Oct 11 2011
I did a caricature/likeness of Hank Sr. a while back for my old mini-comic, American Music A-Z. I’ll have to dig it out and look at it for comparison’s sake. This isn’t a great likeness, but hopefully it’s an improvement:
If you’d like to suggest a #PortraitNight subject, you can do so either via the comments section here, or via my Twitter.
Oct 07 2011
I’ve been neglecting sketchbook posts of late. Partially that’s just because I’ve been super-busy and haven’t been working in it as much as I should. Also, though, I’ve been tending of late to post stuff to Twitter or G+. Anyhoo, here’s a recent page:
Oct 04 2011
Last week I finished up my Our Band Could Be Your Life-themed drawings, but right in the midst of that I received a portrait request that I had to shelve until now. Thematically, it fits in pretty well, though: David Yow of The Jesus Lizard. I may be misremembering–it was a while back–but I believe it was Christian Sager who put in the word for a David Yow drawing.
There’s a bit of nice synchronicity to this Yow drawing as well: Just a few days ago I managed to get a hold of a really nice-sounding recording of The Jesus Lizard’s never-released BBC Peel sessions, so I was listening to those while I drew this.
I saw The Jesus Lizard perform only once–opening for Helmet–but it was a truly amazing show. Also: David Yow had pulled one of his testicles through a hole in the crotch of his jeans, where it remained on display throughout the performance. So there was that.
If you’d like to suggest a #PortraitNight subject, you can do so either via the comments section here, or via my Twitter.
Oct 03 2011
AlphaBeasts is the follow-up collaborative project to the now-completed Animal Alphabet. This time, instead of drawing real animals, we’re drawing fictional ones each week–one for each letter of the alphabet. On the first day (Monday, October 17th) everyone will draw beasts beginning with the letter “A.” The following Monday, everyone will draw beasts that begin with “B.” Rinse and repeat…
Anyone who wants to! No one cares whether you “can’t draw” or you’re Gustave Doré. It’s just for fun!
Put simply: fictional beasts. It (1) should be an animal and not a person and (2) should be imaginary or fictional, but not made up by the person doing the drawing.
The fine print:
Twitter: We will be begin with beasts starting with the letter “A” on Monday the 17th of October. Post your completed drawing somewhere–an image hosting site, your blog, whatever–and post a link to it to Twitter sometime during the day each Monday with the #alphabeasts hashtag. Include the name of your beast–like “M is for Manticore.”
Google+: Same deal, but instead of the hashtag, share the post with Andrew Neal (in addition to whomever else you want). Andrew has generously volunteered to post each week’s AlphaBeasts to a tumblr but he needs to know you’ve posted one in order to grab it.
No, you don’t. You can draw just one letter/week’s beast or you can do all twenty-six.
Awesome! There’re two easy ways to do that. First, you can follow the AlphaBeasts tumblr and each beast will appear in your stream as its posted: http://alphabeasts.tumblr.com. Alternately, you can watch the beasts appear throughout the day each Monday by watching the #alphabeasts hashtag on Twitter.
You can email me at the address up in the header of this blog, or DM me on twitter: @ben_towle.
Oct 02 2011
As mentioned in part one of my Animal Alphabet roundup, folks seem to be interested in a new alphabet project. There was a bit of discussion about possible themes a few weeks back on Twitter and Google+, but I thought I’d post some thoughts here as a centralized area for getting input and suggestions–and hopefully finalizing something so we can officially launch the new alphabet project as soon as possible.
As things stood at the end of preliminary discussions a few weeks back, the most agreed-upon theme was “Beasts and Creatures.” I’ve been doing a bit of thinking on this, though, and it’s seeming to me that there’re probably some specific guidelines that should be sorted out beforehand. Animals is a fairly straightforward theme and with the exception of one or two mythical animals (that I culled from the tumblr and will repost if we do Beasts and Creatures as our theme) there wasn’t a whole lot of explanation needed. “Beasts and Creatures” though has a lot more wiggle room. I’m just throwing things out there, but here are some thoughts:
1) No creatures that actually exist or have actually existed in the past. So, no dinosaurs or giant sloths.
2) Generic creature names are legit, but so are proper names. “D is for Dragon” works. So does “S is for Smaug” (the dragon from The Hobbit).
3) Fictional does not equal “creature.” Hedwig the owl from Harry Potter is not legit.
4) OK, here’s one that’s maybe contentious: The creature must be from something–a book, movie, myth, legend whatever–but you can’t just make up an original creature yourself.
5) Another contentious one: It seems to me like we want myth/fantasy-type creatures, not SF-type creatures. Is there “neat” way to exclude, say, rancors and Tribbles, etc.
Edit: 6) Should humanoid fantasy creatures like dwarves and elves count for beasts & creatures?
As I said, I’m just throwing these out there. Please comment and let me know what you think.
Thinking through that last point, it occurred to me that another potentially fun theme–and one that wouldn’t have nearly as much wiggle room–would be “Robots and Aliens.” The guidelines here would be pretty straightforward:
Any non-human from any science fiction book, movie, TV show, etc.
So, anyway… existing Animal Alphabet participants, possible contributors to this next project, let me know your thoughts!
(Also: this go round, I’d like to pawn off tumblr updating duties to someone else. It’s not a hugely time-consuming, but I’ll soon be losing a work morning to some weekly volunteer work at my daughter’s school, so I’m trying to economize time-wise at the moment. Andrew Neal volunteered to help on that front, but if someone else wants to be in charge of updating, or wants to help Andrew out, please mention that as well.)
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