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Month: July 2016
Gorillas In The Smoke
Here’s something new. A detail from a rough sketch. I’m currently developing this into a much more detailed print design. It’s a piece about power and control …and it has a smoking gorilla. Conceptually I’m still working on the subtext so for now, here’s a drawing to look at 🙂
‘Hell You Lookin’ At?
Giddyup
Gotta catch ’em all. Late 1990’s doodle, ya’ll.
Grindage
This is a rad skate cartoon I drew ‘back in the day’. I was moving around a lot in 1990. I had just left the candy coated bubble that is art school and was transitioning back into the default world. A friend from the local punk scene recently moved to Charleston, SC and married his girlfriend. Turns out her dad is loaded and wants to help his new son-in-law establish a legitimate income. Green Day had just been invented so being punk and having a band wasn’t a career option yet. Dude jumped at the opportunity and dad put up the cash to build a massive indoor skate park. They hired the world’s preeminent ramp builder, Tim Payne to design and build an enormous side by side double bowl in a giant metal building. I was living in Raleigh, NC at the time so I drove down to Charleston one night. My friend said he’d put me to work “doing something” which sounded more fun than working in a pizza shop, which was my current means of accruing wealth. They called it The Hangar at first because the original site they scouted was an abandoned airplane hangar. That first location didn’t work out due to zoning or something so they ended up in an industrial area and calling it The Hanger. I drew this cartoon before the name changing decision was made.
Old school skates at The Hanger:
That’s my friend, Rich with his gold Les Paul guitar.
Forgotten Tales
Here’s some scribblings circa 1989-91. These are four small drawings from different sketchpads over a 2-3 year period. It’s all tangential nonsense. For no reason I sometimes draw little vignettes to unwritten stories.
Flappy Birds
Once I was harried by hawks. Yeah, that’s a thing. It was nighttime and I was sitting on the edge of some scrub flats watching distant lightning. Most hawks are solitary predators but Harris hawks are known to hunt in packs. They also seem very territorial. I didn’t know any of this the night one swooped out of the desert darkness and right up in my face …startling! I hollered and he flapped off but a second giant flappy bird came diving in so I sprung up from the dirt berm I was seated on. I came to my feet flailing and flapping, still hollering. Hawks are freakin’ FAST! I’m in full-on bushman warrior mode now. My eyes are tracking the circling silhouettes against the almost moonless sky. I see there’s three of them as the third is taking his turn dive bombing me. I jerk sideways throwing up my arms to seem as huge as possible while I hit ’em with my best war howl. Right about then a lightning bolt flashed in the distance directly behind the unintimidated, angry flapper. A perfect sliver of crescent moon completed the scene like an illustrated adventure story. Despite my panic, I thought it all looked really cheesy in a 70’s rock album, Frank Frazetta sort of way. I also thought, it’s the future so why don’t I have a cyborg camera eye? It all happened so fast, a photo would have come out blurry anyway. Later I thought about making a painting but I don’t have that kind of time. It was freaky, I had to document the event somehow. I settled on this quick pen drawing; a bushman’s gotta keep steppin’ :/
Anthropology, Man
Rummaging around looking for something that totally isn’t this; I found a really old notebook. It’s a little black book I toted around in the latter part of the 1980’s. We were too hard for iPads or smartphones …and they hadn’t been invented yet. I scanned some doodles from it. Some of these were amidst notes from a college anthropological studies class.
I guess I forgot the burnt umber?