I thought this one might be fun. I somehow got to drawing a guy who reminded me a bit of Seasick Steve.
I like that Seasick Steve fellah. He seems like a nice guy. It was pointed out to me that the instrument in the picture above has too many strings. Well, all I have to say is that this isn't Seasick Steve and that ain't no diddley bow.
Here is a video of Steve for your viewing enjoyment.
I've started my leave, and I finally have some time to draw. I admit I started out a little lazy, but I'm starting to get in the groove of everything. Anyway, here is a bunch of stuff. I find I'm enjoying doing theme pages more and more. I've been really getting into the mood of simple narrative lately, and I think pretty soon I'll be able to graduate to "comic".
This is just a bunch of random junk. Most of it sucks pretty badly, but I like the Groening-inspired frog in the corner there.
I saw Harry Potter, so I just kind of tossed that one down. It's okay I guess. My favourite on the page is Trans-Am Sam. I love that little picture.
Here's some narrative, it's Captain Space Hero and his sidekick saving the universe from the Killbots of Doom. In the future, people always lose track of what year it is (or maybe they're just proud of it?) and so it's posted up on the wall there in a big digital sign. Also of interest is the temperature, the weather and your horoscope.
I think the general agreement is that "Outdoor concert" is the best of today's pictures. I don't know if I agree with that, but I still like it. I have no idea what the narrative is, I guess raccoons don't like rock'n'roll? It's still pretty fun though.
This one is okay, but I wasn't quite sure what to do with the table, and my eraser was filled with graphite dust and it just smeared when I tried to correct it. It's time to quit when your eraser refuses to erase.
Just for the hell of it, here are King Khan and the BBQ singing about balls. Again.
I've been going on and on enough about how great this pilot is. It was made for Teletoon's "Pilot Project" which consists of this and a bunch of other cartoons that aren't as awesome as this one. I'll just post an embedded video of it right here so it's easy to watch! Made by Nick Cross and Troy Little, here is the pilot for "Angora Napkin"!
Hey, here are some more sketches I did. I also drew Carl Sagan because he was awesome.
This one is just some stuff. I like the hanging guy, it looks kind of neat. I'm a big fan of interesting lines of action (as if you didn't know already). I've also been doing a lot of fish-eye warped perspectives lately. They're fun to draw.
You guessed right! The guy on the far right is Rick Astley. He's never going to give you up, never going to let you down. Why does that other guy have a chef's hat? I don't know. It seemed like a good idea at the time. I had a chef's hat in the previous picture and a guy sitting with a fork. I think I must have been hungry.
I gave Cthulu a butthole. It doesn't show up very well on this scan. You can tell by the cat looking at the "cheezburger" that I've had memes on my mind lately. "Sports Entertainment" is what WWE calls "professional wrestling". It seems to me to be a more polite euphemism to the people who actually wrestle.
There's my Carlcature (A caricature of Carl) and some other stuff. I like the broke guy, and the shark is neat. I also just noticed that the symbol on the hero's costume is both a "!" and a "H". I'm really clever and I didn't even realize it!
Just because I've been putting videos in lately, here is somebody's cover of Vangelis' "Alpha" which is featured on Carl Sagan's Cosmos. It's like Vangelis played by Wyld Stallyns. One of the reasons I consider this cover to be so great is that I think Carl Sagan would have agreed wholeheartedly with the sentiment: "Be excellent to each other; and party on, dudes.". Carl Sagan believed in humanity's ability to ask courageous questions. Bill and Ted believed in humanity's ability to produce unlikely answers. I guess it's kind of silly that a documentary and a teen movie are important to me, but they seem to believe in people the way that I want to. Fair enough, right?
Ah, my favourite day of the year. This year I was Professor Layton. I printed off a bunch of puzzles and handed them out to people. It was great. Here is an awesome Max Fleischer you can watch for some Halloween fun:
If the YouTube title is to be believed, this cartoon is "banned". Banned from what? By who? What did Max do to deserve this banishment? Are his cartoons just too awesome? Are there grave councils to determine which obscure 1930's cartoons should be banned from some unspecified kind of exhibition? Could you imagine what would happen if CHILDREN were to stumble upon cartoons from 80 years ago while channel surfing on TV?
They might discover that there is a bigger world with amazing stuff in it!
I think this is the anniversary of my first post on this blog. I think it's gone pretty well in the past year. I've put up a lot of pictures and featured some good music. I hope everyone who has read this blog in the past year has enjoyed it. I plan to continue posting on this blog and to continue showing everyone my crappy drawings and maybe an album here and there.
That said, here is another picture. Forgive the bad resolution, it was scanned at work on our crappy scanner. It's fine for text, but not so great for pictures.
I've been wanting to show off my expensive and ridiculous hobby of collecting CDs. It's a lot of fun to listen to them, but the problem is that it becomes very difficult to give enough time to all the great music I have when I have such a crazy huge amount of it. I went through some sorting today to bring in the new purchases and I took the following pictures so that everyone can be all like: "He's crazy, why does he have so many CDs? Why not just buy MP3s from iTunes like normal people?"
I've always found the name "Science Fiction" a little confusing. Probably because science is kind of the opposite of fiction. It's a bit like having a Taco Salad, I guess.
Anyway, I just vomited a bunch of Sci-Fi stuff onto the page there. If you want some real science, check THIS out:
Watch out! Mariano moves. Worlds bend and lives change in his wake.
I was listening to some funk and drawing stupid faces, so I tried to do that 70's "bent world" perspective with the one long leg and the weird sidewalk. I think the perspective just turned out plain awful, but oh well. I don't think it was really effective, but I still like this picture anyway. I think the fun is still there.
Listen to this song while you look at the picture. It's from a disc I found at a used record store a few months back, a real great find.
In the interest of learning to draw women better (something I freely confess I stink at) I borrowed some Shojo manga from you-know-who and drew a bunch of pictures (more or less) from some of the more shocking panels. My theory was that since shojo is pictures of women drawn by women for women, it would probably capture that feminine essence that I seem to be having so much difficulty with.
Not to make everyone slap themselves in the face and say "Well...uh, yeah. Anyone could have told you that." but here is what I've figured out. Focusing on the eyes and mouth and putting a lot of detail into those areas seems to make things more feminine. Shading around the teeth makes the lips look bigger and (I guess) more feminine. Lips should always be drawn, even if they're thin. Drawing the nostrils but not the bridge of the nose helps gloss over the face and reduce the fidelity of the parts of the face other than the mouth and eyes. I had originally thought that a rounder face and rounder angles probably was a more feminine thing, but I don't think that's true now. The face on the left in the picture above is quite long and horsey-faced, but still quite feminine. You can also obscure fairly large portions of face with hair, which is pretty good for shaping a head and putting focus onto the eyes and mouth. I figured out some other stuff; I think, but you'd have to ask my drawing hand and not my brain. I guess that's really the important bit, so whether I knew this stuff in my brain or not...if my hand doesn't know what to tell the pencil it doesn't make much difference.
Differences in style aside, I think these are good points to note. Now I should just try to apply this to my own stuff instead of being a copycat. I have to admit though, a few more copies would probably teach me a lot. I should do both. Oh yeah, and until my next post, here is some DORAMA! ROMANSU! RABU!
Sorry I haven't posted in awhile, I've been feeling a little down lately. My productivity has fallen to near zero in pretty much everything. It's actually pretty bad.
Anyway, one of the things that cheers me up is a good puzzle, and the master of all things puzzling is Professor Hershel Layton of Gressenheller University, London. A gentleman of high regard, Professor Layton does battle with his mind, and occasionally his lightning reflexes (honed in the gentlemanly sport of fencing, I'm sure). There have been some rumours lately of Layton leading a band of ne'er-do-wells on a mission to build a time machine. I don't believe a word of it! I'm sure Layton himself will soon put things to right!
I think there's also a half-completed ninja turtle in there too. That's weird. The most surprising thing about that picture is that it was *NOT* drawn using reference material. I must play too much Prof Layton, because the one on the right is surprisingly accurate (in my humble opinion). Well...not that Layton's design is all that complicated to begin with. Anyway, just watch the trailer for the latest game...it's even better than the last one!
I drew a picture of a cartoon Charr from Guild Wars (a Charrtoon). It was kind of fun. The backwards leg thing is kind of tough, but I think it turned out okay. Cat faces are really tough for me because they're so wide and short. It was really hard to not make this guy look like a goat, especially with the horns and the long ears.
Yeah, so it doesn't look near as good as Kekai Kotaki's stuff, but I like drawing cartoons. It's more fun for me. I also don't have all that nice digital colouring stuff he has, I have MS paint. I also don't have years of experience, natural talent or any reason I should be comparing myself to him at all. So yeah, that doesn't help.
Oh yes, I also want to note that I've added "jumps" to my music blog posts so they don't clutter up the page. To read more, just click where it says "Read more". Very intuitive.
Here was a quick sketch of Lorkan from you-know-who's comic. Apparently I made him too skinny ("he's muscular!"), and I also couldn't get legs that I liked, so I just scrapped them entirely. I also should have had has arm in the back turning the other way so it's less conspicuous. The sword also looks kind of dumb and he is wearing Luke Skywalker clothes for some reason. To be honest, this picture kind of sucks. Oh well, I drew it in 30 seconds (probably a new best time!). The other picture is...honestly, I have no idea what that is. I guess neither of them turned out all that well. Oh well, consider these a bonus.
I went to the Oolong tea house and did some sketching. The following cartoons resulted:
I think you know what that first guy is talking about. Right? Heh. Definitely. I also drew a self-portrait, kindergarten style. Down at the bottom that fellow is throwing up a fist for the 6 MSTR. ROCK ON 6 MSTR! The guy on the far right is too good for this page and wants nothing to do with it.
Wow! Narrative! How unusual of me. The epic adventure of Devil Mouse, rodent of darkness. Below that is a caveman-type guy with a club, and he's IN the club. hahahahahahaha Oh man, I'm so clever.
Ha! I almost wrote "Drunk and draw". That would turn out well. I'm going to post my pictures in reverse order so it looks like I get worse as the night goes on. It's mind games. I'm tricky that way.
Here I drew an eye and an ear and some aliens. It was getting late in the evening so I decided I better get to some practicing some more realistic stuff (hence the aliens). Realistic stuff is my weakness and it's definitely holding me back from more awesome cartoons. Therefore, I practice. Notice the awesome cartoony lines denoting that the eye is seeing and the ear is hearing. You never would have known otherwise.
Here is a short cartoon involving some popeye wannabe and an octopus. What is it about? Does the octopus take the crusty old sailor home for the night, or is it a revenge plot involving a gruesome tentacle murder? You decide! Also included is a Shaolin monk kid (who I have been told looks a bit like Aang from Avatar: The last airbender), some crazy little cartoon ghost, a guy with puckered eyelids and an old farmer with an awesome curve to his bodyline. The head totally doesn't fit the line of the body, which is why it's so great.
Here is a jazzman I started drawing before I realized I don't know what a saxophone looks like.
Here's my first page of the night. Not so hot, but I love the look on that guy's face who is looking at the octopus man. He's all like "uuuWHHHAAAAA??". Originally the eyes were all buggy, but then I topped them off flatly and it looked so bizarre I decided to keep it that way.
I left work early yesterday because I was feeling down and restless and went to go see the Scott Pilgrim movie. I wasn't really expecting a whole lot, just a lot of geeky in-jokes. I was actually really surprised! The move-making techniques that were used were extremely effective, and despite all the weirdness everything flowed very smoothly! The script is one of the best I've seen in awhile. In a lot of ways it reminds me of "Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure" or "Weird Science" or "Ferris Bueller's Day Off". It was really good! Watch the trailer, it's just incredibly fun! The movie was directed by Edgar Wright, who is the same guy who made "Hot Fuzz" and "Shaun of the Dead", both movies that I enjoyed very much. I really hope to see a lot more great stuff from Wright in the future. The only thing that bothered me about the movie is that Michael Cera plays such an insecure weiner, it's kind of hard seeing him as the lead in a romance story (no, I've never seen Juno, I was unprepared for this). When Cera (as Scott) says "I'm in lesbians with you", I found it very easy to take him literally! I've been told that this makes him cute, and I can see that, I just think that if I were a girl I would not find Michael Cera romantically interesting at all. Chalk it up to taste. Anyway, check out the trailer, it's great!
Once again, 100% cartoons because I forgot to bring reference material. Unfortunately, I can't draw anything aside from cartoons well without reference material.
I've updated all my previous music posts with embedded videos instead of those direct links I was using before. It's much nicer!
Go check it out!
Oh, all of them except for Fear of Tigers (because you should just download the whole album; remember, he's giving it away free on his own site!) and my tirade about video game music (because there are just too many links).
This is a good point to remind my loyal reader(s), click the links in my posts! They often lead to hilarious videos that make my posts more interesting.
I think everyone knows I enjoy playing video games, but I also hate this new crap where everything has to be complicated and involved. Fortunately, ArenaNet has heard my complaints and is building a game that is both epic and still can be picked up and played as if it were Tetris (Maybe I'm exagerrating a little. Okay, say "as if it were Zelda"). At least, that's what they're promising. I REALLY hope it lives up to what they say it will be. I miss games that were just about the fun. It seems like the only people who do that anymore are Nintendo. I really hope this game isn't too complicated or demanding, because it looks really fun. Still, this new video looks great.
I know that when it comes to video games, promises are a dime a dozen (just listen to any word that comes out of Peter Molyneux's mouth), but having played the first Guild Wars, I think these guys are passionate enough about what they do to pull it off. Their entire focus with the first game was to keep it simple and accessible; and I think it worked pretty well, and now they're improving on it. Anyways, I know it's ridiculous to get excited about something like this, but it makes me happy.
Dave McCann and the Firehearts (formerly Dave McCann and the Ten-Toed Frogs) are a treasure of the Alberta music scene. I've seen them live twice and they've put on a great show both times. They're an alt-country band with that Alberta flavour that I MUCH prefer over the American country bands. How can I describe it? It feels a bit dirtier and a little bit more homey. Sorry, I'm not a professional so that's the best I can do. Just listen to this, Corb Lund and Ian Tyson and maybe you'll see what I mean.
I saw this album in the record store earlier this year and there were two versions: the normal one (pictured above) which I purchased, and a deluxe edition with a DVD of bonus features and videos. At the time I was like "Oh cool, 2-disc k.d. lang collection.", and what I realized about an hour later was "Holy crap!! k.d. lang collection!!". I had honestly forgotten what a master vocalist she is. For all those people who complain that true talent is absent from modern music, I point you to k.d. lang. I should have picked up the deluxe set.
This one isn't really new either, but I play it a lot. This album is the second in a set of compilations of unreleased recordings from 1976 - 1981. There is some very funky stuff in here, including a demo version of "Sunshine" with Roy doing the vocals without the female back-up singers.
Here are the sketches for today. Still haven't quite got the female face yet, but I'm getting closer. Also have a half-ways decent sketch of a male face in there too. I did that mostly to prove to myself I don't totally suck ass at drawing faces.
I have a really hard time drawing female faces. It's really hard! If you put in too much detail they look really masculine, but if you don't put in enough they look cartoony. Not that I have anything against cartoons, most of what I draw are cartoons.
This is the result of me buying some fashion magazines and drawing the freakish celebrities contained within. When the result wasn't quite what I wanted I would morph them into some kind of dumb looking cartoon. That happened in every instance. Oh well, practice makes perfect.
Oh yeah, and there's some guy at the bottom. I just wanted to draw weird wavy hair that looked like that, so I stuck it on a really blocky head.
I'm still figuring this whole thing out, so yeah, check back in a few months and maybe I can draw a convincing female face.
This really has nothing to do with anything, but I guess this is my blog, so I can post whatever I want.
I was listening to Inner City the other day. For those of you who don't know, Inner City was a techno/house band from the late 80s that featured Kevin Saunderson and Paris Grey. Kevin Saunderson is considered one of the originators of modern techno and house music. His stuff is really rad, so you should check it out if you haven't heard it. (Also unrelated: Here is a fun remix of "Big Fun" done by Simian Mobile Disco)
Matthew Barber is one of those Canadian singer-songwriters who is just sitting on the edge of big-time fame, but just isn't quite hitting it yet. He's toured with Joel Plaskett and Buck 65, he's had a number one single (In adult contemporary. What a horrible genre name. Yuck. It sounds like a swinger party or something.) and has appeared on national TV several times. He's damn good and I'm sure that everyone who has heard him knows it already. I think it's just that not enough people have heard him yet.
"The Dojo Workhorse" is another project from Calgary's Dan Vacon, who you may remember from his other band "The Dudes". He's got a lot of play on CBC Radio 3 and CKUA as well as CJSR and CJSW in Edmonton and Calgary. That's really good, because more people should be hearing his music!
"Rat-a-tat-tat" is Jason Collett's latest attempt to have his name listed as an alternate definition of "Canadian music" in the Oxford English Dictionary. Jason is taking time off from the ubiquitous Canadian super-group "Broken Social Scene" and his other band "Zeus" and from collaborations with the Weakerthans and Hawksley Workman to collaborate with members of Broken Social Scene, Zeus and the Weakerthans, Metric, maybe Feist and possibly Hawksley Workman on his new album "Rat-a-tat-tat". I apologize if this sounds a little negative, that's not my intention. He isn't actually collaborating with that many people on this album. I'm kind of exaggerating a bit.
No, "Orchestrion" isn't a transformer who changes into a concert hall. This is the latest album from that monster of modern jazz, Pat Metheny. It's a pretty intense album too! Oddly enough, Pat Metheny got into jazz the same way I did. He was a huge fan of Wes Montgomery. I'm not trying to compare myself to Pat Metheny at all, I just find it a funny coincidence is all. The difference between myself and Pat Metheny is (obviously) he is awesome, and I am not.
I usually avoid posting old stuff because everyone has heard it already, but this one is tough to resist. I found it in a used record store for $12 (which is pretty pricey! Most are only $10!)
I think everyone knows I'm a fan of Jeff Beck. his "Blow by blow" album gets a lot of rotation in my player, and his recent DVD "Live at Ronnie Scott's" is a crazy amount of fun to watch, no less because of his collaboration with the amazing Tal Wilkenfeld. He's just an outstanding guitarist, and it's kind of surprising he isn't more famous than he is. Mind you, instrumental guitar is one of those things that doesn't seem to hit the mainstream very easily. It perplexes me, but I guess I'm the wrong person to ask about that.
I'm feeling a bit lazy, so I think I'm just going to borrow a line from the National Post that was up on Wikipedia, particularly because I think they hit the nail square on the head.
“a bit like Leonard Cohen being channeled in a dusty saloon by Patsy Cline.”
