June 2011
30 posts
The Three of Spears
Rushed and scattered today. I only have a rough sketch to be going on with. This is an element that I came up with many, many years ago, and have drawn ever since, as a kind of personal emblem — the Three of Spears. (It can also be found in a deck of tarot cards, but I did not know that at the time.) The symbolism is, on one level, embarrassingly obvious.
I AM A POINTY LADY! DO YOU...
May 2011
37 posts
1 tag
32 going on 12
One reason I never pursued cartooning seriously as a young thing was that I observed certain signs about my drawing that made me doubt I had anything worth pursuing. One of those signs was my natural failure to draw anything “cartoony.” I loved funny-animal strips and so forth, but I never thought to draw anything curvy, big-eyed or anthropomorphic (unless it was a monster), and I...
2 tags
Bryn Mawr (I)
The Anassa or “Anass” is the Bryn Mawr College battle cry, an invocation to Athena in ancient Greek: anassa katakalo kale - ia! ia! ia! Nike! Bryn Mawr, Bryn Mawr, Bryn Mawr! (Mistress, I invoke you, fair one — ia! ia! ia! Victory!) The cheer can only be started by seniors or alumnae, but once the first words go up, the crowd joins in immediately — then, after the...
Out of town till late Saturday
Possibly one of my iThings can take a photo of a drawing that’s good enough to share, but I doubt it. I’ll have to draw and post nunc pro tunc, and also maybe reblog a cool thing to look at, or two.
A second installment of guesses
Again as from the Doe Network. As I say, the point of this exercise is to try to imagine what these people might actually have looked like, not merely as a collection of human features.
A young Hispanic man found dead from dehydration, floating in an inner tube off Broward County, Florida, in 1993. He had apparently tried to escape Cuba. He carried a few personal effects, including notes...
Ask me one of these and I will answer it with a...
eatmiiskittles:
1. My favorite color?
2. A random fact about me.
3. My fantasy.
4. What I do in my spare time.
5. My worst fear?
6. My biggest weakness.
7. The weirdest thing I’ve ever done.
8. What I find cute.
9. My favorite food.
10. What I think about your’ blog.
Practicing with the painting software again
I colored this older black-and-white doodle. The plants turned out well, but the skin tone is all wrong (pale Japanese != zombie) and the background should be more evenly done and sharply graded.
Not much today but a bunch of words to go with it
One of my more depressing habits is to read the Unidentified Victims pages of the Doe Network, a website dedicated to cataloging the sketches and reconstructions of deceased John and Jane Does from all over the country, together with listings for missing persons. Dozens of years-old mysteries have been solved by letting the internet do what it does naturally and make connections.
I personally...
Misc. doodles XI
Never up to much on a Monday.
No particular context, but I’ve used this phrase so much lately that I had an urge to have myself holding this sign.
Abstract of someone I’ll be drawing for a friend.
I am always fooling around with my natural inclinations for drawing hands and fingers, trying to transform them into a quick and cheerful cartoon shorthand. How’s that working...
Anonymous asked: The gay man thirty years dead reminds me of Jobriath the singer.
Ygramul, die Viele, der Entsetzlichste der...
The Neverending Story by Michael Ende is a YA novel that was very poorly served by the movies. If you’ve read it, you’ll recall that it imparts a lot of difficult lessons, some of which none of us ever learn. I read it at age eight or so, and reread it many times since.
One of the many characters cut from the film was Ygramul the Many, a massive hive-minded swarm of stinging,...
No, seafoam green is not her color. I am aware of...
I spent all my drawring time today learning how to work with MyPaint, insofar as I have. I colored this piece that I posted a while back in monochrome as I drew it, and I spent some time working to color another piece that I haven’t posted yet, but that one’s tricky. Here is Miss Agnatha, again.
I like the brushstroke effect, although I don’t know that I use it well. ...
Aargh! Football practice! -- Oh, not again . . .
I am vulnerable to falling suddenly asleep on a Friday with a dachshund. Nonetheless I should endeavor to obey my own rules, even if what I have is a sketchy piece of crapdoodle from warming up.
Busy day
So I just have some beginning concept sketches for a villain from a beloved childhood book of mine; you may or may not recognize it (and if you don’t it’s best, because then the completed drawing will look better).
1 tag
I like banners
One of the things I practice that I enjoy, even though I can tell everybody else is sick to death of it, is my own handwriting. I’ve seen very little that looks like it. I don’t have anything worth looking at today, but what I do have is my practicing making a logo from my own handwriting. I don’t like this — there’s too much white space in it and the ink’s...
No goodness today
Just out-of-context facial expressions. I was busy and it was all I felt like doing.
Well, that just hollows my eyesockets
Ugh, not pleased with this at all. Shows what I get for doing five things at once.
It’s a rendition of this example of skull elongation.
Like much of human anatomy, the skull is deceptively difficult, but needs to be practiced. I don’t believe I set this fellow’s eyes right in the first place, and the postmortem staining makes it all very unclear.
My poor rendition makes...
Thomas or Thomasine Hall
“At some point near the start of the 17th century a certain Thomasine Hall was born in the northeastern part of England. Christened and raised like other girls of her time, Hall spent her later childhood in London. But then came a startling change: upon reaching adulthood she cut her hair and joined the army ‘in the habit of a man.’ When mustered out a few years later, Hall...
Again with the hosing around
I wrote for most of this afternoon and doodled compulsively the whole time, but almost nothing is worth looking at. I wanted to see what my graphite stump would do over other pencils and ink lines, which is pretty much this to start with. I’ll have more skill to use under it later.
Just a quick thing today
Wanted to draw something kinetic today and a bit awkward — definitely to practice, I should add, since I don’t practice either of those enough.
I have no other explanation for the pose and it seems they don’t either.
1 tag
Elsie Paroubek
This picture was poorly lit in the first place, then blown up, cropped, and reproduced in heavily smudged newspapers across the city of Chicago when Elsie Paroubek, age five, was murdered in 1911. That murder was never solved.
After three generations of photo reproduction, she scarcely looked like an actual living child, but Henry Darger cut this picture out and loved her like his own.
No one...
asystolic: Worldbuilding Wednesday →
robotlyra:
creepyeverything:
villainry:
a day to discuss and ask about your and your creative-type buddies’ stories, characters, concepts, the whole shebang! get talking, ~get inspired~
my ask box: here
reblog with your own!
I know it is not Wednesday anymore but I will remind myself to…
In the interests of creative development, you can ask me things about my current feeble attempts at...
Misc. doodles X
Today, the fifteen-minute subway ride I take every day turned out to be the damn Night Train from Mundo Fine, and I lost over an hour on the way home. So, tonight, only doodles from me, and particularly stylized ones, I am afraid.
From the Forgotten Old Photos blog
I’m delighted to have found Forgotten Old Photos. I could draw dozens of these.
“To Aunt Minnie, Lovingly, Ethyl.” What a name for a nurse — I’m sure she was already thoroughly sick of humorous fatherly doctors asking her for “you chloride.”
Not a perfect likeness here, but a good opportunity to play around with graphite some more.
Ammi Phillips
Since the drawing was not much today, I thought I’d give you something else to look at, and post about a thing I just discovered: the work of Ammi Phillips (1788-1865), an American self-taught limner, or folk portrait artist. I believe I’ve seen it in American history textbooks here and there, but when I was looking for period clothing depictions, I paid attention to it for the first...
Ivory and chartreuse evening dress, 1920s, Callot...
Photo reference to The Fashion Book, p. 83. Again, not happy with this one, but it is an instructive fail.
The photograph shows a dress in brilliant, gleaming, slightly translucent fabric that is clearly decaying from the hemline, and the brown-to-black background matches the creeping discoloration very well. Here, it looks like I used a box of Crayola. I think the takeaway for me, here, is...
Misc. doodles IX
Busy with various things today and didn’t execute anything particular.
2 tags
Klaus Nomi and Janelle Monae
(By now, I should have a macro to produce the words “I’m not happy with how this turned out but it’s late and here we are.” Anyway, I can at least pass on some good music.)
In the past couple of years, I fell in love with Klaus Nomi* and decided that he was my Grand Avatar of Weirdness.
Photo reference. He died young, before he could develop his vision in the way he...
Can't actually construct a garment -- barely...
Tonight I was just playing around with mid-nineteenth-century women’s costume design in my head. What? I like fooling around with various periods of clothing. Anyway, this would be a simple 1840s-50s dress with high-necked chemise and two petticoats; the stays of the corset beneath are laced moderately or loosely, to permit movement and eschew vanity. Depending on the quality of the...
Possibly I was the only kid who thought this, but...
Not much from me; a rough day. I do have this, though — did this guy ever show up in your nightmares?
When I was little, the appearance of the Warner Bros. 1970s logo unnerved me. I didn’t know it was supposed to be a W, and I thought it was some kind of a man-bear. That made no more or less sense to me than any other logo on TV. Come to think of it, it still doesn’t make...
Misc. doodles VIII
Hosted folks tonight and haven’t much to show but some earlier doodles. When left to it to do nothing but truly doodle, I tend to sketch faces, particularly faces that are reacting to each other in ways that I haven’t imagined before they appeared on paper.
Or just somebody who is lurking.
Mrs. Buck Ruxton, and a thing I have just realized
Several of my ongoing obsessions in imagery — Starr Faithfull, Mrs. Buck Ruxton, and Elena Hoyos — reflect a theme: the return and revenge of the female body.
In 1935, Dr. Buck Ruxton of Lancaster, who might have been a remarkable cross-cultural success if he had not also been an insanely jealous and abusive husband, strangled his wife Isabella Kerr in a fit of rage. Then, when his...
And no, I did not forget
I skived off accidentally last night, because I was miserable and tired and had a long day and I was going to lie down with my dog for just ten minutes, which turned into 3 a.m. all of a sudden. This did not involve any Diet Coke & vodka whatsoever and I resent the insinuation shame on you sir.
I plan to put double effort in on an upcoming day —
Genus Sula
I started out drawing another dead person today and then I looked out and it was hell of May Day weather out there, the hunt being up &c., and I looked at the blog, and I thought: colors! How about some of those.
Here is a blue-footed booby. I like his gormless, Berke-Breathed-like posture. Not a great reproduction of the sharp, bright original, although I enjoyed my Art Stix more than...
