Well, here it is. The grand finale of the week long Sketch Challenge between me and my friend Andy Heckathorne. Since tomorrow is Halloween, and this being the last day of the challenge, it seemed appropriate to break out the ink in grand style with a caricature portrait of the master of the scary short story – Edgar Allan Poe.
I always found it interesting that those tales of gothic woe came flowing from the mind of a man who looked like he could be the subject of his own stories. Perhaps when he wrote in the first person, he really was the subject of his own stories. Hmm, something to ponder.
Well, here he is with the title character of his most well-known story, The Raven, in ink and white gouache on a dark gray shade of Canson paper.
Is there another day in this Sketch Challenge? Quoth the raven, “Nevermore.”
Thanks for tap, tap, tapping on your keyboards and mobile devices to come see my sketchy efforts. I hope you have enjoyed this week of sketch posts! And thanks to Andy for putting me up to the five day challenge. I hope I met your expectations, my friend.
Day three has arrived of the sketch duel between me and my good friend Andy Heckathorne. My friendship with Andy goes back to my days in college where we took many art classes together by day, and worked on the school newspaper together by night. It is because of this close friendship that I won’t claim ownership of this contest quite yet. All bets are off on Friday, though.
For those of you who have frequented my blog in years past, I usually post a monster each weekday during the month of October in what I call Monster Month. Unfortunately, real work schedules have kept me from doing those personal pieces this year, but seeing that we are still in October, there is no way I can let a week of sketches go by without adding a monster to the mix.
I present to you this orange beast master of flame, a fire breathing dragon complete with a hot dog accessory!
This guy would be really handy on a camping trip.
Another sketch comes to you tomorrow in the great 2015 Sketch Challenge!
The other day I was doodling in my sketchbook with a blue pencil when this little creeper came out. I liked how he looked, and decided to put some ink on him. The rough inking raised his appeal a bit, and then it escalated into including some shading. Having just made a pot of coffee, I dipped my brush into the coffee and gave him some brown stains to complete the sketch. I know he doesn’t look it, but now he smells good – like a caramel macchiato latte.
Since he was painted with coffee, now it will hard to resist licking the paper. Sigh.
Every now and then you have a dead moment (so to speak) at work waiting for your next assignment. Such a moment was upon me today, so instead of surfing the net or getting a sixth cup of coffee, I decided to start doodling. While keeping things very sketchy and rough, the doodle kept expanding in size, scope, and hideousness until it arrived at this heaping hulk of a concept monster.
Is he a brute with beastly intentions? Perhaps a misunderstood miscreant with a heart of gold? Or maybe it is someone who just regrets not having taken better care of his teeth in his younger years.
Whoever he may be, he most definitely is a sketch who evolved in a moment of a little workday idleness.
Several weeks ago on a visit to one of my favorite jaunts, a little restaurant known as Chili John’s in Burbank, California, I doodled a monster on one of their paper placemats. It was just one of those things that happened when a ball point pen met a piece of paper while I was enjoying conversation with the great folks who work there. They liked it, and pinned it up on their wall which in a way is a challenge to anyone else who comes in to do better.
You can see that I am a very neat eater – no chili spills on the placemat.
To “do better” is not very hard in this eating establishment, because cartoonists from all the animation studios sit at Chili John’s lunch counter each and every day. They are always doing drawings, most of which go on display in the back room for the amusement of the owners and staff.
Chili John’s is the second oldest restaurant in Burbank (only The Smokehouse is older) established in their current location in the 1940s. The fare is simple – good solid no filler spicy chili in beef, chicken, vegetarian, and here at Thanksgiving – turkey. You can have it served over rice, spaghetti, beans, a chili filled tamale, or a hot dog. That’s it! The food is good, and the clientele from all walks of life come in to dine. It is not unusual to see their share of famous people past and present such as Tom Bosley, “Weird” Al Yankovic, Grant Show, Roseanne Barr, Greg Proops, Anne Hathaway, Daniel Roebuck, and any number of recording artists who inhabit the hidden studios along Burbank Blvd. Just last week the CBS show CSI was taping two doors down at the hobby shop, and cast & crew kept coming in for some of that good ol’ chili! It got to where the Craft Services cook came and got a supply to put on the buffet outside. Even Guy Fieri featured it on his show Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives on the Food Network. But I digress.
So, back to the monster sketch! Someone DID decide to pick up a pen and meet the challenge. In my absence, Delilah – age 8 – came in with her mother, saw my monster sketch, and decided she was going to draw him, too. She studied and concentrated and came up with her own beautiful version of my beast. She also one-upped me by giving him a name – Lumpy!
Delilah has an eye for monsters, but also a taste for excellent chili!
I LOVE IT Delilah – whoever you are! Well done! Please keep drawing and drawing so that one day I can copy your work, ok? Hopefully sometime we can meet each other there at Chili John’s. We can enjoy a bowl of hot chili together and laugh at each other’s placemat doodles. Then maybe Anne Hathaway will have to follow in OUR footsteps. 😉
Welcome to the final selection in my 2014 Monster Month series of creepy crawlies and things that go bump in the night. As you can see, this grand finalè is autobiographical. Well, at least it is how I remember bedtime to be when I was a child.
I was that kid who would look pensively into his bedroom to make sure no monsters were peeking out of the closet or rumbling under the bed. If the coast looked clear, I would run full tilt into the room and leap onto my bed so fast that the monsters beneath had no chance to reach out and grab my ankles. Of course the mattress was off limits to them, so if I made it there safely, the monsters were powerless to attack me.
However, those monsters knew they would have their turn – a moment when I would be the most vulnerable. It was that moment in the middle of the night when one would have to get up to go to the bathroom. You wake up, and are too groggy to realize that you are sliding out of bed to go into the hall, which also means you are too groggy to think defensively. The monsters take that moment to SPRING out from the abyss beneath the box spring and munch on their midnight snack of a wailing child.
The next time your children wet their beds, don’t get angry at them. They are just protecting themselves from going down the gullet of a hungry monster. Instead, be thankful you still have your children and applaud them for their defensive thinking.
Buckle up. It’s going to be a bumpy night.
Well, thank you for joining me again on this year’s monstrous journey. It was fun letting my mind wander to create these creatures. Hope you enjoyed them as much as I did in drawing them. Keep coming back throughout the year to see what other goodies I unleash, and feel free to click on the Monsters category on my blog homepage to see what beasties you may have missed in the past!
While he is small, this is NOT Tiny Tim. This particular Tim was a piece I created a few years back when I was trying to get a short cartoon off the ground with my friend Brian Joseph Ochab. Narrated by Sir Christopher Lee, it was going to be a magnificent stop-motion tribute parody of Tim Burton’s early short film for Disney called “Vincent”. Through various efforts to get it off the ground, our “Tim” did not happen, but some fun artwork was left behind. This is a piece I never shared here before.
If you would like to see more of my development art for our short and even a video of when the project was talked about on TV, CLICK HERE!
You be the one to water that tree. Not me.
Return tomorrow for our grand finale piece in this year’s MONSTER MONTH!
We are down to our last three monster posts for the month, and it’s about time we classed up the joint.
Not all monsters are, well . . . monsters. While some roam the countryside making mayhem wherever they please, others are of an upper crust upbringing and behave in a quite dignified manner. They abhor the besmirching, (yes, I said BESMIRCHING) of the monster species by the uncouth antics of a few.
So, without further ado, may I present monsters who enjoy some rarefied air…
Thankfully, this is not a musical and they won’t break into song. Whether classy or not, all monsters are tone deaf.
Tomorrow is a Throwback Thursday offering – a piece from a project from a couple of years ago.
