Archive for the ‘art & sketches’ category
For those not in the know, Movember is a movement in which men use the month of November to grow mustaches to raise money and awareness of men’s health issues, such as prostate and testicular cancer and depression. Having run a 10K for breast cancer awareness and research this summer, I figure it was only appropriate to jump on the bandwagon of men’s health to balance myself out. I, along with fellow curator of ‘stache Andy Marikis, am part of The TGM Disciples, led by our fearless leader Todd Kollus. While the other boys are rocking the handlebar this fall, I myself am sporting the D’Artagnan
While this may not require the training and effort of the Susan G. Koman 10K, the effort is still for a great cause. And to show that we are in good company, I took a few hours this week to sketch out some mustachioed role models joining us in spirit on our quest for healthier men folks everywhere. In case my scribbles are incomprehensible, do your best to identify: mathematical genius Albert Einstein, the immortal Coach Ditka, all four of The Beatles, crazy film critic Gene Shalit, strong man Hulk Hogan, Gahndi, a grumpy Mark Twain, mustache-in-chief Tom Selleck, creepster John Waters, Salvador Dali, grandfather-of-all-staches Sam Elliot, and someone who was supposed to be Burt Reynolds but who stopped off for a drink somewhere between my brain and the paper and was instead replaced by a total stranger.
If you’ve enjoy this little workaday diversion, might I suggest you donate to our team. All of your money goes to a great cause!
Last week I attended a photo shoot for one of my clients, Emerald City Theatre. The purpose of the shoot was to collect a vast array of different photos of children having a good time with props and costumes. I’ll be making use of these photos in the coming weeks to design their Summer Camp 2012 brochure, as well as throughout the next year for miscellaneous collateral and website headers. Having a vault of non-stock photography of children smiling and having a good time is gold for a children’s theatre’s marketing department.
Apart from throwing in a suggestion now and again, there wasn’t too much for me to do at the shoot. The company’s Theatre School brought in a brigade of teachers to corral and focus all the children. This left me with plenty of time to sit with my sketchbook and practice capturing movement and faces. I hadn’t had a chance to draw people in action in a long time, and children are fantastic subjects because they are in constant motion doing crazy things. So much better than just drawing people walking through the park or down the sidewalk.
Speaking of which, it was several days later when I found myself in downtown Chicago with about an hour to kill before seeing Carrie Fisher’s Wishful Drinking. So I parked myself outside a Potbelly restaurant and once again pulled out a sketchbook. This time, my subjects tended to be DePaul college students and business people on their way home, but any practice is good practice. It’s easy to fall into a rut in the way I draw people, so these few days of sketching proved very valuable.
Schedule permitting, I would love to be able to take part of every Friday afternoon to go out sketching. We’ll see how that works out…
This past weekend, I took a much-needed three-day vacation to Wisconsin. My last vacation was my trip to Panama three years ago. And I don’t mean that was the last time I went somewhere cool, I mean it was the last time I had an extended period of time not doing work. I need to do get away more often!
These are the three sketches I managed to churn out in that time. I wish I’d had time to do more drawing, but considering I haven’t had the time to do any drawing for myself most of this year, I count these three pages as a victory nonetheless! I truly believe that an artist needs to create for themselves just like an athlete needs to continually workout to be in top shape. A year from now, my goal is to have my business (and clients) organized in such a way that I can spend several mornings a week sketching for myself as a warmup, and produce something for myself at least every other week.
While I was in Wisconsin, I stopped by Arcadia Books in Spring Green, which is owned by James Bohnen, the retired artistic director of one of my clients, Remy Bumppo Theatre Company. Lisa and I hug out with him over the weekend and saw the show he directed at American Players Theatre. While at the bookstore, I picked up Scottie Young‘s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, which I’ve been craving for some time, and French Milk, a diary comic/sketchbook/travelogue from cartoonist Lucy Knisley, whose work I now realize I’ve seen before, and who only days ago moved away from Chicago to live in New York. I recommend checking out both.
It’s been a long long time coming, but the GrabBagComics redesign HAS FINALLY ARRIVED! After I had to move the blog from Blogger to WordPress, I never had the time to devote to learning the ins and outs of WordPress, and the functionality of the site suffered. But now I finally took the time to learn how WordPress works and learn enough PHP coding to be dangerous, and here are the fruits of my labor. If you find anything that doesn’t work, let me know, cuz I wanna keep this thing shiny.
A few caveats: I haven’t touched the Dumbstruck archives… yet. As I work on fleshing those out and continue working on compilation books, I’ll be restructuring all of that, but it will happen over time. A bunch of older Dumbstruck posts are missing images because I moved a directory around a year or so ago, and I’m not burning to fix all that soon. Sorry. Also, this site doesn’t look good in Internet Explorer 7 or earlier. I could make make the necessary adjustments, but my time is better spent. If you don’t have at least IE8, I’m sorry, but, deal with it.
Finally, I’m happy to say that I will be posting here no less than twice a week. Sometimes it will be projects that I’ve recently finished, sometimes it will be new Dumbstruck comics, sometimes it will sketchbook drawings, sometimes even design tutorials. I’ve been doing a bunch of stuff and trying to stretch myself artistically more than I have in the past few years, so stick around and tell me what you like and what you don’t. And thanks for checking this out!
And now, without further blather, COMICS WOOOHOOOOO!!
For Valentine’s Day, Lisa reserved us dinner at The Girl and The Goat, which is a restaurant started by Stephanie Izard from Top Chef (Lisa is a Top Chef fiend). She took her Top Chef Cookbook in the hopes of getting it signed. She also asked that I draw a cartoon to give Stephanie (perhaps as a sly way to convince her to sign the book). So despite being under the weather, I sketched out this cartoon for the event.
Unfortunately, Lisa had class ON Valentine’s Day, so we had to go the day before, and Stephanie was not working that say (the waiter said she was at a charity event). We left this drawing for her anyway along with our business cards. Unfortunately, though, we’ve heard nothing from her. 
