WHEN DOC GOT ME UP OFF MY DRAWIN' BUTT TALES OF THE MIRADO BLACK WARRIOR, PART II

BLOGGIST'S NOTE: you may well wonder (or, perhaps not) why I'm putting a series about drawing here on SZ:TCoB instead of o'er at my own digs, but there's a perfectly good reason... Just gimmie a minute to think of it...

OH! It's because, as I briefly explained in Part I, I've been fascinated with art and drawing my whole life, but basically gave it up cold turkey as a bad job back when I was perhaps 13 or 14 years old. In the last month or so, thanks to both Doc (who's my Inspiration) and Spooky (who's both my Muse and my Instructor) I've started drawing again, and it just seems Right and Proper that these stories should go here on SZ, which has always struck me as a sort of communal blogg.

But, over the last few weeks or so, I’ve found myself drawing again and I’ve got two people to blame: Doc and Spooky.

I remember visiting Flann and Doc ages ago at their old house and spying a crayon drawing that Doc had done at one of those restaurants where the table is covered with a large sheet of brown butcher’s paper and the kids are given crayons to draw on the table with. Doc had drawn a monkey with a red keister, looking back o’er it’s shoulder, sticking it’s tongue out and holding a banana. The caption to this was ‘MONKEY GOT A RED BUTT!’ I don’t know if Doc still has it lying around, but I remember standing in awe at what a fine cartoonist he was and feeling embarrassed I couldn’t even draw just the red butt, let alone the monkey.

Then, some time ago, Doc started working at the bakery and began sketching out little funny cartoons for the other folk at work. It started off as a whim but apparently everyone else was like me: artists of such low skill that they naturally applauded Doc’s work and therefore asked him to draw MORE. Well, you know what happens when you start to draw more and more—you get practice and you get BETTER.



I began to study these drawings of Doc’s (like that of his Stock Noseless Self-Portrait above and his earlier works) and also spent more time over at their house in their bathroom where a whole stack of comic collections could be found: Calvin and Hobbes, Zits and Fox Trot collections were stacked next to the john. I began not only to read these, but to gather some ideas for cartoons of my own—starting with the big, round eyes that are common in Fox Trot, Garfield and Doc’s self-portraitures. With time on my hands at work, I began to doodle and within a few hours had a stock character that I would quickly draw when the person on the other end of the phone was being a total pill (mind, Doc works in pen and his drawings show up better than mine which are, until recently, all drawn w/genric #2 pencils)

Then, borrowing the idea from Doc, I began to draw a few VERY poor and rough cartoons about work—I’d post them here but they’d make no sense; suffice it to say they’re almost all of a frustrated person sitting at a computer with a headset on talkin’ to some moron on the phone. I started giving my drawings to Mike, one of the blokes I trained with. Also, just for him, I drew a cartoon of our computer system that has a RED ALERT button at the top in the form of a life preserver-- pushing THAT will literally sound an alarm on everyone's PC in the building as well as our parent office in Georgia. "Push THAT button when your PC literally catches on fire," is what the boss told us in training, making all of US wonder why in the hell it's THERE in the first place and adding a sort of eeeevil temptation TO push it just to see what sort of haywire mischif we can get up to (you know, right before we accept our pink slips).

Next thing I know Mike has a veritable Rogue’s Gallery of ALL of my drawings hanging up in his cubicle! I walk by and he says to the gal next to him—someone I never met before—“THAT’S the guy who draws these things!” She looks at me and says “those a really funny! You’re a good artist!”

This is the point where I turn and look around for the guy she’s talking to, only to point at my own chest and ask, “who? MEE?” (which, of course, is exactly what I did). It maybe be true that if you give a mouse a cookie he’ll want a glass of milk, but if you give an attention whore like me some encouragement, he’ll go sit down and begin cranking out cartoons every single day and practice drawing more
(NOTE: the joke in this one is about "points"-- when we're late or take time off we get points that accumulate; too many points and ya' get writ up, hence th' joke...)

About 2 or three weeks ago I was over at Doc’s pad and, with nothing particular to occupy my time, found myself with a pencil and pad in hand and drew out a bearded fellow in a baseball cap sittin in a pub with a sad sack of a drunken fellow. On the bar in front of them (I was experimenting with backgrounds and surfaces and foreshortening) was a stuffed rabbit-like thing. “Judas, Larry,” says the man in the hat, giving the bunny-thing the hairy eyeball, “it just breaks my damned heart!”

Doc apparently found something existential in the whole thing because not only did he laugh and wonder what the hell it was about, but he particularly liked the man’s beard and ballcap. He said he thought I was developing my own particular style (albeit with borrowed elements from The Simpsons, Garfield, Peanuts and Fox Trot) and I think might have even said that I was beginning to cartoon better than him (flattery will get you everywhere—I am nowhere NEAR the stage wherein I can put Dale at the opera).

All went well for about a fortnight until the evening recently where Spooky, who I had recently learned was briefly an art major in college back in the day, still had her portfolio of her student work and she laid it on the bed and went through some of her drawings with me.

END OF PART II

TALES OF THE MIRADO BLACK WARRIOR PRESENTS: DRAW! PART I

Once upon a time, like every little boy and at least 85% of little girls, I used to draw. I doodled, drew pictures, sketched and scribbled. Mostly what I drew was people’s faces, but now and then I’d attempt a sketch of Snoopy or some other stream-of-consciousness scribbling. I remember that for Christmas one year someone gave me a little flip book of stencils that had various themes in it—animals, letters, plants, etc. The one page I got the most use out of, though, was stencils of various science lab equipment—beakers and flasks and distillers and burners and the like. I actually went through a phase were I made a series of drawings that were ALL science equipment that was floating in midair under the general title of “Ghost Labs”. It saved on having to draw people and all those bits I wasn’t good at—I was never good at drawing hands or noses, and I’m STILL not good at putting people in ¾ perspective or shading.

I took art classes with other students in elementary school and in my school’s art room I saw a life sized drawing of a skeleton that the art teacher had done when SHE was training in art school. It was a magnificent thing that somehow always filled me with a sense of sadness: DAMN that was a GOOOD drawing!! 6’ tall and shaded impeccably, you could have taught a class of medical students with her drawing. No doubt it was probably some sort of thesis-level project and took her MONTHS to complete, but as a kid I used to stand in awe of that.

Other kids could draw and cartoon and, if absolutely nothing else, TRACE existing drawings, and I too attempted to draw some stuff but my attempts always came out looking somehow off—especially if there was any sense of symmetry in it. Still, I wasn’t the WORST artist in the classroom and I DID enjoy my scribbling and even felt that a few things weren’t so goddamned bad after all.

THEN I bought Brian Froud’s book FAERIES and that was the end of that.

Literally, I stopped drawing overnight. Which was a shame because, if memory serves, I was moving out of my blocky, hesitating sketch stages into more confidant lines and drawing OTHER things and even attempting to draw random objects I saw as a way of trying to capture what I saw every day. But Froud’s drawings were magnificent (and still are). Even his pencil sketches of strange creatures made EVERYTHING I drew look childish, like a 4 year old who was missing a few fingers and had a bad nervous disorder had attempted to draw it.

I have always been drawn to art in all of it’s forms—I’m simply amazed when I look at sculpture to think that someone banged this out with a chisel and made a block of marble come to life; same thing with clay--three dimensional art confounds me and anything *I* made in art always wound up with two grooves cut in it so I could turn it into an ashtray (no one in my family smoked). I loved art museums even as a kid and was fascinated not only by suits of armour, but also the oil paintings of men in funny hats and big, ridiculous-looking collars. To think that someone could take PAINT and make a 2D surface come alive to the point you could just reach out and take their hand astounded me. I longed for such talent.

My friend Dave was an art major in high school, dabbling in all medium including drawing, paint, clay, photography, wire, ceramics and everything else. I was rather intimidated by him, actually, and because HIS stuff looked so damned good and MY stuff would have looked just plain stupid, I never attempted to draw anything else, but rather put MY energies into writing and then, late in high school, into acting.

I remember a time he asked me to model for him and I actually got out of a hated math class so I could go to the art room and just sit still. I loved that: the art room was COMPLETELY different than any other place—no desks to speak of, music playing, art supplies and pieces of student art in all states of accomplishment all over the place. I seriously longed to BE an art major so I too could come down here and have a place all to my own (I eventually found my own place in band, though I was a pathetically mediocre musician and always 3rd [or even 4th] section).

Fast forward practically 20 years and I’m living in Pittsburgh, PA, and have some friends who are patrons of the arts and have artistic streaks themselves. Oh, they may not have studios themselves or paint, but they certainly appreciate and support the arts and will go out to concerts or weekends at the museums and were on mailing lists for galleries that were opening. There was also a Center for the Arts less than 10 miles from my house and on a complete whim I bought a drawing pad, pencils, conte crayons and a sharpener and drove off once a week to attempt to learn how to draw the human figure.

THAT in itself is an entirely different blogcake, for if you’ve never sat in an almost silent semi-circle intently studying a totally nude person under strong lights trying to render what they look like on paper with graphite or charcoal, it’s an Experience: especially when LOTS of other people have already BEEN figure drawing for YEARS before they got there and they can whip out an amazingly life-like drawing complete with shading and muscle tone while YOU sit there and barely have an outline and what you DO have makes the mode look like an early Cathy cartoon. I felt embarrassed when the model would put on a robe and quietly walk around and see what we’ve drawn: here I was staring at her and what I was able TO put on the paper was embarrassingly amateurish.

“Hey, that’s a good start,” she said in an encouraging way, “is this your first live figure drawing class?”

“Yeah,” says I, “is it that obvious?”

She laughed. “Oh, I’ve seen MUCH worse than that, trust me,” she said. “It’s all a matter of practice. Remember that.”

Somewhere ‘round that time something struck me: no one ever explained to me that for most of the world, ANY art takes practice. Oh, sure, some are born savants who can HEAR a piece of music and then play it exactly on the piano, but MOST of us spend YEARS banging away at our craft until we can finally pull it off and make it look easy. No one had explained to me, as I sat examining and admiring Brian Froud’s work, that this was the best-of-the-best of a professional artist who A) had an inherent talent for drawing B) was TRAINED as an artist and C) spent HOURS a day drawing, painting and examining what he’s already done. No one explained to me that you gotta have a fair amount of self-confidence to be an artist—it’s not going to come out right the first time and you’ve got to have the strength to cross it out and try it again AND to show what you’ve done to someone more skilled than you and ask, “how can I improve this?”

I had neither inherent talent NOR self-confidence NOR a mentor to guide me NOR (apparently) anyone to point out to me that Rome ‘twasn’t built in a day and that to improve meant that I’d have to WORK at my drawing and—perhaps even more importantly—challenge myself: drawing the same thing over and over again isn’t challenging yourself.

What’s more, though, is after those figure drawing classes Life just sort of rolled over me and I stopped drawing AGAIN. The classes were expensive, I NEEDED and instructor and didn’t feel that going to a art “class” where a model just posed and you just drew (generally $5 at the door to cover the model’s fees) would help me in any meaningful way. I did get a few books of models out of the library, but lets face it, it’s easier to learn to draw something that’s 3D than trying to sketch a copy of a 2D picture. Try it: sketch a real egg or a real coffee mug on a table and then try to sketch an egg from a PHOTO of an egg. Of course you CAN do it, but it’s not at all the same thing. Extra-double-plus-so with the human body; clothed, nude or draped, it’s better to have a live person than to be looking at a photo of a person. For starters, the lighting and the sizing are all wrong. At the time I not only didn’t know anyone who would pose for me, I didn’t know anyone who had the time to just SIT for 20 minutes in one position, so I gave it up AGAIN.

That is, until recently...