Friday, May 29, 2009

This may be a bad idea, but I'm starting by posting some drawings I did in high school. A lot of this stuff shows immaturity apparently, but I often get a kick out of them. I have tons more of this stuff, all done for the most part in spiral lined notebooks, before I started buying proper sketchbooks, which may have been a bad idea. A lot of them are embarrassing or hilariously bad, and I may or may not post more when I gather more confidence, but here's some I still like 5-6 years later.

I'll give you new stuff in the next post, promise!

Most of this junk is just loneliness, as high school tended to be. This guy draped over a bench is inspired from a certain musician I used to listen to and understood all wrong, so it would be ultra obscure to even explain why.

Here's a guy working at a job I never had. It's okay, but I may recycle the idea later into something more grandiose like Winsor McCay may have done.
From what I remember, I did this because I messed up. Just funny looking.
This is kind of a half assed attempt of drawing my what goes on in my head when listening to Goldfrapp's first album, which I often played the year after it came out.
The series below involve this awkwardly designed jester character I would constantly draw. I had all of these great plans to make a comic book about this story I had in mind and the characters revolving around her, but I ultimately shelved it because it was ridiculously ambitious, badly thought through, and naive. Maybe I'll try again some other day when I have a better understanding on what you have to do to make a good involving story. Anyways, this first one kind of sucks, there's a lot of silly anatomical mistakes.
These next two are some of my favorites though. They capture something that's not always easy to do as an artist. I'm not trying to gloat, but I feel good when I look at them, so it must mean something, mistakes included. There was a lot of time spent on these in class when I should have been giving my full attention to learning. I would like to recycle the koala looking character from the first picture for something one day, but his design is too fickle, so I'll have to figure out how to spruce him up and which universe he would actually make sense in. Oh well.

The second one is also Winsor McCay inspired. A lot of my high school work uses elements Winsor McCay used, even though I did not own any Nemo or Winsor McCay collections at the time, mainly because he was not public domain and the Fantagraphics collections were out of the price range of a 16/17 year old with no job or later on minimum wage. I don't think that stuff started being published at a budget until Checker ame along, and now I also have that great Taschen book.

I was enchanted by the movie as a kid though, even though it kind of sucks in terms of writing and some character design, but the animation and atmosphere was top notch, thanks to the meticulous Japanese crew. The rest of that particular influence came from finding one of the Fantagraphics Nemo collections at a book store and deviously flipping through it until I had to leave.

No comments:

Post a Comment