The Dark Knightmare Strikes Back

I don't know why Batman doesn't like me.  I LIKE HIM!  I've told him many times that he has neat ears!

Maybe this fucking project would be going better if my friendship with Batman were going better.  He could swoop in on his fancy Bat-Rope and detective the shit out of everything and locate some way for me to not be so terrible at figure drawing!

I seem to remember enjoying drawing super heroes when I was younger and after I left high school there was a brief period that I considered going into drawing comics for a living.  Maybe (and most likely) I was delusional at that time, but I remember doing a fairly decent job of drawing these characters.  I make no claims about being able to tell a story in sequential art, but I thought I had some abilities when it came to drawing people in tight costumes just standing around in heroic poses.  It seems now that I'm so awful at this type of thing that I shouldn't even be allowed to read comic books let alone think about drawing them.

I specifically remember enjoying my sketchbook drawings of the scantily clad female characters such as Magma from The New Mutants.

I guess I just thought I would be better at this than I am.  Some of my favorite graphic novels are so deceptively simple looking that I sometimes think I should get a portfolio together and take the Marvel Universe by storm!  This is (much more obviously these days) one of those situations where my ignorance and my ego are giving each other a handy in the public restroom stall that is my brain.  I have a feeling that I've never given these people enough credit for all the time and effort they put in over the years to make it look easy.

When Keith Richards plays his guitar it looks like he's not even paying attention to what he's doing.  To my eyes he's paying more attention to not falling over than he is to his guitar playing.  This may be a bad example because his playing style isn't particularly complicated and he does fall over a lot so his fear is probably justified. My point is that he is so skilled at what he does that anyone who's seen Mr.Richards play thinks it's so easy that they could certainly do that as well as him, if not better.  These people are probably incorrect in this assumption.

All the greats make it look easy when they handle their business.

Van Gogh is another one of these people that make it look too easy.  I couldn't begin to count the number of times, while working at the frame shop, that I've heard some person tell me that they went to the MOMA and saw some Van Gogh painting and they didn't understand what the big deal was because their kid (who's somehow magically always two years old!) could paint better than that guy.  NO THEY CAN'T!  They just cannot!  There is absolutely no possible way.

People think Van Gogh's style of painting is easy, but that's because Van Gogh is so talented that he makes it look easy.

On a brief side note, speaking of Van Gogh and counting things...

There is a possibility that it might mean something to the person that is paying to have it framed, but all I see is that same crappy poster that seemingly everyone in America has purchased and I just can't care any less than I do.  I deeply want to care about people's artwork, especially since I choose to work at a frame store, but it's physically impossible for me in this case.

I know it's supposed to be a masterpiece and everything, but how many times do I have to frame a poster of Van Gogh's Cafe Terrace at Night before I just end up cutting the head off every person within reach including myself? 

7000 maybe? 

I think I'm at about 6587 so you've only got a couple of weeks to bring that masterpiece in before things start getting dicey for everyone.

Anyway, like the jackass that I am, I thought I would be able to draw some super heroes like Darwyn Cooke or Bruce Timm because their work looks so simple at first glance. I would just take my concepts and graft it on to some semblance of their style.  Easy!  As it turns out, just because my regular paintings are complicated and difficult for me, doesn't mean that working in a clean simple style is going to be any easier.  It just means that I am not very skilled at what I do.

I had some sort of ridiculous idea that less detail and less realism would mean less work for me, but I've discovered that it might actually be MORE goddamn work!  Making things not-complicated is apparently really fucking complicated.

And that isn't the only problem. Super hero drawings, given their subject matter, should be powerful, dynamic and filled with the amazing feats of strong men in tights.  Most of my work, on the other hand, is very posed and static and filled with pale delicate girls doing nothing. It's like everything that I've learned about drawing and painting for the work I usually do is completely useless for this project. Completely starting over and having to re-learn almost everything is (overly dramatic pause!... and sigh) totally not frustrating at all.

Hey!  Here's an idea...  Maybe I should try just drawing something in my own style!

Idiot.

The Dark Knightmare

I’ve spent the last few days trying to come up with a decent layout for a Batman piece I’ve been designing for a friend that I owed a very big favor and I’m becoming very frustrated because I can’t seem to figure out how to create something that is at least kind of original.  Anything that I draw that's any good is because I'm blatantly ripping off some one else's work.  On top of that, all the styles I'm stealing from are in conflict with each other so my designs are a mess.  Darwyn Cooke's retro simplicity is directly at odds with Alex Ross' complicated hyper realism.  Mike Mignola's distant noir abstractions are the exact fucking opposite of Jim Lee's gritty explosions of detail.

Goddamnit this is going to drive me INSANE!  It's like Batman has become my arch enemy!

My Valentine's Day Shame Extravaganza

I had big plans for Valentine's Day.

That day at work I, and all the jackasses I work with, had spent eight hours listening to my chronological Prince playlist (including rarities!) so that when I got home I would be suitably inspired to create my Valentine's Day masterpiece.  I was practically giddy with excitement because I had a ton of good ideas and it had been quite some time since I had posted anything.  The plan was to create to create a tumultuous emotional roller-coaster filled with everything from joy and laughter to heartbreak and tears all set to the perfect Valentine's Day soundtrack of Prince's epic Purple Rain!

...but (sigh) the end of my work day really sucked ass and the fucking commute home was an abomination.  And I'm old, so my back hurt. What I needed was a drink to get me focused and get my energy up.  If I was Popeye, whiskey would be my spinach.  Revitalization here I come!

And then I had a couple more revitalizations just for good measure!

Soon, it was clear that I had revitalized the fuck out of myself.

In fact, I was so revitalized that I could barely even drag myself over to the kitchen counter to get more revitalization juice.  I would do it though, no matter how difficult walking across a room proved to be!    

It was my moral responsibility, as a thank you for all his years of ridiculously-amazingness, to do my absolute best work for Prince (whom, I'm fairly certain, I thought was going to to be my BFF after he read my super-awesome post.)

You can probably see where this is going.  Obviously, my consumption of way too much alcohol had severely impaired my ability to control my brain by this point and most everything I drew was complete shit.  The original concept for the drawing was much too complicated for Revitalized Andrew to handle and so it got simplified down to my favorite part of the idea (and even that was a stretch to complete.)  The accompanying text, while entirely true, was the written equivalent of some drunken idiot sitting next to you at a bar leaning over and interrupting your conversation because he thinks people are missing out on how witty he is.

I tried really hard to just let the post go as it was because I've been told many times by many people that not everything I do has to perfect all the time and they are right.  On the other hand, I can't really let my work be mediocre garbage if I can help it either.  All through the next day at work I couldn't stop thinking about how I needed to fix the previous night's sub-par post.  I knew it wasn't the worst thing I'd ever done, but I also knew that it could've been much better.

So it is in the spirit of trying not to be awful at things, and with the stench of sobriety all over me this time, I have completed my original idea for the Valentine's Day post.  To bastardize a classic Prince lyric, this is what it looks like when drunks try.

As anyone who's ever been drunk with me while a Prince song is playing will tell you, the highlight of my amazing dancing is always the excessive amount of pointy-finger that I get going.

Don't be jealous, this is just how I get down.

Happy Valentine's Day

Dig if you will the picture of you and I engaged in a kiss...

Somehow, it is much hotter when I imagine Prince doing it while "When Doves Cry" plays in the background.  I bet Prince would be having an amazing Valentine's Day if he wasn't a Jehovah's Witness, or some shit.  Goddamn I do love him though... like, I'm the 'listens to his new albums' kind of in love with Prince.

Oh, screw it.  Happy Valentine's Day, Prince, wherever you are.

I wish I could watch Community 24 hours a day.

   Yesterday I was on the phone with my brother Mike and his wife Fran comes on the other line screeching "It's a tiara! It's a tiara! I'm a princess and this is my tiara!" at somebody, presumably me. Normally I would assign this type of outburst to Fran actually believing herself a princess and wanting to make sure that it was well understood by everyone within hearing distance (and possibly further since I was on the phone and nowhere near her location,) but sadly she was addressing only me. This is sad because the words she was saying were lines from a recent episode of The Big Bang Theory and she knew that I would recognize them as such since apparently I now watch that fucking show.  

   I'm not sure when I became the type of person who watches The Big Bang Theory. I didn't used to be this kind of person. I used to do... um, other things.

   I can't seem to remember what they were, but they weren't anything to do with watching The Big Bang Theory , that's for fucking sure. This is one of the problems with being this type of person. My ability to think has most likely been impaired from lack of use. It's like when you don't drive a car for a while and when you finally go to drive it...  the battery is dead.

   Or something like that. I don't know. I used to be able to come up with more than just a serviceable metaphor, but now I watch television so I guess... something. Fuck.

   Also, because my brain is dead there will apparently be a marked increase in the amount of swearing in this post because that's how stupid people talk.

   It's not like this is the The Big Bang Theory's fault. It's not a bad show. Many people work hard to produce this program and many, many people watch it and enjoy themselves on a regular basis. And I'm happy for them! I know I sound like I'm being a sarcastic, artsy dickhead right now, but that isn't my intention (this particular time.) This was not intended to be criticism of the show or their viewers, only an observation of the questionable choices I make. It's just that I feel I should be doing something creative with my time instead of watching the product of other people's creativity.

   That's not even really the problem because when I read the Chuck Klosterman's Eating The Dinosaur this week I didn't consider it a waste of time and that's clearly a different person's brain at work. In my opinion, it's not so much that reading a book scores higher on the Cosmic Scale of Importance than watching TV, it's just that one endeavor usually inspires at least some kind of minimal brain activity and the other inspires me to eat an entire frozen pizza and stop thinking for the rest of the night.

   Three years ago I moved to my new apartment and, as part of a conscious decision to try to be more creative and produce more work, I didn't bring my TV with me. I was going to use my free time to draw, write, get drunk with my friends, talk my girlfriend out of her clothes, get drunk by myself... whatever. It didn't have to be something amazing, it just had be something. This included watching TV if I really wanted to do it. That is the key! I didn't want to just come home from work and automatically flip through the channels until I managed to find the least awful thing to watch.  If there was a program that I really wanted to watch I could always dial it up on the Internet and watch it on my computer. That would be fine because I would be actively choosing to stimulate my brain in a slightly less stimulating way.

   And, as we all know, slightly less stimulating is sometimes my thing.

   This mostly worked fine until recently. I'm not sure when it started, maybe when I was sick with some kind of flu-thing, but for the last few months I've been watching every crappy sitcom I can find on the network websites. Yes, it's that bad. Sitcoms. I can't even say that I waste my life watching some cool HBO show or an uppity BBC America show. I watch 2 Broke Girls and The New Girl and any other show with 'girl' in the title. And fucking Suburgatory. I even liked The Big Bang Theory so much that I went back and watched the previous four goddamn seasons, probably telling myself something like it would enrich my understanding of the character's story arcs if I started at the beginning, to justify such a waste of time.

   Then, at some point, I stopped caring about justification and just came home every night and watched TV.

   The saddest part of all may be that since I have to watch TV on my computer, I don't even get to flop all over the couch and relax while I do it. I sit at my desk for hours with my junk-food smorgasbord laid out in front of me, trying to find a new position in my desk chair that might resemble something comfortable. As you might expect, after four or five hours of How I Met Your Mother these are harder and harder to come by. It's usually when my back hurts too much to take anymore (or when my stomach is so full that food is visible in the back of my throat) that I get up to go to bed and find out that both of my legs are asleep. Between my dead legs and the lightning bolts of pain shooting up my sore back I can barely shamble to bed like a drunken, tortilla chip crumb covered zombie.

   I lead a glamorous life.

   Strangely, I don't seem to have the patience to sit through a single hour-long crime show even though I can sit through six half-hour episodes of The League with minimal effort.  Maybe television dramas aren't my thing. Maybe after I've watched every season of every sitcom on earth I might be able to get back to being productive in my life!

   Maybe I'll give goddamn Chicago Fire a try just to be certain that prime-time melodrama isn't my thing...

Sexy Nude Robots

Before Christmas I was commissioned to paint a twisted, old oak tree for some reason. I tried to explain to the prospective clients that this is not really the type of work that I do, but no one ever listens to me and so they decided to go ahead with it anyway.  Also, I suspect that I was the only artist that they knew so I would have to do.

I have no idea why they wanted a what is usually a vertical object formatted horizontally or why they wanted it split onto two canvases, but I just do what I'm told like a good little money-grubbing robot.

Logically, of course, if I actually was a robot I wouldn't draw naked girls.  I would draw naked robots!

...hmmn, anyway,  I think the tree painting came out fairly well and the clients loved it.  Done and done!

I never would have bothered to post this piece since it doesn't really fit in with the other things regularly I do, except that one of the dummies that I work at my day job won't stop sighing and whining about wanting to see this painting because it's a landscape and he fucking loves landscapes.  So, this post is especially for you Cheap Chris!  Now please stop your whimpering.  It's annoying.

UPDATE:  I'm not sure how this blog became about Cheap fucking Chris all of a sudden, but apparently it has.  After speaking with him at work today, I learned that he thinks the orange parts in the picture at the top of this post are my rendition of... water (thereby once again confirming my suspicions that he is a complete moron).

I have no idea why he would think this, but just in case I have any other readers that might get lost in a hall closet, I have some helpful guidance; the first picture is the painting in progress, the second picture is not the painting at all, the third picture is the completed painting and the fourth picture is a close-up detail from the finished painting.