When an evil villain requires someone else to carry out their nefarious plans, they turn towards a creature not as mentally blessed as they to do their evil bidding. Often they turn towards the practice of falconry by luring winged creatures into their schemes. Some falconers use ravens like Maleficent in Disney’s Sleeping Beauty. Others, like Nazi sympathizer Franz Liebkind from The Producers, depend on disposable carrier pigeons. Even the Wicked Witch of the West had her flying monkeys.
Well, today’s MONSTER MONTHcreature from my sketchbook (graphite pencil) uses the ever-dreaded and fearfully malicious SONGBIRD. Yeah, you read that right. Don’t mess with this bad boy…
That little birdie may look cute, but beware – its song can shatter the souls of men.
Last winter I had the opportunity to meet and chat with actor Joe Mantegna for a few minutes. I’ve always enjoyed him in various movies such as The Three Amigos , Baby’s Day Out, and one of my all-time favorites – Searching For Bobby Fischer. It was at that moment that I realized I had never seen his current TV show Criminal Minds.
Here in Los Angeles, Criminal Minds seems to run every night on the Ion Television channel, as well as periodically on A&E and CBS – sometimes all three at the same time! It’s ensemble cast works hard to capture the weekly criminal who can’t seem to play normal in society. As I was watching with my sketchbook in my lap, I started to doodle one of the show’s other headline stars, Thomas Gibson, who made himself known a few years back on the sit-com Dharma & Greg. While that was a comedy, somehow on Criminal Minds Thomas is continuously stoic in his demeanor, never cracking a smile. His uber-seriousness was something my pencil had to try to capture. I later finessed the drawing a bit at my desk adding color on the computer with these results….
Thomas Gibson with enough intensity in his gaze to crack open a walnut.
One of these days, perhaps I’ll go back and sketch Joe Mantegna as well since he sort of got this whole ball rolling.
You know what I think is a good time? If you said “going upholstery shopping” you would be wrong, and yet somehow I find myself compelled to write on this topic.
Just a little over a year ago, my folks moved from my childhood home in the suburbs of New Jersey to a home on the range in Delaware which most of my siblings and I descended upon last Christmas. For over thirty years we were used to the holiday sights, smells and activities that could be found in the shadow of New York City, and suddenly found ourselves in a cold, snowy plain with little activity to be viewed from the back porch of the new home. There are only so many games of Farkle, Uno and Skip-Bo to be played before a large family starts developing signs of cabin fever. What to do? What to do?
Well, if you were like us, I grabbed my plaid-lined jacket as everyone piled into the car one frigid white day and traveled an hour north to go UPHOLSTERY SHOPPING!!! Yippee doodle.
Yes, that’s right – thousands of bolts of cloth fabric greeted us at the store, all available for the astute decorator ready to deck their halls with plaids, fleur de lis, stripes and paisleys. My mother was on a mission to find material to recover her old dining room chairs to match the paint of her new dining room. My sister was on a mission to find something delightful to cover her nice old living room chair. I was on a mission to find a chair in the store on which I could retreat out of the way of their missions.
Thankfully, I had the foresight to bring along my sketchbook to draw in. Equally thankfully, the fabric store had the foresight to provide several comfortable chairs for husbands and sons to sit in. As I was making my imprint in a nice leather cushion with one part of me, another part of me was imprinting the blank pages of my sketchbook with doodles.
I soon was lost in the world of my imagination as my hand wielded the pencil about the pages, and then suddenly, there she was like a mirage calling to the thirsty desert traveller – GLADYS! She was a woman smiling, chatting, and enjoying her time tending to the needs of shoppers buying their last minute bolts of cloth to put under the tree. I’m not even sure that Gladys was her real name for she never revealed her real name to me – a true woman of mystery. But there stood this vixen in her cobalt blue sweatshirt and bobbed blonde hair with dark roots wearing a delightful pair of flower print pants with an elastic waistband. Not only was she beautiful, but she was practical. Oh glorious Gladys – where have you been all my life? It was at that moment that I knew I must draw her…
The coy and demure Gladys offering her siren call to unsuspecting holiday fabric shoppers.
Then, just as unassuming as the day began, our time in the fabric store was at an end. I reluctantly closed my sketchbook and slowly walked to the door with a wistful look in my eye having an unfulfilled profession of love for Gladys. It’s just as well, though, as it never would have worked – she was clearly into flower prints, while I was into plaids.
“When you have got an elephant by the hind legs and he is trying to run away, it’s best to let him run.”
– Abraham Lincoln (1809 – 1865)
The key, boys and girls, is to moisturize.
Feeling saggy? Feeling baggy? Perhaps you can relate to this sketch I whipped up last night. There was no rhyme or reason for it – just felt like drawing an elephant in the ol’ sketchbook, and happened to find a great elephant quote from Abraham Lincoln this morning. Though, I’m not quite sure what kind of experience Lincoln had with elephants – outside of the Republican party, that is.
While I know that it has been really hot across the United States these past few months, Southern California has had one of the most mild, beautiful summers in all the years I’ve lived here – until this week. This has been a sweltering week in Los Angeles, so of course, as that great leader of jurisprudence known as “Murphy” would have it, my air conditioning ceased to condition my air.
In sitting here waiting for the arrival of the repair men, I was thumbing through my sketchbook and came across this polar bear sketch drawn earlier this year. Even though he came from my own pencil, I couldn’t help but wonder if his smug little expression was coming from the fact that he was enjoying crisp, cool temperatures while I most definitely was not. He just stood there mocking me.
A polar bear enjoying the cool degrees of his summer. Either that or he’s listening to Barry Manilow. Hard to tell, really.
So, now the repair men have come and performed their patriotic duty. My air is working just in time to keep the paint from peeling off the walls, and I’m standing in front of my vent with a satisfied stance not unlike my fuzzy friend above.
Over the course of what feels like a very short career despite having been a member of the full-time creative field for 16 years, have drawn in many styles to please many clients. That is what a freelance illustrator/cartoonist does. You always bring a little of yourself to the table, but if somebody needs Yogi Bear, they don’t want him to look like Mickey Mouse. You need to work cohesively with the other players. I get that.
Over the past number of years, the animation business has adopted the philosophy that if an artist’s portfolio does not look like their product, the artist must not be able to draw their characters. And if they think there is a glimmer of hope in the pencil wielder, the studio will require a remunerationless drawing test that usually is a good week’s worth of work. In essence, they make the artists try out for the team.
Perhaps these ideas came along because artists would lie on their resumès, or maybe it’s because hiring is usually handled by human resource agents that don’t truly understand the drawing process. I don’t say this as a slam on them by any means. With budgets being slashed, with many animation jobs leaving our borders, and with a local workforce greater than the amount of available jobs, companies want to know if you can draw what they need. I just wonder why, when a resumè has legitimate claims of having drawn things as diverse as characters for Disney, Pixar, Warner Bros., Hanna Barbera, Mercer Mayer, Fisher-Price, and superheroes that one would assume that artist cannot draw new things? Just last year I was turned down for a job with the stated reason that they didn’t think I could draw their characters.
So, that being said, when I apply for a new job in animation, I try to find out a little of the style of a show and see if I can quickly add some drawings to my portfolio that would key the bosses to the fact that I can draw their characters. They need to know that I can play ball with them.
The following is an example of just that. You’ll notice that this baseball boy is not exactly like the style of my other personal work here on the blog. He was created as a part of my portfolio customized for a job application earlier this year. Started as a rough sketch in my sketchbook, he then became an inked drawing with some color added in Photoshop for good measure. I didn’t get that job, but I did have fun trying to broaden my horizons a bit.
This baseball boy is a rough sketch taken directly from the pages of my sketchbook.And here’s a more finished look at the sketch. Click on the image to see it larger!
Ironically, despite what I wrote above, I didn’t have to “try out” for a character design position I currently hold. Based on the reputation of my past work, I am grateful to be helping bring Zhu Zhu Pets toys to life in the animated realm. Sometimes the resumè and a good pitch from colleagues alone can help get the game play going. Then you have to step up to the plate and prove you deserve to be swinging the bat.
Sometimes you just gotta get the inner redneck out of you. Some let him loose by slipping into a drawl, others by wearing a trucker hat, and others by wearing plaid and suspenders. I get him out with a pen, and name him Delbert.
Good ol’ Delbert keeping up with where the fish are biting via his video phone.
I’m not sure exactly why I drew Delbert with a mobile phone when I haven’t even leapt off that technological precipice quite yet. When it comes down to it, I suppose I just don’t like being that accessible to folks. What is accessible to me every day, however, is my collection of plaid shirts. So I’m already halfway to becoming Delbert in real life!
At any rate, enjoy this little submission from my sketchbook of random musings.
I’m not the smallest guy around. I enjoy my pizza, burgers and just about anything else on which cheese may be included. It is safe to say that I could use a little direction with my culinary concoctions. One day a friend with her own edible issues called and suggested we go to a one-night class on food choices that our health insurance plan was offering. I thought, “Sure, I could stand to have some guidance.”
Our evening started at an Italian restaurant where we felt we would be having our last meal. Enjoying every cheesy, tomatoey bite, we slowly psyched ourselves up for the night of instruction and scolding we were about to receive. “Psyched” is right – arriving at the “class”, we were annoyed to discover that it was a group therapy situation instead of traditional teacher/class learning.
I guess the first lesson in food choices was whether or not I wanted a Milky Way, Butterfinger, or Twix when the “teacher”/therapist offered us a bowl of candy without a hint of irony behind his offer. He genuinely wanted us to enjoy ourselves. I refused any of his maniacal sweets thinking it was all a trick. One look around the room revealed that not a soul trusted that man’s candy.
That same look around the room revealed that my friend and I were two of the three youngest participants in the room. Large senior citizens occupied the majority of the chairs that had been circled together like a nocturnal wagon train protecting the central occupants from an attack of savage high fat foods. The other young participant was a skinny young woman who thought she was fat. She bolted at the first sign of a questionnaire, possibly running off to join a bulimia class down the hall. We weren’t exactly sure.
The “preacher” extolling the virtues of healthy eating that he clearly had been practicing in his own life.
Since it was a group situation, we were all encouraged to express our feelings to the whole group about food. While everyone was able to get a few words in, one gentleman across from me (possibly in his 80’s) began a food monolog not entirely unlike a sermon. He preached all about the heavenly things we should be eating, and condemned the food that brings us down. He knew it all – probably because he had been through this class several times before as we later discovered.
I was so glad that I had the foresight to take my sketchbook along with me. I had anticipated sitting at a desk facing a boring teacher at night and needed something to keep me awake. The circular seating arrangements made for a much more interesting life drawing session by far. While everyone else was taking notes about how self-esteem will make you thinner (please see my last blog post for thoughts on THAT subject), I was busy wielding my pen around creating these ink sketches of the “preacher” and his lovely wife.
The “preacher’s” wife, not to be confused with a Whitney/Denzel movie of the same name.
So, that night I learned that (alleged) bulimia is bad, vegetables are good, self-esteem classes don’t help repeat attendees, eat a good solid meal before going to a health clinic, and never EVER forget to take your sketchbook to night school.
