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.