FALLOUT » Drawings

In Space

I once had an idea about a hypochondriac robot and a manic monkey/dog (a genetic-hybrid) who travel the galaxy selling useless products to aliens. Like door to door salesmen. Their space ship is the size of a small country but most of the interior is filled with cargo, so these two live in a cramped little command module. There is a lot of travel time from A to B in outer space so there’s plenty of time for these guys to really drive each other crazy in there.

I’ve always been a sucker for cartoon science fiction stuff, but this idea is really about sharing space with someone… Sharing a bedroom with your little brother or a cubicle with someone at work. It was inspired by staying in an apartment full of guys and the frictions that result from having room-mates; all those little annoying brouhahas over who ate who’s stuff in the fridge and so on. Just put all that button-pushing and passive aggressive shenanigans “IN SPACE” with robots and monkey/dogs and there you go. Sort of a Silent Running GlenGarry GlenRoss Odd Couple Ice Station Zebra type thang… for kids!

Anyway, it still makes me chuckle when I think about it so I guess I’ll blow the dust of this old idea and do a comic story someday….

Girlie Sketches

Right now, I have a few little design jobs all cooking on the stove at the same time. Some of them are tasty, some of them not so tasty. Here are some sketches for one of the fun jobs. The assignment is to design a cheesecake pinup-girl to be the icon character for a potential line of Boudoir clothing and accessories (which is why she is holding a handbag in a few of the sketches). This is the first time that I have designed a female character and had the client ask me to make the boobs and bum even bigger. Good times.

I’ll post some more cheesecake sketches later, once I scan them. My good scanner (a 2nd-hand Epson Perfection 3170) just up and died recently; one day it simply failed to even turn on, after being a great workhorse for about a year… So until I buy a new scanner (model suggestions anyone?) I am stuck with my slow All-In-One (fax/printer/scanner) which has lousy picture quality, though serviceable enough for rough Black and White sketches…

Thrust Monkey

When I am doodling away on my self-published comics, I can really disappear up my own creative tail-pipe on the preparations sometimes. I may spend days and days designing a character who only appears in one or two panels, drawing pages and pages of thumbnail sketches, and spending hours and hours thinking up names and back-stories and all that stuff…. none of which shows up in the final book.

Case in point, an airborne adversary for Rocket Rabbit, THRUST MONKEY. He’s a jet-pack powered bad-guy who, by the way, rolls (and flies) with JUMP CHIMP (posted earlier) a rocket-boot sporting fellow flying simian, both of whom are members of the APES OF WRATH, a freelance co-op of hairy marauders, each of whom got way more pencil mileage than was really required.

But on the other hand, playing around with all this stuff is the fun part of doing personal projects. And I get to post the left-overs in my blog.

The Tiniest Bear

A long way away from wherever it is that you live right now, there once was a tiny little cottage at the end of a long and winding trail, deep inside a forest of tall and tangled trees.

Inside this cottage there lived a family of misfit bears. There was an enormous polar bear, a gigantic grizzly bear, a huge black bear, and even a teeny tiny Koala bear.

As everybody who knows anything about bears will tell you, koalas aren’t REAL bears. This koala was even less real-er than the others, for it was actually a little girl. Though not a real bear, the little girl had many excellent bear-like qualities.

She could dance just like a real dancing-bear. She could wrestle just like a real wrestling-bear. Also she was cranky when she woke up in the mornings, just like a real bear!

But best of all, like any real bear, she liked bear-hugs. The bears would hug her right back, though not at full bear-strength (they didn’t want to break her). Those bears loved the little girl as much as if she was a real little bear.

Even though she always cheated at cards.

The little girl felt more at home with those bears than she’d ever felt before and she enjoyed playing with them all year long.

Then one day, the first fall of snow painted the forest in white and announced to the world that winter was beginning.

The bears began to yawn. As everybody who knows anything about bears will tell you, bears sleep ALL through the winter.

The little girl did not feel sleepy. As everybody who knows anything about little girls will tell you, they DON’T sleep all through winter (unless it is night time, of course). The bears worried that the little girl would be lonely while they slept all winter.

So before they went to sleep, the bears gave her a present. They said “We will be asleep for a while. You may feel a lack of bear in your life. Open this if you feel lonely before we wake up.”

The bears each carefully hugged the little girl good night, and then they all went to sleep. As soon as they were snoring, the little girl felt terribly alone.

The little girl opened her present. It was a TEDDY BEAR. As everybody who knows anything about teddy bears will tell you, teddy bears have many excellent bear-like qualities, but they aren’t real bears.

Teddy Bears don’t need to sleep all winter (in fact they don’t sleep at all). So the teddy bear could keep the little girl company until the other bears woke up in the spring.

And best of all, teddy bears like bear-hugs. The little girl loved that teddy bear as much as if he were a real little bear.

Even though he always cheated at cards.

More Travel Sketches

These were drawn while watching a play at the Kabuki Theatre in Tokyo, once upon a time.

Scribbly Doodle

Here’s a tiny doodle done while riding on the train, with a little tone added in Photoshop.

The 2008 comics-convention season is about to start with San Francisco’s Wondercon at the end of next week. The California cons will be more evenly spread out this year; Wondercon in February, Comic Con in July and APE has been moved to November. I prefer this new spread, rather than having all the California Cons in the first half of the year, which meant that I wasn’t able to prepare something for each of the shows.

I am hoping to get a down-and-dirty mini comic ready for Wondercon (though it will have to be very loose and scratchy) and with the new date spread, I may even be able to make something new for each of the California cons this year…

My Auction Pieces

Here are the three new original pieces that I did for the latest Maverix Art Auction, which was held last night. In addition to these ink drawings I also submitted three signed and framed prints from my Dad’s Elephant Book.

Over this past week I had rented and watched the original three Star Wars movies, and as I had already been doodling the characters, I decided to tidy up a few and submit them to the show, when I couldn’t think of any better ideas. The LEIA was won by Mike Murnane, The YODA by Hop Matsuo, and the LUKE by Bosco Ng.

I am happy to say that I won some GREAT pieces myself and I will have a full report on the Auction in a few days, when the all numbers are tallied up and the photographs come in…
So Stay tuned!

Ueno Ape House

I’m still in scanning and archiving mode. Here are some of my very rare life-drawings, done on a cold winter’s day at Tokyo’s UENO ZOO. The apes had gone inside to escape the cold, though they couldn’t escape prying eyes, as we human beings could observe them in their little shelter, from behind super-thick plexi-glass. The observation room was relatively warm and a good place to do some sketching. As other visitors came and went, I got to really study the gorilla as he sat in a very relaxed pose apparently not even noticing the crowd. Suddenly, he sprang into a classic SILVER-BACK pose and banged his fists on the glass so hard that the plexi-glass pane went BOOM!

This terrified everyone, and sent them running and yelling out into the cold, clearing the observation room, only to slowly fill up again with a new group of people who were unaware of how much jeopardy their underpants were about to be in, because over the course of about 40 minutes, I saw the gorilla pull this move about once every 7 minutes or so. After the first time, it was pretty funny to watch him affecting this “I’m not watching you guys” attitude but then, with a little tell-tale glance at the crowd (just to make sure that the observation room had filled up) he would again unload a KING KONG moment, which was guaranteed to scare the ramen-noodles out of everyone– me included.

Japanglish & Englinese

These are some of the illustrations for an English Language text book for Japanese readers. I drew them many years ago while I was working and living in Japan.

In the early months, my income was mainly from Teaching English, so freelance illustration jobs were a welcome distraction from my limitations as an English Language teacher…. I didn’t teach at a school (if you can call what I was doing “teaching” at all) instead, I put on a tie and an ill-fitting suit (bought from a shady tailor in Bangkok) and went to teach on-site at several businesses around Tokyo (including National Electronics and Toshiba) that had conversational English classes as part of the training program for their employees. I spent a lot of time travelling around Tokyo by train, going from job to job. Using Google Earth and WikiMapia I was recently able to figure out where some of my old teaching posts were.

This was part of a long period in my life where I rarely participated in a fluent conversation. In the evenings, my students mangled my own language (under my earnest direction) and the for the rest of the day I mangled theirs, as I tried to learn Japanese. Though I was a language-teacher at night, in the mornings I was a language-student myself, attending Japanese language classes. I am sad to say that I never got very fluent, despite my very best efforts (a Japanese friend tells me that I speak Japanese like a little girl) but I managed to pick up enough “survival” Japanese to get around, order food and have limited conversations with anyone patient enough to listen to me shred the verb conjugations of their language.

Thankfully, both for me and the well-being of my English-language students, I soon found a job that I was better qualified for; working in animation (at TOEI Studios, on a Superman TV series) and so I quit being an English teacher. Though the full-time job meant that I unfortunately had to give up my morning Japanese classes, it was a relief to be able to take off the baggy suit and neck-tie and draw all day. I continued to do freelance illustration jobs, in addition to the animation work, right up until I left Japan.

LifeDrawing VS MindDrawing

Often, when I buy a big hard-cover sketchbook, I’m intimidated to even draw in it at all. Instead, I do most of my drawing on scraps of paper, and glue these into the sketchbook, using it more like a scrap book. I buy sketchbooks with the intention of drawing from life but instead I mostly fill them with doodles, things drawn from out of my head.

When it comes to drawing realism, I have always admired people I have worked with who can pull plausible images out of their minds without resorting to reference. Even when the subject matter isn’t some fantasy-land or goof-ball cartoon, I enjoy seeing a personal stylisation that informs drawings of the “real” world. I think that has made me want to be capable of the same. But I realise that part of the reason that people can draw from memory or imagination is that is that they have spent the time puting images INTO their heads first.

I can be sloppy about using reference too… Though not always out of pure laziness. I have learned that I draw better caricatures from memory than I do from looking at a photograph directly. Memory seems to record a shorthand record of a person’s dominant features and attitudes; a good place to start in doing a caricature. Seeing myself as a cartoonist rather than an artist gives me a bit more licence to exaggerate and fudge the details…

I suppose that the reason I started drawing in the first place was that it was a form of escapism. It wasn’t about representing reality but coming up with an alternative. Anyway, as much as I enjoy doodling from my imagination, I have been thinking that I need to more often feed it it with some reality; life drawing or sketching from life, or even copying images from books and magazines, is something that I need to do more of… in order to find that balance of personal style and plausiblity.