Sometime last year I decided I wanted to get better at drawing portraits.  I came up with a sketching exercise where I clicked on a random mug shot from a collection I have culled from the archives at TheSmokingGun.com, and then tried to draw whatever popped up.

Mug shots make great reference material for practicing portraits. They provide a clear view of a person’s face, while the whole I-have-just-been-arrested aspect provides a range of facial expressions that you rarely get from other photographs.

This one here isn’t the most exciting mug shot, but whatever.  As for the drawing, you’ll see from the hair and the skinny neck that I gave up on trying to get a photographic likeness and just decided to make it more “stylized”.  That is a nice way of saying I got frustrated and impatient and just decided to finish it.  If something isn’t quite right, I can just say, “Yeah, I meant to do that.”

Works every time.

Let’s all take a trip back to the summer of 2008.  Back then, the country was sharply divided in the midst of a tumultuous presidential campaign; yet we all united when we fell in love with the decomposing remains of a dead animal.  If you are not familiar with the Montauk Monster, a brief visit to wikipedia will cure what ails you.

Above is an idea I had for the holiday season: Montauk Monster the Snowman. The story involves two brave children who find a mysterious carcass on a New York beach.  They place a magic top hat on his head and - voila! – he springs to life!  He then takes them on magical adventures and teaches them how precious life is.

Remember the Moustache Cyborg?  Well, in contrast to his esteemed bionic colleague, this fellow is comprised of all organic, fleshy tissue.  That is, of course, with the exception of his mechanical, bionic moustache.  He is the Bizarro Moustache Cyborg!

If the two cyborgs were to encounter each other, I’m not sure if they would be staunch allies or mortal enemies.  But if they did turn out to be enemies, I would like to think their epic battle would still be rather pleasant and refined in some way.

I say!

I know, these days the swine flu seems so passé.  However, these pigs were rendered last summer when the virus still had the ability to incite some good old-fashioned dread.  If you were like me, you probably wondered how long it would take until the whole thing degenerated into some sort of apocalyptic I-Am-Legend-esque scenario.  You know the one:

Swine floozies.  Lurking in the shadows. Waiting for nightfall so they could infect the remaining few with their unnatural mutation.  It all seemed so inevitable.

Anyway, this post isn’t meant to be about the swine flu as much as it is about sketching and repetition.  While there are 3 versions of a flying pig represented here, I probably did a hundred other sketches of the same pig with the same bat wings.  It all started when a friend (who had just recovered from the swine flu) mentioned making a t-shirt with a flying pig on it.

I decided to try and come up with something, but I quickly realized that I didn’t know how to draw pigs.  In this respect, the repetition really helped and it was nice to see improvement with each new sketch.  At a certain point, however, the quality reached a plateau and sketches were cranked out with little or no variation.  The repetition ceased to be a useful learning mechanism.  It had mutated into an eerie, compuslive automation.  It was sort of like writing REDRUM on the wall or drawing circles over and over like that kid in The Ring.

Still, the flying pig is just one of many lazy, repetitive doodles to add to my repertoire, which includes zombies, robots, hamburgers, and sasquatch (to name a few).  What I need to do now is find something new that I can mindlessly sketch over and over; something that would genuinely alarm a casual onlooker if they happened to glance in my direction as I am furiously scribbling on a sheet of paper.  Imagine looking down at the paper only to find it to be jam packed of identical drawings of - I dunno - NANCY PELOSI.  And all of the Nancy Pelosies are staring right at you!   Whooaa…I just freaked myself out a little bit.

In Loving Memory

The other the day I took a few moments to reflect on the memory of my blog.  I wondered if it made it to blog heaven, and I was hoping it was happy wherever it was.  Then someone told me, “Omigosh, Mike.  Don’t you know?  Your blog is *still alive*!”

I just laughed.  ”I appreciate your childlike optimism, friend.  But it has been 8 MONTHS since my blog has been updated.  My blog is an angel now, and it is very happy.”

I was pretty sure my friend was crazy.  Still, later that night I felt strangely compelled to visit my blog.  I wanted to pay my respects, if nothing else.  Imagine my shock/joy/horror to find my blog was indeed still alive!  Unfortunately, it was barely managing to wheeze slow, difficult breaths through an accumulation of crusted spittle.  Boy, was I embarrassed.

“This is why I don’t own pets,” I thought to myself.  I tried to tell my blog how sorry I was, but it just responded by faintly gurgling some incoherent nonsense.

Anyway, I gave the blog a bubble bath, some soup, a new logo, and a sketch of a boy perched upon a mutant rabbit of some sort.

It isn’t much, but it is a start, I suppose.

I’m not feeling particularly wordy today, so this will be some sub-par pontificating.  At any rate, you should probably check out some paintings by  Kevin Cyr.  The bummer part of his website is there aren’t any thumbnail galleries of his paintings, so navigation isn’t the greatest.  Anyway, if you pull down the drop down menu for ‘Paintings’ at the top and click around, you’ll see some awesomeness.  A few that I liked:  Johnson, Kool Man, and Berry.