Oct 03 2011

Come One, Come All! AlphaBeasts: It’s On!

What Is AlphaBeasts?

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…

Who Can Participate?

Anyone who wants to! No one cares whether you “can’t draw” or you’re Gustave Doré. It’s just for fun!

What Am I Supposed To Draw?

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:

  • No creatures that actually exist or have actually existed in the past. So, no dinosaurs or giant sloths.
  • Generic creature names are legit, but NOT proper names. “D is for Dragon” works, but not “S is for Smaug” (the dragon from The Hobbit). Yeah, there are some gray areas, but generally if you can put the word “the” before it–as in “the Lorax” then it’s probably a name for a type and not for an individual.
  • Fictional does not equal “creature.” Hedwig the owl from Harry Potter is not legit. Owls are real animals.
  • The creature must be from something–a book, movie, myth, legend, whatever–but you can’t just make up an original creature yourself.

How Do I Submit My Beast?

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.

Do I Have To Draw Something For Every Single Letter?

No, you don’t. You can draw just one letter/week’s beast or you can do all twenty-six.

I Don’t Draw. What If I Just Want To View Each Week’s Beasts?

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.

What If I Have A Question?

You can email me at the address up in the header of this blog, or DM me on twitter: @ben_towle.

Oct 02 2011

Animal Alphabet Part 2: In With The New?

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.

Beasts and Creatures

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.

Robots and Aliens

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.)

Oct 01 2011

Animal Alphabet Part 1: Out With The Old

This past Monday was the twenty-sixth–and final–week of our collaborative Twitter project, the Animal Alphabet. The project began as an offhand comment by me on Twitter that I was thinking about drawing an animal in my sketchbook for each letter of the alphabet. Fellow cartoonist and friend Rob Ullman, though, had the good sense to recognize the possibility of something bigger and proposed that he and I should each draw an alphabet’s-worth of animals and post them on Twitter concurrently.

Somehow, though, the project blossomed into something far more wonderful than I could have ever imagined: a weekly collaboration among dozens of artists (well, I’d have to go through the archives to get an exact count, but, well, there were a lot of folks who participated) from various corners of the globe. Participants included casual sketchers and professional artists; there were entries from five year olds and entries from the artist who storyboarded Inception and was then drawing The Hulk for Marvel Comics.

I couldn’t be happier with what this project (unexpectedly) turned into. For six months my Friday nights began with selecting and penciling some odd animal and my Saturdays usually involved inking and watercoloring that drawing. As I type this on a Friday night, I feel like that’s what I should be doing.

I’m incredibly grateful to everyone who participated. Thank you all! I hope you had fun. As someone who wound up as the unexpected organizer of the project, I sure did. Special accolades, though, are in order for those few folks who completed an animal drawing for all twenty-six letters of the alphabet…

The Animal Alphabet Lifetime Achievement Award Winners:

Isaac Cates

Sam Wolk

Lupi McGinty

Andrew Neal

Rich Barrett

Henry Eudy

and me!

The Final Animal Alphabet Project:

So here’s the full twenty-six week Animal Alphabet project:

http://animalalphabet.tumblr.com/

My Animal Alphabet Drawings A-Z:

What’s next?

The Animal Alphabet is done, but lots of participants have expressed an interest in a follow-up A-Z/alphabet project. I’ll be posting a some thoughts about that tomorrow and soliciting input from folks. Stay tuned!

Sep 27 2011

Portrait Night 9/27 (Heather Lewis)

My final Our Band Could Be Your Life-themed #PortraitNight drawing is Heather Lewis of Beat Happening. I have to admit, I kind of dragged my feat on this one because I’m not a huge Beat Happening fan. In the imaginary world where I’m the king of everything, I’d decree that the final chapter of Our Band be replaced with a new one about the Meat Puppets–which, my personal (and questionable) tastes aside, would seem to make more sense musically. Anyhoo… here’s this:

If you’d like to suggest a #PortraitNight subject, you can do so either via the comments section here, or via my Twitter.

Sep 26 2011

Z is for Zebu

Last letter of the Animal Alphabet! I’ll do a full Animal Alphabet round-up blog post with some thoughts on what the next alphabet project should be soon, but for now…

You can follow the other “Z” entries as people post them to Twitter this morning by following the #AnimalAlphabet hashtag. To see all the entries so far, check out the Animal Alphabet Tumblr: http://animalalphabet.tumblr.com.

Z is for Zebu

The original art for this is for sale here.