Welcome to the grand finale of 2013’s Monster Month! This piece was painted as a cover this past August for the National Cartoonist’s Society (NCS) magazine The Cartoon!st that featured an article about yours truly. I was honored to be invited by editor Frank Pauer to be interviewed, and had a great time creating this monster menagerie to accompany the issue. I have been a member of the NCS for eighteen years, and am proud to be a part of that fine professional organization.
The Monster Manipulator with his league of out-of-the-ordinary gentlemen.
This piece was created mostly the old fashioned way – with real watercolor paints and colored pencils! Only the bookcase eye glow and the haze on the glass dome were manipulated digitally. The hard part was in getting the fellas to all hold their poses for me while I painted them from real life.
I hope you have enjoyed this creepy time together over the past month. I truly had a blast creating the creatures. Bookmark my blog to make it easy for you to see more fun art being posted throughout the year!
What better way to get Monster Month kicked off than with a self-effacing interpretation of the Wolfman. This is a version of how I look before I’ve had my coffee in the morning.
This is how I really am. When a full moon appears, I become normal looking.
For those of you paying attention to my signature, I originally drew this one back in 2010. It was a sketch in my sketchbook that I inked, then scanned and colored in Photoshop. I was playing around with the idea of turning myself into the Wolfman for 2010’s Monster Month, when a funnier idea came to mind. I redrew myself a little less angry getting scolded by a police officer. CLICK HERE if you’d like to see THAT drawing which was inspired by THIS drawing!
The next installment of boogie monsters arrives here on Friday!
I dropped by the barber shop this past weekend with a sketchbook under my arm. Barber shops are always populated with a cross section of ages and personalities that make for an interesting time. The regulars carry on conversations and offer unsolicited opinions on just about any topic. The newer guys sit and listen participating only with facial expressions. You never know how long you will have to wait on a Saturday morning, so why not capture these moments with a pencil?
I go to Arenas’ Barber Shop on Victory Boulevard in good ol’ Burbank, CA. The shop is run by second generation barber siblings Denise and Steve Arenas whose pop got them going down the path of hair manipulation many years before. They used to work in the hair salon on the Disney Studio lot for years until current management starting eliminating some of the family atmosphere of the employment experience there, and forced out the Arenas along with other follicle folks.
Ten years ago Denise took over an old time barber shop run by an old timer named Chuck (I used to go to him, too), fixed up the joint and created a fun atmosphere for parting parts and taming tresses.
Denise will cut any hair no matter how much or how little you have.
So, the next time you get your hair cut, look around and take it all in. There are few experiences in life where complete strangers can all be the best of friends for an hour while waiting their turn for a trim before walking out the door into harsh, cold anonymity once again.
Perhaps my favorite kind of music next to film scores are the tunes from the Great American Songbook by yesterday’s crooners like Bing Crosby, Dean Martin, Frank Sinatra, Perry Como, Johnny Mercer, Mel Tormé, and especially Nat King Cole. Cole’s smokey smooth tones infused with a bit of jazz are at once nostalgic, comforting, and yeah, I’ll say it – romantic. His is the voice I imagine would come from my mouth should the opportunity to serenade a young lady comes along.
Lest I actually open my mouth and frighten you all away with the true nature of my voice, perhaps for now just a sketch of the great Nat King Cole is in order…
The man who knew how to straighten up and fly right – Nat King Cole.
It is hard to believe that thirteen years ago the great animator and designer Marc Davis (one of Walt Disney’s famed Nine Old Men) passed away. I was part of a group from Disney that went over to his home to help his wife archivally store the art in Marc’s studio. Each flat file unearthed a new treasure trove of drawings that no one but Marc probably had ever seen. One drawer in particular made an impression on me. As each piece of paper was lifted, there was sketch after sketch Marc had drawn in person of jazz musicians during the heyday of the Los Angeles jazz scene. Included were drawings he created of the great Nat King Cole during live performances! Oh to have been a fly on THAT wall!
Speaking of performances, here’s a nifty introduction to that great King Cole voice! Enjoy!
Here in the United States we used to separately celebrate the February birthdays of our two favorite Presidents, George Washington (February 22) and Abraham Lincoln (February 12). Somewhere along the way somebody got tired of paying people to frolic and play for two days, so they combined the two holidays into one (February 18) and called it the generic “Presidents’ Day” even though many Presidents didn’t earn the right to be celebrated.
Abraham Lincoln is definitely one who deserves celebrating, most notably for ending slavery and trying to mend a fractured nation. He is honored, along with George Washington, by being pictured on both coin and paper money. Towns, schools, cars, even logs are all named after Lincoln. He is a memorable part of Disneyland, and has been the subject of many books, movies, and television shows.
One of the earliest portrayals of Lincoln in film was by Charles Brabin for the short His First Commission in 1911, roughly a mere ten years after motion pictures were invented. Lincoln has been portrayed in films and television over 300 times by actors such as Walter Huston, John Carradine, Henry Fonda, Jason Robards, Hal Holbrook, Gregory Peck, and more recently by Daniel Day-Lewis.
For all these reasons, and the fact that he has such an intriguing face, I felt compelled to try a more grown-up approach to painting than what I am used to. Using red, white and blue as my palette, this piece came forth last weekend in watercolor with a hint of colored pencil here and there. While employing a more mature technique, I’m still a cartoonist. So this remains a caricatured interpretation of a President I admire greatly.
Abraham Lincoln in all of his red, white, and blue.
Here’s part two of some of my real life sketches drawn in the airports where I spent some quality time over the holidays. These specimens were captured in Baltimore and Atlanta one week ago where I spent a combined twelve hours sitting around. I people watched, sent some e-mails, played on Facebook, watched a movie on my iPod, ate a few meals and sketched. What else can you do when at the mercy of the airlines?
This woman was struggling her way through the halls of Baltimore’s airport with a giant carry-on bag and shoes that did NOT look comfortable. Not to mention I feel sorry for whomever had to sit next to that hair.
While sitting in Atlanta’s airport, this woman walked up and took command of a seat near the gate entrance. She was dressed very elegantly, but her face and body language looked like the weight of the world was on her shoulders. And by “weight of the world” I meant “shoulder pads”.
This Indian kid was a walking cartoon with his long frizzy hair, slouch, ginormous eyebrows, and overall demeanor. This is not so much a cartoon drawing as it is a portrait.
So there you have it – a few sketches from my travels. I don’t know how I’d pass the time without pencil and pen in hand. Sure glad the TSAs haven’t outlawed those. Yet.
Welcome to the New Year! What occupied YOUR time on New Year’s Eve? Was it spent traversing this expansive nation of ours over twenty-two of those last twenty-four hours of 2012? No? Mine was.
Yes, twenty-two hours. I left my parents’ home on the east coast of the United States to travel an hour and a half to the Baltimore airport just to wait about seven hours before my flight took off for Atlanta where I spent another five hours before flying to Los Angeles where I waited for a bus to take me to my car which I used to travel the last thirty minutes home. It was on said bus where I rang in the new year with about thirty other weary travelers, one of whom somehow managed to already be drunk. Good times.
With all that time spent in airports, the trusty ol’ sketchbook was utilized. There’s nothing like a good airport to bring out the most interesting of humanity. Thought I’d share with you a few highlights…
This woman was actually drawn prior to Christmas during my journey east when I got stuck in the Minneapolis/St. Paul airport for seven hours.This gentleman was in the food court with his family in Delta’s terminal of the Baltimore airport. Sounded like they were speaking French to each other next to the McDonald’s, and yet none were eating French fries.Also in Baltimore, this woman cracked me up. She sat down in her pink track suit with a double row of rhinestones on the sleeve, and proceeded to eat her lunch and physically groove to the R&B music she was clearly listening to (I could hear it from several tables away) on her iPod.
Just to spread the love, next week I’ll post a few more gems from my time served in the Baltimore and Atlanta airports on New Year’s Eve.
