Paul's New Hat

While visiting San Francisco a few weeks back, my friend Paul bought himself a brand new pork pie hat.

Charming as an Eel

The Full Story

Several months ago I watched a couple of documentaries titled Toulouse Lautrec: The Full Story and Van Gogh: The Full Story. The presenter was British art critic Waldemar Januzczak. He's got a very engaging personality and takes their stories and makes them accessible and captivating. I just watched another doc by him called Ugly Beauty, which explains why modern art is not only valid, but that it's also important and where it fits in the history of art.

He's an interesting looking guy too. Here are some sketches I did while watching:

Coco

Lunch Doodle

Jungle Oasis

Saturday Sketch at the Scarab

I stopped into the Scarab Club this morning for their twice weekly figure drawing session. Unfortunately, or fortunately depending on how you look at it, the model didn't show. So the gentleman who was running things pulled up a chair and posed for three hours! He was great fun to draw. I did several different versions, but these are the only two that I thought worked.

National Dog Day

Apparently yesterday was National Dog Day. So in honor of that auspicious occasion here are some more sketches of Jambi.

And lest I forget about the current head of the house, I've included some of the lovely Bijou as well.

Pig-dog

My dog Jambi was something of a chimera. He was part Shar-pei and part something short. His feet stuck out at a weird angle giving him a flippered look. His nose was pink, his tongue was blue, his forehead wrinkled. He had yellow eyes ("I swear to God, yellow eyes!"). His fur was course and when he'd shed, it worked it's way into car seat and couch cushion material making it near impossible to vacuum out. Yet his ears were soft and velvety. And when he lay on his side to sleep, with his short little flipper-feet sticking straight out, he resembled a piglet, curly tail and all.

Cowboys and Katt

Girl & Pup

Dogs

Woo! 2

Same girl in the sketch from a few posts back. She looks weird to me. I think it's because her chin's the wrong shape. The paper texture in the background is from a first grade school assignment that is 38 years old! I found it in the same box as Speed Racer.

She kinda looks like my sister.

Woo!

More Sketchbook Stuff

Another Lautrec and a caricature commissioned by my mom.

That Too-Loose Low-Trek Guy

Last week Azucena and I visited Philly to take in some family, food, and museums. Family and food were both wonderful, and so were the museums. One nice surprise at the Philadelphia Museum of Art was almost an entire room dedicated to prints by one of my very favorites, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, painter and poster-maker in fin-de-siècle Paris. Henri used to hang out in brothels and dance halls, portraying dancers and prostitutes from the Montmartre neighborhood in which he lived. Sadly, he died young from drinking too much and complications from syphilis. So, you know, take that as a lesson.

The first sketch is my final version of Henri. I also did a few of the people he knew in Paris: Emile Bernard and Carmen Gaudin. He knew Vincent van Gogh as well.  I recently watched an excellent documentary on van Gogh and  he really comes off as a mal humorous, irritable, self-absorbed jerk, which is why I drew him that way. I saw another documentary by the same people on Lautrec that is equally entertaining and illuminating.

We also spied this fine example of American artistry whilst at the PMA:

I see spots

This here is a little exercise I picked up from someone (probably Stephen Silver). I made a bunch of little watercolor spots in my sketchbook and then picked out faces in the swirls and inked them. Some turned out better than others, and some not at all, but it makes for a lot of fun!

Doodle Dump

New Acquisitions

I picked up a few things over the last couple weeks. First up, I got the winning bid on a cool illustration by cartoonist Chris Houghton at the Kids Read Comics auction at Green Brain Comics last week.

This is a book I'd been looking forward to for a long time. The Abominable Charles Christopher is a serialized web comic and has been collected in a gorgeous first volume with a fuzzy suede-like cover.

I mostly purchased the next book because I like to say TIGERBUTTAH. Try it. It's fun. It's filled with lovely gouache paintings. Plus it was printed by the same folks who make the Golden Books from my youth, hence the nifty metallic spine.

Lastly, the latest hardcover version of my sketchbook.

In a galaxy far, far away...

As a kid, among my most prized possessions were my Star Wars action figures. The first set of four figures were made available through the Star Wars Early Bird Special Christmas Cardboard Envelope Thingy. Kenner Toys hadn't thought to cash in on the success of the movie by merchandising toys for the holidays. In a last minute effort to not miss out on what would be millions, they came up with the idea of selling cardboard envelopes with a gift certificate inside to send away for toys that hadn't been made yet. Then they would send you one figure a month: Artoo, Leia, Chewie, and Luke. This was at a time before everything was merchandised to death. In fact, Star Wars started the whole shebang of merchandising everything to death.

Needless to say I was nuts over Star Wars. That two hours and twenty minutes of film still influence every brush mark I make. So I begged and begged and begged to get a cardboard envelope for Christmas. And I did! And my envelope didn't have a gift certificate in it. Which sucked. And who at the local Toys-R-Us is going to believe you that the certificate was conveniently left out? So no Star Wars for me. I had to wait months and months (which in kid time is, like, forever) for the figures to arrive in stores so I could take them home to take on my Micronauts.

I played the hell out of these things. Along with my best friend Mike, epic stories were concocted and played out in the sand box in his back yard. I even lugged them with me on a family trip to California where they got a little melty in the ninety degree heat. Han Solo would never stand quite right again.

At some point, probably years later while I was working or at school, my mother cleaned the basement and gave all my Star Wars action figures (along with the Micronauts) to little Roy down the street. I guess I was okay with it at the time. I'd already painted Chewbacca white because I wanted to see what an albino wookiee looked like, so I was pretty much done with them. I hope he got as much out of them as I did.