Head Shots

Head doodles. How is it done? Just play along with me...

First! Draw a circle or an oval or a square, then make an eye or a mouth or a triangle for the nose, then let the features flow from the tip of the pencil and see what you get. Maybe look at a picture to get an idea for hair, or find a nose that doesn't look like the noses you usually draw. The characters stack up and rarely do two look the same.

You can reference the work of other cartoonists, too; maybe there are head shapes you haven't happened to have doodled yet. Copy a head shape, but put the eyes a bit higher, make the nose bigger, turn that smile into a frown.

My heads here are fairly restrained, they do not venture into the realm of the more distorted cartoony caricatures, but I have recently not been so daring.

I might try to expand my idle-doodle-time to include full figures. That takes a bit more concentration but it's a lot of fun, too.

24 cartoony head doodles.

I suppose could make videos of these drawings with the screen capture feature in ClipStudio. I've done that before but I wasn't amused by the effort of wrangling iMovie to make it presentable. It wasn't hard after all few tries but I burnt out on it while learning how to do it. I should go back and take another shot at it.

There. A project for my next bout of insomnia!

The end.

Sketching on the iPad

Here are a few drawings I recently created on the iPad in ClipStudio. I've been thinking about not signing up for the full version at the end of the next subscription period. I haven't been using the fancier features for anything.

This is me throwing shade at me for not doing much art lately. We'll see if it works.

Cartoony drawings of three ladies and Supergirl!

The End

Sketchbook Post, January 13

Here are some drawings from the ol' sketchbook. I've never been good at keeping a steady sketchbook – but every once in a while I manage to focus my energies on the task and get a few pages properly vandalized. 

These scribbles are some of what I've made at the breakfast table over the past couple of weeks. They are loose, informal studies from the web and a book or two. For the pencil drawings I tried to re-ignite my long-unused half-assed semi-ambidextrousness, but it was very difficult. Theses drawing are combo lefty-righty to accommodate my short flurries of raging frustration. I was never comfortable with delicate left-handed drawing -- big charcoal figure studies done with arm and wrist were pretty easy -- but noodling with the fingers is always tough. Moreso now! 

ANyway. There's nothing special here. I'm just trying to keep the blog and the love of drawing alive.

Sorry I Missed Your Call

Four years ago I was fiddling with a little op-ed cartoon idea inspired by something I had read over the weekend. It was right after the Trump/Raffensperger phone call came to light. My memory of details is hazy but — as is shown in the text of the animation — the story reported that the Trump team had tried calling Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger 18 times in the effort to pressure him to rig the election in Trump’s favor. But good ol’ Raffy sensed there was fuckery afoot and he wasn’t answering the call. At least he made them wait, eh?

It was scandalous, of course, but also kind of cute and funny in the seemingly unserious cacophony of unhinged nonsense flowing from MAGA back then. I was tickled by the image it conjured and so was inspired to make this cartoon. "La la la. Do you hear a ringing? Is that the phone? Jeepers, it stopped ringing just as I was about to pick up. Too busy to answer. La la la." 

Cartoon animation of Brad Raffensperger
not answering the phone. 

I had been experimenting with simple animation, so i put together the wiggly drawing above, just for larks. I had the flimsy notion of showing it to an editor at work— we weren’t doing any editorial cartoons or animations but there had been discussions about developing a project along those lines. Maybe I’d show it as a proof-of -concept, or simply as a reminder that I had been paying attention to what we had talked about.

I finalized the gif before work and wasn’t happy with it. I was not inclined to show it but hadn’t completely decided against it. Then I logged in for work — January 6, 2021, y’know? — and saw the newsfeed; MAGA was attacking the Capitol. Total shitshow.

Suddenly a small joke about Raffensperger avoiding answering the phone wasn’t cute or charming. Or relevant. So I put my cartoon in the rear-view mirror and moved on. I saw the gif yesterday morning while rummaging through an old external drive and, considering the timing, I thought I’d set it free.

Hang in there fellow Americans. Another shitshow incoming.