Bitch...

This is a drawing I did for a friend many years ago. It was for an invitation to a women's only movie party she was hosting at her apartment. The movie she showed on this occasion was, if you can't guess by the drawing, (assuming the likeness I achieved is sufficient), ALL ABOUT EVE, starring Bette Davis.

DATELINE: OCTOBER 01, 2022 I have removed the previous image and replaced it with this new one. The previous scan was from a printed copy of the drawing, as I was not sure at that time where the original drawing was filed. That printed copy I scanned had become discolored in the upper half of the image. I subsequently found the original drawing, as well as several pristine prints of it. However, I just used Photoshop to correct the white balances on the previous scan, so this is a corrected version of that. (Why didn't I do that in the first place? I have no clue!) I also removed the sloppy hand-lettered "Bitch" in the word balloon and used a font to make the image overall more appealling. Who says one can't change what came before?

Spring Rocks!

This began as a doodle in a sketchbook some years back, and I liked it so much I used it again as a background in another drawing later, (one I will post here soon). Here is another elaboration of the original doodle, colored, and with background.

We the People...

I did this illustration for someone who was giving a seminar to students aspiring to become attorneys. I was asked simply to provide a picture depicting a courtroom proceeding. The text promoting the event and providing time, place and date information was placed in the black bars above and below the picture. The composition is lacking, and the hands of the attorney are stiff and awkward, but we learn how to do something better by doing it imperfectly and recognizing the imperfections after the fact.

Brushy Face

This Ben Shahn-like drawing was just a quick doodle. I like it because of its expressive brushy lines, but it was not drawn with a brush. This was drawn digitally, with a Wacom tablet, using a Creaturehouse EXPRESSION, a wonderful vector program that was bought by Microsoft and turned into a component of Windows-only website building software suite. Microsoft discontinued the product a couple of years or so ago, but I can only use the original software, which was compatible with Macs. The program has its own complement of prepackaged brushes, as expected, but one could make marks on paper with pen, brush, ink drops, etc., then scan them in and use them to make unique vector brushes that were responsive to pressure sensitivity, allowing for variability of line weight. This was drawn with a brush I made. The program was much cheaper than Illustrator or equivalent programs, and was far easier to use out of the box, very intuitive, and far more conducive to making expressive, "natural" drawings. It didn't have, perhaps, the "power" of Illustrator, but it was the better tool for simulating natural media, but with the advantages of vector capabilities. (The two cartoons in my post "Harry Potter Conquers The Universe" were drawn with EXPRESSION, over scanned in pencil underdrawings.) 

Will anyone rescue EXPRESSION from the digital grave?

Harry Potter Conquers The Universe

Two pictures I drew for The Brutarian, fanzine dedicated to trash culture, (monster movies, rock music, exploitation films, etc.)  The Brutarian ran for quite a few issues and received wide distribution, in that Tower Records carried it in their magazine section.

This article had to do with the popularity of fantasy and sf in popular culture, as best I can recall.  The first illustration here is titled "Harry Potter Conquers The Universe." (Could that have been the title of the article? Maybe.) The second illustration depicts interstellar love, (although, as so often on Earth, the love appears a bit one-sided).  This is titled "Lunar "L'amour."

Flayed Head

This is an ink wash and gouache drawing of a plastic head ecorche I have, cast from a cadaver's head. The other side of the ecorche is just the skull, so one may see and compare the bony structure under the musculature. The gouache was a happy accident; I intended only for this to be an ink wash rendering, but I laid down an area of wash that was darker than I intended. Not knowing how best to correct the error, I went over that section with a thin layer of white gouache, hoping to lighten the ink. I succeeded in my intent, at least partly, but I was surprised to find I liked the look of the gouache over the ink. After I competed the rest of the ink wash layers, I went over everything with the gouache. 

Dance of the Oddfellows

Here's the final picture, used as the cover drawing for issue #3 of Oddfellow, a humor magazine published out of NYC.  This was the "Spring Issue," (a hint to the theme of the image), and also the final issue to be published. It was a joint effort by two brothers, the younger of whom I met when he was temping at my place of work. When he told me he and his brother were planning on publishing their own magazine, I recommended they contact a friend of mine, a professional illustrator, to do some work for them, which they did, and which he did. They also asked me to contribute, flatteringly enough. I provided four interior drawings illustrating a story in their first issue, a single doublewide drawing (it ran across the top half of two pages inside) for another story in their second issue, and this cover drawing and an interior comic strip for this final issue. The interior strip was written by the publisher and was an advertisement for a music store in NYC. (I generally write my own comics--not that I have produced a surplus of them--and only twice previously had I ever illustrated someone else's script.) 

This incorporates elements that I drew separately (as shown in the previous several posts), then put together digitally in Corel Painter, (with some tweaking in Photoshop).  For a closer look, click on the picture, (as with all pictures posted on this blog). This is an upload of the tif file of the finished illustration, and not a scan of the published cover.