Lemonaide Girl

I know summer's over but here's a nice doodle.

Witch Hazel

So it's one week till halloween, I hope all of you are excited. I watched some cartoons related in the celebration, and in doing so I found a Chuck Jones character that I had forgotten about! Witch Hazel who was brilliantly voiced by June Foray (you may know her as Rocky from "Rock and Bullwinkle"), she is so hilarious so ridiculous in fact that i decided to draw her, and let me say she is no easy task. And even when I did have an idea of her construction and start drawing her in my own poses i was still off.



It was a frustrating reminder that i need to stick with drawing cartoons from the 40's and not the 60's when construction became a lot more complicated. But not all was lost in fact, the hands post from yesterday were drawings of her hands in different poses, so i did get something out of it.

Here are some of the expressions/poses that i referenced above, along with some that i should have drawn.
Here's the LINK to the actual video for some reason the embedding has been disabled.

Hands - but only with four fingers.

Why do they only have four fingers? Well because I also did a character study who had human hands but only four fingers, but more on that tomorrow. Also I plan on using more color pencils in my sketches in this way.

Billions and Billions

if you ask me Carl Sagan is one of the most brilliant people of the later 20th century. no one has really instilled a deep passion for learning and knowledge more than he did. And I'm really hoping that I get the complete "Cosmos" DVD for Christmas this year (crossing my fingers!). Anyway I worked yesterday on a caricature of him, unlike Nina who has easy-to-exaggerate features... Sagan, not so much. It took me a while but i got pretty close with the last two (below), i might continue to work on him.

I'm going to try and make them more like the Sagan on the right where his head is more square and fat.


Below are my first attempts at drawing Mr. Sagan. the one on the upper right was by far the best out of these first attempts. I have a weird Spock looking one, one Alfalfa-esque, and the other one has a more Richard Dawkins kind of thing going on. the first thing my eyes went to was his eyes, brows, and nose so i first focuse my attention there. I was also working on his smirk that he always seems to have.

Second page i'm getting closer working on his cheeks. That "Gah!" you see is me expressing frustration on the page, i do that sometimes.


This is the second to last page i worked on, i decided to just take a picture and draw it not as cartoony but still exaggerating on features so i know where to apply emphasis. As it turned out my eyebrows were a little off and he needed a buldge on the chin which I was also putting to far down.
It still needs some work but until then enjoy Mr. Sagan explaining numbers that are more than billions and billions!

Nina

I talked about Nina Simone a couple posts back so i wanted to share this drawing i've done. These pictures are first attempts and still need some work but pretty good for what it's worth.


She had this really interesting hairdo back in the 60's where it looked like a fuzzy wedding cake with jewels coming out of it. I would have given her bigger/buffer arms (spending time on that piano all day gave her some sweet guns).

Dr. Nina Simone was amazing, she attended and graduated from the Julliard school of music. She wanted to be a classical pianist more than anything. To make ends meet while attending school she preformed at nightclubs, one owner said she couldn't preform unless she sang and that was the spark that started it all. She abandoned her classical dreams to pursue what she thought was more important, the civil rights movement, and she wrote and preformed these famous protest songs: "Mississippi Goddamn," "Four Women," "Ain't Got No," and her most famous "Young, Gifted, & Black." My favorite song that she's ever preformed is "Sinnerman", almost 10 minutes of pure awesomeness. She was not only famous for her protest songs but her amazing and often chilling interpretations of other songs. She could not be defined as a soul, folk, pop, or gospel singer, because she sang it all.

"I want to shake people up so bad that when they leave a night club where I have performed, I want them to be to pieces." -Nina Simone

Your's Truely (& a couple of H&'s)

Got bored and drew myself, clearly I'm not in a very good mood. Usually when i draw myself I'm in a bad mood b/c i don't have any ideas at that moment so I just keep drawing by drawing the most obvious subject. I like that high wire act, I love high-wire gags (and acts for that matter) for some reason I've always been fascinated by that as a kid and i'd like to work on something centered around it I would have to much fun thinking up of things to do.


Ugh... even my writing sucks today. sorry.

On the note of my last post regarding African American caricatures I do have another one to share, but this time it's women.

Her afro would be fun to draw in fast movements, her hair allows you to play stretch and squash with it. There's also the woman in the bottom right, she's some kind of 60's civil rights soul singer... I was listening to Nina Simone and she got me goin'. However the woman with the afro was inspired by a song called "Feeling Free" by Nicole Willis and the Soul Investigators, I think when i'm done with my current project maybe i'll do something with that song, I would really like to do something with Nina considering that she's a damn genius but her voice isn't terribly exciting for animation, i was considering maybe doing "Feeling Good" the lyrics give me something to work with and she does some pretty fun scat singing in the end but other than that her voice is typically pretty static. Anyway, too early to tell for now.

Also, ignore the drawing on the upper right, it's shit, that's why it's unfinished.

Little Project.

So while I've been improving my drawings i decided possibly tackling on a little project. It's just going to be kind of a music video to a short song that i really like. I'm still pretty early in the project to have a desire to tell you what it's all about and what will happen. But I'll share with you my main character.

The song was made back in the fifties and sung by a very sly and hip black man (he was associated with the beatniks). So I made black character in a zoot suit, i think that his overall appearance is instantly recognizable and without speaking a word we have a general idea of what kind of person he is, energetic, fun, and hip. He is based off of Prince Chawmin' from "Coal Black & da' Seben Dwarves" but the racial stereotypes will be a little toned down as to not alienate my entire audience.



Speaking of racial stereotypes, let me know about what you think about how i drew his lips I'm concerned that maybe it's a little too much, but I don't want to change it for a couple reasons. First being that they are incredibly fun to draw, not just the lips but this entire character just falls off my pencil so effortlessly. One of the reasons why it's fun to draw is that they are very expressive and i can get some good emotions out of them, I also can't wait to start animating him speaking, I'm going to have tons o' fun exaggerating the way he talks.


But another reason is that, I'm afraid that by toning it down a little he won't be as graphically recognizable, The new Disney movie that's coming out "The Princess and the Frog" which is centered around people of a darker complexion, some of the drawings just strike me as stock doodles of white people they had laying around and painted a different color. I think that if you take away the color and all you have left is the ink, most of the characters you probably wouldn't think were black unless someone told you.

I'm of course not telling anyone to draw features so exaggerated that they are offensive, but to draw something until it's universally recognizable and some of the new Disney characters they do a pretty good job at realizing this fine line, but they're human drawings also look like they are not very fun to work with.

Also, so long as your not being tasteless and just having fun, no one should be offended.

Hello Again.

Sorry that i haven't done anything in a really really long time. But... uh... well... I don't have an excuse, I'm sure that I did but I have already forgotten what it was.

Don't worry though, because in the time of my absence I haven't stopped drawing. So i will be uploading tons and tons of doodles for you to look at, including Billford's and friends and family, and a new project I've been working on. Hopefully I will be uploading on an everyday basis like I used to.

I will start either tonight or tomorrow I just wanted to make the announcement.