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

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!"

 

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.

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.

Have I Got Noose For You!

Here's an impulse piece I made in my sketchbook. I wanted to do a bendy stage magician, the old fashioned type that used to travel from town to town, putting on shows at local theaters. I suppose that that's been a dead art for over half a century now. Now you mostly see "illusionists" at prom after-parties, corporate events and with residencies in Las Vegas or something. 

Anywho, I made this colored pencil piece up over the course of an afternoon. When I posted it on Instagram I got a lot of likes. Primarily from prestidigitators who will soon be sorely disappointed to learn I don't post a lot of magic-themed material.

A Night In The Cemetery

One of the amazing things that I've gotten to do over the last few years (this was the fourth, I believe) that falls into the category of "I can't believe I get to experience this!" but somehow had the good fortune to be a part of, is the Trylon Cinema and The Friends of the Cemetery "Cinema In The Cemetery" event. Over the last four Septembers I've gotten to sit in Minneapolis's oldest cemetery, the Pioneers and Soldiers Cemetery on Cedar Avenue, and watch old horror films screened on a small screen erected directly in front of the caretaker's cottage. If you had told monster movie-obsessed child-me that I'd get to sit and watch Vincent Price in The Last Man On Earth or Hammer Films' Dracula in a cemetery, I'd have thought you were either bonkers or trying to sell me a line. 

Not only did that happen, but twice–during the first year, watching El Santo And Blue Demon Against The Monsters, and the following year during Dracula, of all things–the scene was complete with a full, blood-red harvest moon!

This year the program was a little different. The Trylon usually creates a theme, and runs one film per Saturday along that theme for the month of September. One year it was all Hammer Films productions; last year was a month of Vincent Price films, etcetera. This year there was only one outing scheduled, for whatever reason, and it was a showing of the 1924 silent classic The Hands Of Orlac, directed by Robert Wiene and starring Conrad Veidt as the titular Orlac. Being a silent film, of course, the music was crucial, and this was supplied not by pre-recorded soundtrack, but by a live ensemble called Spider Hospital. You can hear a piece of the music here.

I took my sketchbook along and did some doodling during the brief period of waning daylight before the show started. I didn't get much on paper before it was too dark to see, but that's fine. I was there to watch the movie, and the movie was great. The only irksome thing cantankerous old me finds with these outdoor screenings, is the crowd is often a mixed bag. Some old folks who remember the films and have remained fans, some film buffs out to catch a classic in an unique environment, and those who've shown up for a novel experience–usually families looking for something to do besides sit around the house and ask what there is to do. I generally have my Svengoolie shirt on at these things (solidarity is important) and usually get one or two middle-aged guys who point at the glow-in-the-dark design and say "That's what I'd be watching if I wasn't here tonight." 

Some sketches of headstones.

I'm no puritan when it comes to the film viewing experience; unless there's someone gabbing on their cell phone during the picture, or standing in front of the screen, everyone's allowed to have a good time watching a movie. But I've found these things have a tendency to turn into amateur Mystery Science Theater 3000 events. Yes, films from the beginning or middle of the last century have elements that don't translate well to people who don't have the context or reverence for the material that I or other fans of the films might have. Especially when the film is a silent film. Of course there's no dialogue for the actors to utilize to help convey emotion or context, so they have to over emphasize body language and facial expression. Every concerned character becomes a wide-eyed, chest-clutching basket case on the  verge of a nervous breakdown, every swooning lover becomes a creepily melodramatic, bewildered caricature. It looks goofy to the CGI generations and that's understandable, but to constantly lambast and heckle the material and performances as if we were sitting around at the Internet Cat Video Festival gets a bit irritating after a while. Same goes for the guy sitting next to me who spent nearly all of the ninety-two minute running time scrolling through his various social media streams on his cell phone. Apparently the comments he was receiving in response to the comments he made on some picture of something was more riveting than what he'd paid $10 to experience.

I don't know why there aren't more events scheduled this month. Hopefully disgraceful acts like this won't prevent future screenings.