Conjurers

Wouldn't you want to know the rest of Anna's story?!

Good thing No. 2 about facebook™®: It's a de facto forum of storytellers.

Which ain't surprising, since by its nature facebook™® is a megatool for tales.

Daily — hourly! — you and I read tales there heavy and light, grandiose and haiku, vulnerable and vague, from hither and very, very yon.

I'm delighted that this social medium attracts people who love to tell stories, and tell them so well, whether spun from pure invention or dragged heavily from life.

Also not surprising: Many of the tellers hail from the south — the southern United States and the south of England. Something about those places seem to make it a sin not to tell a good story.

Cressida in England, for example, invigorates a familiar game — imagining the lives and purposes of people passing by in the shopping mall or airport — to another level. She has fashioned hilarious and weighty backstories for fellow travelers on her daily train commute, and dispatches the goings-on among the regulars and irregulars, even if all they're really doing is sitting and reading and chatting.

In the world Cressida has created, they are spies and saboteurs, social and professional climbers, and closet clowns, progressing through their sundry struggles in episodic detail that deepens the lives Cressida has forged for them.

If the real people ever found out about these daily stories … or maybe they're really as Cressida describes and she is a journalist on the front lines of British commuter life.

Zane, an English teacher in Mississippi, can describe the day in ordinary heartbeats, can lay his life open about the struggles of family and faith, can deliver Southern satire, and then can let rip a story so raucous I want to ask — but don't know how without offending — "Come on, did that really happen?!"

(He, politely, says it really did.)

What makes the stories so important to me are their power to evoke images — so strong that I have to stop reading and look out the window, watching the pictures build behind my eyes.

And I just have to draw.

Another wonderful storyteller is someone I have swum with (in fact, Cressida and Zane are swimmers: A connection?). She goes by Anna and I imagine a mug of good hot coffee in my hand, across the table from Anna in a shop somewhere, while she tells true tales of her layered life.

Tales that make me feel I have been standing still all my life.

The illustration above comes from one of her stories from childhood. I could not help but draw it.

Anna's dad once gave her opossum babies, she tells, to care for after mama possum was killed. They became her boon companions, hanging on her while she went through life. They even wound their tails over her bicycle handlebars and rode upside down with her.

See? How could you scrub that image from your mind? Why would you ever want to?

While reading that, I had to pick up the nearest black Prismacolor®™ pencil and put down in my sketchbook what I saw building in my head. Then I photocopied the result onto heavy bristol (thanks very much, kindly FedEx Office® technician near my house; no thanks at all to the FedEx Office®™ person in the next nearest office, who didn't even want to try and help), and painted over with watercolor.

It's one of my favorite techniques, because the toner resists water and therefore color, and the blacks remain black.

OK, enough technical talk.

This is about storytellers. I hope Anna turns that story into a book. I hope Cressida turns her tales into a book too; I see many keep asking her to. I hope Zane keeps enriching us with stories of his time and place, so foreign and now so familiar.

Keep telling! I want to keep drawing.

You lose some

Scab picked bloody, toothache sucked, bug bite rubbed raw … yep, the deed is done:

In a weak moment I visited the Website for which I had been commissioned to create a pinup-inspired woman for a startup establishment.

Against my inner voice of restraint, I just wanted to see what the start-up got that was different or better than what I was working to give. The client canceled the project, said we were on different tracks, and paid me for my time to that point.

What the start-up got was better: It used the very art it supplied as inspiration for the illustration they wanted from me.

What's better than riffing off Vargas or Elvgren to create a custom illustration? Why, ripping off Vargas or Elvgren, of course!

Maybe the images used are royalty-free. Maybe they're low-cost stock images. Maybe they're just pulled off the Internet, already in low-rez jpeg format suitable for use on a Website. Who knows? Either way, none of the artists get credit on the site.

With pin-up girls, I've come to learn, ownership of art may be scattershot and frazzled. Vargas' and Elvgren's and others' work shows up in tattoos and modified on the Internet. Credit? Recompense? Hardly.

I sketched some of the famous poses hoping to help the client decide which kinds of poses were wanted.

One Elvgren painting I found originally shows a woman kneeling forward in a sheer low-cut coral-colored dress, bare beneath. Without too much work I found a version of the painting, identical in every way except someone has applied an intricate tapestry of tattoos over her breasts, down her arms and over a thigh. The result looks organic, as if part of the original art.

Sorry, Alberto and Gil, your work appears to be fair play.

I don't know what the start-up is doing for its ancillary promotional items, for which it wanted a two-color image from me. Maybe I don't want to know.

It reminds me of when I developed a logo for proposed establishment near the Gulf Coast. The clients had seen a logo I created for a classical guitarist and wanted that same look, a guitar turned into a crowing rooster. I drew them many many images incorporating their establishment's name and the story behind it, varying the basic bird-cum-guitar concept.

OK, but we really like that other logo, the clients told me. I mean, we really, really like that logo! Why can't we have that logo?

Because … someone owns it … ? You'll have to talk to the owner of the logo. Oh, he doesn't want to sell? Whatcha gonna do? They dropped off the earth. Every once in a while I check to see if that establishment ever got off the ground, and if so, whether it just pulled a jpeg of my logo off the Internet.

Sometimes in this business, I'm dead where I stand.

Morning breath

(Or, my continuing love affair with Prismacolor™© pencils …)

Just a little early-week morsel, an illustration for a magazine story warning home brewers how to avoid making bad beers.

I yanked out my inner child on this one, remembering the textbook illustrations of our tongues and how each section specializes in tasting sweet or salty or savory or Cheetos™®.

I let the uvula way back there be the arbiter of taste.

'Tis another project which I drew with Prismacolor®© and brush and ink, photocopied onto stiff art paper and watercolored, the liquid color resisting the black toner.

The little call-outs were drawn and painted separately, reduced and copied on art paper, and painted, cut out and pasted on. Old school —ish.

Enjoy.

In praise of Prismacolor®™©

Our son's looking at cars … I put this monster in one of his top choices …

For bouts of drawer's block, I recommend inventing monsters.

Who knows what monsters lurk in your heart, after all? Only you. Release them. They want out, to live and move and have their being where and when your pencil goes. So let your pencil go; follow it around until the first line meets the last. Monsters form, drawer's block disperses.

This monster came to in such a way. With two projects looming last week and doubt about where to start, I took black Prismacolor©™® (Item PC935) pencil to sketchpad, circling around the inflamed eyeball until this dude tattooed the page.

In one swell foop, I inflamed two long-lost loves, one going all the way back to childhood.

The other is Prismacolor©™pencil, which I'd abandoned years ago. But looking over old stuff — stuff predating the necessary evil of digital illustration — reminded me how much I love it. It's just my speed, not slippery like pen, not thin and wanting like graphite pencil.

Prismacolor®© black skates over the paper in full rich black black lines, which take repeated goings over to thicken and feather outlines, but can also whisper over the paper for texture, letting the unseen nooks of the paper show.

The "lead" is soft enough to flow, but hard enough to keep its point a while, and doesn't break within the wooden shaft like other pencils do. Too many times I've sharpened lesser pencils down to the nub in futile exercise, as the lead falls out with each sharpening.

I like to photocopy Prismacolor™® drawings onto thicker bristol board and paint them with watercolor. The toner resists water, so the color falls around the black line, letting it stay true and bold over the color.

Thus this monster was colored.

Black ("Noir") Prismacolor®™ pencils come dear, though; I had forgotten. They are the only pencils missing from the Prismacolor©® display in art stores. I might have to score a black-market supplier.

In this sketch I married my beloved pencils to my beloved monsters.

How I craved those bug-eyed, lamprey-toothed monsters that drove hot rods so hard their very chassis warped in the frozen motion! I always stopped what I was doing as a kid to stare at the stickers and cards and magazines where they lived. The beasts of Ed "Big Daddy" Roth's airbrush come foremost to mind, but he was not the only one. In fact, the research this sketch impelled tells me it was Bill Campbell's "Weird-Ohs" who stole my child heart.

The bulbous wild bloodshot eyes, the rambling wayward tongue! The stuff of waking dreams. A childhood friend from long ago, Emile Duronslet Jr., showed me how to draw Martians that sort of looked liked this (left). I'm thinking Emile too had fallen under Bill Campbell's spell.

Campbell had one of those careers to die for, a career made dead by the 21st Century: He painted the cover art for the boxes of plastic models of cars and planes, depicting the real things in four-color action. From that he unveiled his monstrous "Weird-Ohs" and "Silly Surfer" creatures. That's what Emile always called them — creatures — as he made up stories about them.

Drawn by the art and caught up in the zeitgeist, I began making those models; every boy was. It was the logical next step.

Just not the right step for me. I was a butcher.

The patience required, the fine motor skills! Good god! The emotional plummet of realizing, upon successful completion of Step 9c, I missed a fold on the instructions and skipped over the crucial and linear steps 3 through 9b, with their sanding and priming and painting.

And mom incessantly and feverishly warning me not to sniff the glue. "There's a reason it's called dope!!" I was convinced even the smell of glue would melt my brain out my nostrils.

Elbows locked, fingers failing, patience shredded, I was doomed to leave a miniature glue-ruined pick-and-pull lot in my bedroom for years to come.

The model manufacturers took pity on me and created Snap Tite™© kits, no glue required, simple steps, water-based adhesive stickers the only trick. It was like having a toy car with some assembly required, except once assembled nothing worked except for the ample swooping surfaces, which were good for collecting dust.

They matched my inchoate skill set, though. I could put the parts together and stare at the 3-D realizations of the cars "Big Daddy" and Bill Campbell and others drew. An industrial designer named Tom Daniel, I learn, created the concepts for many of those models that saved my dignity.

Sometimes I muse about testing my model making skills as an old child; so far, no move made. But I still love to draw them to my heart's content. I've even riffed on this genre for pay. I'll make more and post here.

Draw yourself a monster.

More from the Haul of Wonders …

 … in which I haul out illustrations and wonder publicly why I drew them. This is from the Vaguely Familiar Wing, and required crack detective work to solve.

The clue is the clock (really more of a watch with a hormonal imbalance) and its only numbers, 10 and 31.

Hidden in my sketchbooks, similar watches dance and gesture like something from an animated fever dream sequence. Each watch displays the same time, 10:31:

I even inked some of the watches, so they definitely were being prepped for some final use.

(I gotta say, though, I like the feel of black Prismacolor pencils as final art; I've gotten away from that over time.)

Other sketches in my books show the same desk scene and the word Timcor, and then most of the mystery was solved: I did this for a consultant in a branch of the tax industry called a 1031 exchange (don't ask; the explanation made my eyeballs shrink two sizes). I applaud the guy for trying to humanize his line of work. I believe the desktop was for a Web homepage he was building, and each element on the desktop would take you to a new page (very Web 1.0).

For all the fun I must have had, you'd think I'd have a better memory of this project.