While those things are a matter of time at this point, I can try to keep my hands busy and knock off some of the rust on my drawing skills.  One blog that I follow religiously is John K's (of "Ren & Stimpy" fame) - it's a wealth of information for cartoonists and animators, but also covers a lot of things that "fine artists" can put in their artistic toolboxes.  One of the things John K's been going over the last week or two is using magazines as the basis for practicing caricatures (and learning how to draw hairstyles - a very difficult task).  While I usually don't like to draw directly from photos, beggars can't be choosers...

 

This one's from a photo in the most recent Atlantic Monthly, and is indeed the Pope.  I don't really do caricatures in the traditional sense - I'm a lot better at portraits.  But the important thing here is not nailing the likeness perfectly, it's about shaking off the tightness that comes with a period of artistic inactivity.  For me, I tend to want to strangle a drawing to death when I'm not in-practice and confident about what I'm doing.  Trying to micromanage, to tightly render and control the outcome usually doesn't result in a lively, interesting drawing.  For a super-quick drawing, this one is okay, but it would have been much more interesting to really delve into how light fell on his face.  As it stands, there's not anything all that interesting going on - it's an okay comic book style illo.

This one and the next are from the Issue of Interview that has Madonna on the cover.  This one's getting a little better.  The guy in the t-shirt probably would have been better served by drawing with different tools (the guy's look is kinda weird and plasticy - a more cartoony drawing and inking with a brush would have emphasized that more).  The giant head is more interesting to me - it's really hard to draw super-handsome guys without it becoming a cartoon or visual cliche.  The photo was kind of funny too, a super handsome guy brooding, and practically reaching out with his lips to smooch something.  I don't think I really nailed that, but I still think the drawing in the nose and mouth area turned out okay.  I didn't really nail the eyes or eyebrows, though.

These are starting to feel better, just because the poses had something that I could exaggerate and play around with.  The female character is pretty much a human letter "A", which is an unusual shape for a lady to have.  The drawing's okay, but I'd like to play around with that pose some more and really knock it out of the park.  The guy here had an interesting look, but what jumped out from the photo first was that he seemed to have a never-ending torso.  That, combined with the samurai haircut, was enough visually to make me want to draw him.  For quick drawings, these are okay, but I think it'd be funny to draw him with little baby legs (but still use the 7.5 head body size).

I'm probably going to spend the rest of the week plowing through magazines and doing quick drawings from them.  Maybe I'll post some more, if anything interesting comes from the work.

c.

NOTE: I forgot to include relevant links - and now I can't seem to get the link thing to work on GoDaddy's site, so I'll get around to posting those later.  LOS LINKS!!!!