Untitled Pen Drawing

I love to work with Bic pens. My favorite are the clicky kind. I don't race them or anything, I just like to use them. The Bic is a very good pen for drawing for two big reasons: The ink flows every time, and you have a tremendous amount of control over the amount of ink flowing. So armed with a clicky Bic I drew this guy.

It was loosely inspired by something I saw on The Meth Minute 39, a very weird, but incredibly funny cartoon show on the interwebs. I wanted to draw a much more distorted face than I usually draw. It sort of worked. I was actually going for a view as though the viewer was looking up at the guy, so in that respect it failed. But the face is still weird looking. Initially I left off the goat-tee, but then wondered what it would look like with one so I added it. I think that was a mistake, but that's the danger of working with pen, rather than pencil. You may notice that there are more shapes surrounding the head. I still don't really know what they mean. A friend once told me about how he used to meditate: he would imagine himself swimming towards the bottom of a very deep (but clear) body of water. On his way he would see fish swim by and he realized that each fish represented some thought. He didn't know what the thoughts were, but he did recognize that as long as he was still seeing fish, his mind was not clear. Perhaps that's what happening here. They don't mean anything specific, just "there is crap in your brain."

I'm going to run this one through Photoshop and try to clean it up a bit and make it shiny. I like the image, it's pretty funny looking. But it is a sketch so there are a lot of rough lines. I don't want to completely take the rough lines out, that's part of what I like about this image, but I would like to make it look a little more completed.

Robot-Head-Thing

Just this past Saturday I was interviewed for a local 'zine called "Infolepsy". As a result, I now feel motivated to draw more frequently and to at least maintain status quo on posting to this blog. So I drew this last night.


Whenever I'm stuck for ideas, I draw heads. Human heads, robot heads, dog heads, cat heads. But no shower heads. I don't know that I have ever drawn a shower head, interestingly enough. I may have to change that. Anywho, I was pretty pleased with the doodle, I'd taken some time to do some shading on the 'bot-head and I like the cross-hatching, too. But the background was a bit dull. Now, it was just a doodle, it was never intended to be a Finished Piece Of Art or anything like that, but still I wanted something to make the image pop a little more. So into Photoshop it went, I selected the background and tweaked the Levels and voila! (Which, if I'm not mistaken, is the French word for "viola".) Now there is this.

Interestingly enough -to me anyway- I have done images similar to this one before, with the shapes around the head that don't really define a border to the space, but I have no idea what it's all about. Oh I'm sure there's something about balance in there. There's always something about balance. But I don't know what the rectangles are or the circles are. These circles aren't the "bubbles" I so commonly use, so I don't know what they're trying to tell me. I guess this gives me a little direction for new works: what the hell are the circles and the boxes all about? It can't simply be to make the picture appear more elaborate and meaningful than it really is. Or can it?

Big Head (in ink)

I started trying to keep a daily sketch book last year. It hasn't worked. I just can't put something in there every day. But it's starting to form a habit. I find that when I draw daily I draw better. I have better ideas and better technique and some cool ideas. I realize, too, that a great deal of the things that I've been drawing are, in some form or another, self-portraits. I realize, too, that a self-portrait doesn't have to look anything like Self. The following is an example of a mental self-portrait, a sort of drawing of my mental state at the time.


At the time, I was on medication for depression. And the medication was waaaay too strong. My brain wasn't firing on all cylinders, nor were they firing in time. I felt completely spaced, on top of the crippling depression. The huge head, looking a bit like a depressed balloon with vacant eyes, floating up and away towards the uknown, atop a pretty drab background. Sickly skin wrapped in dark colors. That was my mind in mid-May, 2007 (and for a little while after, too). It doesn't really look like me. (see?) The drawing is certainly missing all the characteristics that I generally incorporate into self-portraits: beard, bald-cap, cigarette (though that's not a constant anyway, but a cigarette in a holder is a dead give-a-way for a self portrait). But that is clearly me. If I completely forget about this piece and see it again in 15 years, I'll still see me in it. I have no idea what the big hands are about. I was probably looking at some work by Sam Flores at that time.

This went just past a sketch into a "finished image" because I wanted to try out some new pen nibs and brushes that I got for working with ink and this was the excuse to do it. I'm really pleased with this image. I think it's a pretty solid image, one I'll still be proud of in the future. I can see this being a sort of inspiration, a "Look what I'm capable of" kind of thing. Even though it's all about that horrible depression and the hell of a time I had getting through it, this image makes me feel good.

Mind of a Man, Heart of a Robot (In Color!)

Well, here it is all in color. I rather like it in color, don't you?

And there you have it. My first hybrid in a long long time. I like to draw something with pencil or pen and then color it on the compooter. Partially because I suck with color. I can't work with paints or pastels or anything like that and get the results that I'm looking for. But with Photoshop, I can tweak the colors until they are just right, plus do some other cool stuff that helps to "complete" an image. Take, for example, the cherry on the cigarette. What I did originally looked just awful. It was a bright red. Had I painted that, there would wind up being huge gobs of paint in that area and I would have ended up destroying the thing. But this way I could tweak it down to orange and mess with some other stuff that I barely understand, but still appreciate, and make it look good. I was also able to make the background (which is super easy and I love the way it looks!) and the frame.

Now that I have the scanner, I suspect that I'll be doing more pieces in this fashion. I'll spend more time shading the original pencil or pen drawing and then just color it after the fact. I know that can work really well because I've done it before with favorable results.

The Scanner Has Arrived.

Yay! My scanner arrived on my doorstep this morning. So I sat down to spend the evening scanning and lo and behold, the second thing I scan wants me to color it in. Here is the uncolored version:



As you can see it is a man's head on a robot's body. And the man is smoking a cigarette through a cigarette holder like Franklin Roosevelt would if here a half-man/half-robot creature, with the head of a man, and the heart of a robot. That bit about the head of a man and the heart of a 'bot is pretty much what this one is about for me. If one were to design a creature utilizing the best parts of two other creatures, one would not be likely to create this: a slow, confused brain with a mechanical heart void of anima. This guy would be the thing made from left-overs.

Like there's this janitor who lives in the basement of the lab or machine shop where they build these man-bots with the brain of a bot and the heart of a man. And late at night he tinkers with some of the ort and creates his own critters. And this critter is his pride and joy, his greatest accomplishment in the world of splicing-together-two-things-that-don't-belong-together. It's his best friend. And this critter is a smoker, because it's sort of a depressing existence to realize that he's been created out of the dregs. And he's aware of the fact that "this just isn't right", he knows, with that human mind, that he shouldn't be. He's simply a science project for a weird janitor. So he needs a smoke to calm him down. All the reason of a human, all the compassion of a robot.

Well, whatever his story is, there will be a colored in version up here soon. So watch this space!