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this is a drawing of a hawk or eagle smiling… it was done with an ink pen on a piece of paper. Line weights were hard to control but most people just used a rapidiograph of varying widths to achieve the differences. there was no %800 percent zoom, so you couldn’t draw anything vanishingly small. In illustrator you can zoom in 3200% or some other ridicules number. This flys in the face of logic. The human eye is unable to see anything that small. it blends shapes together. I imagine someone could create an image that was meant to blend together but that would be a novelty and not the norm. As you can see the points on the corners aren’t laser sharp. things aren’t tweeked to minute perfection. Lines are put approximately where they should be. The computer allows one to move lines after they are put down and move them some more and again and again. creating a cycle of infinite changes. This allows the designer to second guess himself. and second guessing your art means death. None of it makes perfect sense. Hopefully someone will look at it. but other than that it captures a place in time when someone thought this looked cool.
I am always interested and amazed to see what people come up with. From the simplest scribble by a child to a labored over illustration, it tells alot about who made it. A peek into their subconscious mind. I guess that is why people are afraid to create art, they don’t want people to see the real person behind the mask. and that is the ultimate shame.
Like this:
I never had much use for this low brow art form … partially because it is hard to do and puts your work up to the scrutiny of everyone who looks at it. “that doesn’t look like him!” “I look like that?” “my nose isn’t that big” etc…
but I inherited this task from Fedi the previous staff illustrator. Part of being creative is allowing yourself the space to fail. This is vital to the creative process. When ever you are doing something new you can’t predict if you will get it right the first time, so you need a space to fail. So if you do fail you can try again, and again until you do it right.
Sudsy Malones was a bar/laundrymat in clifton a suburb of ohio. Basically they would book anyone. If you showed up on any given night you and your buddys could play there. Every band started there. We would get up there, to play on a tuesday night for a few drunks and people doing laundry and knock over cymbols, fall over the drum set, break strings, while trying to play our songs we just wrote. I remember playing the opening chords to a song I wrote then forgeting the first line and just staring out at the few people with blank in my head …
but eventually you learn from your mistakes and build up your skills, better then you ever could in a practice space. It was a reality check, but not a complete death if you failed. This space is hard to find at times. Mostly you have to create it in your head.
This is where I was when I started the caricature deal. I had never done one before, but can draw so I just needed to apply my skills to this. I take longer then the people who do this everyday at kings island, but I also ad color and have more specific props … anyway
i have an old mad magazine paperback with alfred e neuman rendered in this style. it is a challenge to create an image of a face with simple abstract shapes. by itself the shapes don’t mean much but place them in a certain arrangement and you have a picture. for production reasons producing gray tones can be cost prohibitive. So the artist is forced to create a work with as simple of shapes as possible. you would think creating something in full color would take more skill but to me making a believable picture with simple lines is harder. Those lines have to be just right because you can’t just blend that edge together it has to be either black or white.
society is having alt of trouble lately making things black or white. we want everything mixed together and smoothed out. so we end up with blurry logic that takes a while to break down creating confusion and mundane homoginized boring life. somewhere we have to take a stand and say that is enough.
I read in the paper last weekend about the 300 people killed in cincinnati last year by gang violence. This is not on the news nationwide or in a pamplet at the docters office. Movies stars don’t do telethons to stop thug violence. Nations don’t have summits to eliminate this threat. but it exists in alot of rust belt cities across america. it is probably safer in Bagdad than alot of places in America. At least the marines have guns and are prepared to die. People get killed in cincinnati just walking down the street in broad daylight.
The drug trade is part of the problem, apathy is part of the problem, unwed mothers are part of the problem, break down of family are part of the problem, lack of basic morality is part of the problem. The Catholics and the right wing take a lot of flack for trying to be moral being called nazi’s and made fun of relentlessly by saturday night live and other people in the media, but those people don’t live the thug life or see the bodies stacked up over the last year, the weeping mothers. lack of morality makes it ok to kill and fathers to leave behind thier kids and mother to be hooked on crack.
somebody needs to do something, everybody needs to do something. people make up these problems so people need to solve them… and it will take all of us… or it will not change
don’t have a scan from my sketchbook at hand so here is an older drawing of santa working in his shop… I t started as a sketch for a catalog cover but was rejected for some reason I can’t recall…
here is an attractive young lass out for a stroll and precariously balancing a guiness in her hand… drinking and driving never mix but drinking and competitive cycling can be very exciting!!
when drawing commercial art, there are very few times where a sketch is good enough, so you spend enough time taking previous drawings and cleaning them up. eliminating any extra lines, and smoothing out others. even when you see a sketch in an ad or on package it has been refined and any extra stuff removed. this act has a way of removing the reality of what you are depicting. that is why even the best most true documentary is biased, some more than others. because somewhere in the process a person had to throw out shots because they are to dark, or sounds or words becuse the aren’t pleasing or the sound quality is bad. T.V. makes you think things are supposed to be overly clean and painted and the women are all skinny with b or c cup bras, the men all have washboard abs and thick hair and spend thier free time at a gym,
this creates an unhappy society but out on the edge of town in the country, are people without tvs and radios who never heard of paul mcartney and the beatles, or tina fey, they never question thier looks or figures, they spend thier free tiem being happy and walking in the woods….
