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.

Satori Sketchy

Dr. Sketchy Detroit was back at the Belmont yesterday. It was a lovely late spring evening and we sat out in the courtyard where Satori Circus posed up for us. And it was good to see some old friends show up and join us too. These are my drawings from the night, the sixth image down being from a three-artist round robin sketch where we each spent five minutes adding on to what the previous artist did.

Also, due to the family friendly nature of my blog and for the benefit of under-aged Facebook friends, the un-edited versions of the first and last sketch have been hidden here and here.

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.

Munny!

Niece Bri shows off her and her uncle's handiwork from a Sunday afternoon of painting Munnys (Munnies?) at Lift in Royal Oak.

Weather

Family Portraits

I took my Mom and Aunt to a family reunion last weekend...well a kinda-family reunion. It was a reunion for my mother's half-sister's husband's family, so I didn't expect to be related to many there. But apparently I was, though most of them I didn't know or haven't seen in a million years. Here's some sketches: my cousin Margie, my Aunt Nina (the family story teller who is now over 90), and a bunch of boys playing on the Slip-n-Slide.

A thousand and then some

Every so often I collect all of the artwork that I've done on my tablet and print it up in a book. That way I have a hard copy to put on my shelf next to my other sketchbooks. I'm just shy of hitting the 1,000 mark on total "pages" since I bought my tablet pc so I thought it was a good time to start putting it together. I actually have well more than the number stated, but that's the number of pages that have been saved to the folder on my hard drive called "Sketchbook". It's not counting all the other files I've done that have been worthy enough to have actual titles bestowed upon them. Not like files such as poor ol' Image926.tif. Oh, what fun that one was, but just not fun enough to get a fancy name. But fancy or not, they all go in and then I can back 'em up to make more room on my drive for the next thousand-and-then-some.

I'm curious what's going to happen when I reach 1,000. Will it restart at 001? Or will it add a one to the front? So many unanswered questions.

Below is the cover I did for the book. Since Ellie and her peeps feature largely in the pages it's only fitting they be on the cover.

UPDATE: Upon reaching 1,000 pages the file automatically gets named Image1000.tif. Another mystery solved!

Ellies

This should be wrapping paper.

Spring Sketchy at the Scarab...

...with a flower power/hippy chick theme. There was even some fire eating going on! How cool is that?

DAP-tastic!

Azucena treated me to Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings last night at the Majestic Theater in Detroit (not the theater where Houdini last performed as we learned; that was the now gone Garrick Theater). She'd won the tickets on WDET a few weeks ago after declaring her intentions to do so. Closing her eyes, she calmly spurned any effort on my part to "dial now!" Instead, she waited just the right amount of time, came out of her Houdini-like trance, and dialed the number to be caller number three (or two, or four, or whatever). I will never doubt her magical dialing skills again.

There was a bit of a mix-up with our tickets at will-call, but after that the evening was stellar. The opening band was The Heavy, known by me for their song How You Like Me Now from the Kia Sorento commercials. I liked them. They seem to be part of the resurgence of Reggae and Ska that I've been hearing about. Then the Dap-Kings came out and played a little intro to announce the entrance of Sharon Jones. The whole show was one big, powerful, energized, sweat inducing, funk-soul revue. I imagine this is what the Motown Revues back in the 60's were like.

Here's some sketches (based on photos from the web as the few I took with my phone were lacking):

Viva Las Sketchy!

I just got back from a jaunt out to Vegas to hang with friends and take in a little Dr. Sketchy. Here's the evidence:

Ellie Reads Comics

This is a poster I designed for KIDS READING COMICS, a gallery show at Green Brain Comics and inspired by the Kids Read Comics convention at the Henry Ford Centennial Library in Dearborn, Michigan. The exhibit will hang at Green Brain until Friday June 11th.

Homework

I recently finished up an online course in animation character design with the illustrious Stephen Silver. You may (or may not) know him from the work he's done on the Clerks animated series, or Kim Possible and Danny Phantom. I've been studying his work for some time - I love his clean lines and shapes - so when I saw he was offering courses I naturally hemmed and hawed for months before plunking down my cash. Nothing against Mr. Silver, I just work myself up into a ball of nerves when spending a lot of moolah on something others might view as frivolous. And my generation has a tendancy to view frivolous online art courses as the equivalent of "Draw Tippy".

But frivolous this was not. I'm making a concerted effort in improving my abilities. Time to put my dough where my pie hole is. I'm not looking into entering the animation field, but I want to be able to improve on drawing characters the same from different angles, and also constructing them in a logical and clear way. Mr. Silver's class helped with just that.

He uses videos to hand us the tools to improve our artwork with in-depth lessons and personal critiques that are hand drawn over our own assignments. We get to see where we've succeeded in applying his lessons, but more importantly where we've strayed so we can learn from our mistakes. I can't say that all of his lessons have sunk in yet, but I've already noticed an improvement in my artwork. And I have more confidence in my abilities too!

Here are a few of my assignments. The first is a character we had to draw based on a description. Merely an assignment so he could see where our drawing ability stood.

Aside from many, many, many drawing exercises, another assignment included creating a version of Dr. Jekkyl and Mr. Hyde. I invented my own version of a 19th century paleontologist who accidentally ingests some dino DNA.

It was a great course that was a lot of work and a lot of fun. Now to make it pay off!