or bags of that pink hand soap one was likely to find in the bathrooms.

“No thanks,” I replied sheepishly, handing her the five. It didn’t seem to diminish her smile any. She took the crumpled bill and dropped it into a small aluminum-colored cash box, then pressed a small hand stamp into an ink pad and raised it in my direction.

Seconds later I was maneuvering the aisles of the dim auditorium, a smudged smiley face stamped on the back of my right hand. There was a handful of people scattered throughout the room: a bored looking couple sitting in the back row, an elderly man with a houndstooth trilby and a meticulously manicured white beard up front on the right, someone I couldn’t quite make out a few rows behind him. I chose a spot in the middle, near the aisle, and waited.

There was no announcement, no emcee who stepped into the blazing circumference of a spotlight to tell us what was going to happen next. The smiling ladies from the foyer didn’t wander in to thank us for our attendance and gleefully tell us about what wonderful programming might be coming to the Maplewood Cultural Center in the upcoming weeks. The dim lights simply lowered further until the room was in total darkness, and then some scalloped stage lights flared to life. The stage, which had previously been a dark, black patch at the front of the room, was suddenly illuminated. A pair of crimson curtains parted slowly over a platform about six inches off the ground, and there, on a simple metal folding chair, small amp between his feet and sky-blue Fender guitar in his hands, sat Oasis Slim. 

I was dumbfounded.

He wore a grey wool suit with a white button-down dress shirt. The two black strands of a bolo tie dangled at either side of the descending strip of pearl-white buttons on the dress shirt, crowned by a steel clasp set with a small bird’s egg oblong of turquoise. His scuffed black dress shoes bookended the small guitar amp as if it might run off if he hadn’t. And his face…well, he didn’t have one. Not that I could see. You see, Oasis Slim’s head looked very much like a cactus, pricks and all.

Was this a put on? Some sort of theatrical flourish? Is this what was going to make the music Desert Blues—a cactus mask? I noticed that the backdrop behind Slim was a very stylized western desert scene that could’ve been pulled from the cover of any pulp cowboy magazine or novelty postcard, replete with a series of sandy plateaus fading into the distance, covered with whiskery cacti. A sun-bleached steer skull and busted wagon wheel nestled in the foreground under the watchful eye of a hungry tempera paint buzzard. 

Oh god! Had I stumbled into some esoteric amateur comedy act?

Well, it was weird, but I liked it! I felt like I was seeing something that hadn’t been seen before. And, if it had, how had Slim kept the lid on it so well? Someone—one of the couple in the back row—had chuckled at the reveal; otherwise the room was silent.

Finally, after seconds which had seemed to draw on for hours, Oasis Slim moved. His hand jerked from his guitar to his face—or his cactus rather; the movement quick and jerky, as if he were an animatronic display suddenly switched on. With a thumb and index finger, Slim chose one of the bone-colored needle stickers that covered his head, one from the area that would’ve been his right cheek had he had one, and plucked it out.

Without so much as a second’s hesitation, Slim gripped the needle between thumb and finger like a guitar pick, and began to play.

Whoever Oasis Slim was under that cactus mask, he must have been either damn good, or blind and playing purely by feel and muscle memory. There were no eye holes that I could see anywhere on that bizarre, bulbous green head. Slim started to play a basic twelve-bar blues riff without so much as a word of introduction. Just picking and pressing the strings into chords.

I noticed, a few minutes in, that the room seemed to grow warmer. I began to swab the roof of my mouth with my tongue, noticing my saliva had evaporated and leaving me with a bad case of cotton mouth. I could feel sweat start to bead at the back of my neck, right at the hairline, and trickle down my shoulders and spine like small beetles scurrying for shelter.

Slim played on but the music seemed to fade into the background. The songs were all instrumentals, and didn’t really have a beginning or end, at least not that I could tell. I felt a bit disoriented. I could still hear the tremolo of the strings around me, as if the soundtrack to some movie I found myself in, but the shadows and silhouettes of the dark theater had glommed together and become somehow faded, less definite. It was as if I’d developed some sort of miasma. I could see very little; all was a barely-lit darkness. I could swear, as the music continued, that I could feel the unfiltered heat of a desert sun baking my neck and face until it hurt. I felt downright feverish! I became aware of the coarse grit plastering my pores, the lethargy tempering my joints and muscles. 

There was the dry-hinge squawk of vultures somewhere overhead, but I couldn’t see them. The sensation of something brushing against my ankle caused me to grope for it in the darkness. For a second I froze, a cloud of ice blooming in my chest as my fingers found something rough and dry scuffing their tips, but a second investigation found only the coarse cotton weave of my socks.

Eventually the sensory spook show ended. The deluge of strange sensations ceased,   the darkness evaporated, and I found myself in the same raggedy seat in the same dark auditorium I’d sat down in. Slim, however, was gone. The few other people who had been in the theater were missing as well. 

I took a second to collect my thoughts–or to try rather, but there was little likelihood of any cogent brain activity. My skull was buzzing like a kicked hornets nest. 

Once I was sure my faculties were more or less in working order, I made my way to the lobby. The two women were still there, this time out from behind the card table and one was dragging a broom across the parquet floor, the other was half visible through a half-propped restroom door, doing the same with a mop.

“Have a good night!” chimed the woman with the broom. I wasn’t sure what to say, or necessarily how to say it, so I just nodded in her direction and kept moving towards the door.

Once I got home and sat down, made myself a cup of tea, I sat and tried to piece the evening together. An hour had passed from the time I’d walked into the Cultural Center to the time I’d gotten back into my car. And the kicker was, I wasn’t even entirely sure what had happened.

It was an experience, though. I have to admit that even though I wasn’t sure how to process what had just happened, my gamble had paid off in spades! I wasn’t likely to forget whatever it was for some time! More importantly, my thoughts strayed to Oasis Slim himself. How had he done what had he done? And, perhaps more importantly, that cactus head of his had just been a mask, right?

Shocktober Silver Screams Day 5: Svengoolie

It was going to happen sooner or later, so why not on a Saturday, when Rich Koz, aka Svengoolie, beams monster movie magnificence and jokes so old they were dusty during the height of vaudeville into our homes?

All you need to know can be seen over at Svengoolie.com

Shocktober Silver Screams Day 3: The Mummy

Day Three needs no explanation. I could go into the pre-code madness that is the great The Mummy, starring Boris Karloff. I could point out how the opening title sequence alone is better than the sum total of most movies in the cineplex this very moment. I could gabba-gabba on and on about how it was directed by Karl Freund, who was the director of photography on Fritz Lang's Metropolis and Tod Browning's Dracula and John Huston's Key Largo.

Lobby card for Karl Freund's 1932 film The Mummy. Boris Karloff is wonderfully
billed here as "Karloff The Uncanny"! 

I could do all of this, or I could just show you my meager marker scribblin's in the semi-form of Boris Karloff as Adreth Bay / Imhotep, the titular Mummy. 

Shocktober Silver Screams Day 2: The Brain From Planet Arous

I went with a decidedly more comic book art approach for Day Two's material, since 1957's The Brain From Planet Arous is kind of the penultimate schlock fest that people either knowingly or unwittingly spoof and reference when they're poking fun and cracking wise about "bad" movies from the 1950s. 

The film is a thick slab of atomic age cheese, but a helluva fun watch. John Agar, prince of the B's, plays a nuclear scientist who becomes possessed by a cosmic brain from the planet Arous. Gor, the brain in question, has a taste for world domination, and, after being introduced to Earth women vis a vis Agar's fiancee Sally (Joyce Meadows), becomes a big ol' floating mass of prurient interests. Of course another, kindlier brain is trying to stop Gor; his name is Vol, and he hides himself in Agar's fiancee's dog.

A lobby card featuring John Agar with his "possessed" foil-lined contacts,
the very same used by Gary Lockwood on the Star Trek episode "Where No
Man Has Gone Before."

The film was directed by Nathan H. Juran, a Jewish Romanian filmmaker whose family emigrated to the USA and settled in Minneapolis, where Juran studied architecture. He did eventually set up his own architecture office in Massachusetts, but the Great Depression forced him to try his hand at freelance illustration due to the construction freeze. He found work as an art director in Los Angeles and was nominated for Academy Awards for his work on John Ford's How Green Was My Valley (1942) and the 1946 film The Razor's Edge. He did win the award for How Green Was My Valley, but eventually moved out of the art department and into the director's chair for some Audie Murphy westerns and, eventually, landing a deal at Universal, directed some of the classics of 1950s b-cinema; most notably The Deadly Mantis, Attack Of The 50 Foot Woman, The 7th Voyage of Sinbad and 20 Million Miles To Earth (both with Ray Harryhausen!). 

Apparently Juran wasn't too thrilled with his horny world-enslaving brain picture, because he changed his name in the credits to Nathan Hertz. The film received more jeers than cheers, but found a new life in the fallout as a cult classic. You can see a neat press package from Howco International films at the great Zombo's Closet website.