Random Procedure Drawing #1: Guinea Fowl

The first subject I came upon by using my random procedure outlined in my previous post was "guinea fowl."

Here's my drawing.  Here's the wikipedia post if you're interested.  Can you handle the anticipation of what the next random drawing will be?  Can you?  CAN YOU?

Until next time.

"not sent or guided in a particular direction"

Often, the hardest thing for me when beginning a drawing is figuring out just what the hell to draw.  This morning, I devised a plan to defeat this enemy from the realm of endless possibility.

From now on, whenever I can't decide what I should make, I'm going to go here, a random number generator, find a number between 1 and 948, find the corresponding page in my dictionary, locate the first noun on that page, and then Google search images using that word.  The first image I like, I'll use as the basis for a drawing.

Yes, another way for me to shirk responsibility.  Algorithms will decide my artistic fate.  May the Gods of Mathematics have mercy on us all.

Frankenstein's Eyelid

I couldn't figure out what to draw the other day so I spent an hour or so messing around on Retronaut looking at vintage photos.  There's some pretty cool stuf on there.  I found some pictures from the set of the original Frankenstein movie, and decided to draw this one of Boris Karloff getting his Franken-eyelids put on.

Teenage Lobotomy

This is a drawing of an Incan skull.  The individual had some sort of brain surgery performed on them before they died.  I've been thinking with my brain about my brain a lot lately.  I'm pretty happy with this drawing.  The end.

Elena

I went and saw Andrey Zvyagintsev's Elena at the Mary Riepma Ross Theater yesterday.  It was really good.  It's a slow, beautiful, minimalist kind of murder story.  I really liked Zvyagintsev's movie The Return, too.  Here's my drawing of the lead actress in Elena, Nadezhda Markina.

I've had a lot of trouble drawing recently.  I don't know what it is, but everything I do turns out shit.  Just gotta keep plugging I guess.

DOOOOOOM!

The best masked rapper around.  I love MF DOOM.  He sounds like no one else and explodes with creativity. 

Big Black Wizard Final

Well, I finished it finally.  It wasn't that it took a long time, it was just difficult to get motivated to crawl around on the floor with ink, and glitter, and an eraser.  But that's all behind me now, for now my creation LIVES!

Overall, I'm happy with it.  It was created with probably the wrong materials in sub-par conditions, but I think it's pretty fun.  I was going to paint the eyes a bright yellow, but was then inspired by my wonderful wife and her love of glitter, as well as old-timey 3-D glasses.  That's right folks, the eyes are pink and blue glitter.

Now the big question, what the hell do I do with it?

Clown Contamination

Here's an experiment with ink on my Russian-Cement-Man Paper.  I found an absolutely terrifying picture of Ronnie McD and quickly sketched it up.  The real question is, are the pink specks going out, or coming in?

Big Black Wiz, Part 2

Finished the basic outline today.  I'm still unsure of how I'm going to fill it in.  Right now, I'm thinking India ink and maybe some acrylic paint.

Life-size Black Wiz Part 1

So, I've decided to create a close-to-life-size version of my portrait of the Black Wizard cos-player I drew a while back.  This might be a total disaster, but, as Tom Cruise says in Risky Business, "What the hell?" 

This is the first baby step.  I've measured and gridded off some brown paper left behind by some Russian concrete men (no, really), hoping to blow-up a 4 or 5 inch image to about 5 or 6 feet tall.  The plan is to sketch it following the grid, and then probably paint it in using India inks.  We'll see how it goes.

Execute

I drew this image after watching Werner Herzog's documentary Into the Abyss.  It's a really good film about the death penalty.  I was looking up images of different execution methods, and I realized that the more humane the techniques become, the more obscene they feel.

Here's another version I created:

Evil Ed

This is a drawing of actor Stephen Geoffreys from the 1985 movie Fright Night.  I watched this last night, and there are some great performances in it.  Geoffreys plays a character named Evil Ed, and I'm not sure that his performance is "great," but it's certainly unforgettable.  Mrs. Plop Blop found this tidbit about him in his imdb bio:  " In a startling and unexpected career move, Geoffreys wound up acting in numerous gay hardcore porno pictures under the pseudonyms Sam Ritter and Stephan Bordeaux."  Seems like an interesting guy.

Plane Smash

I used to have a recurring dream, many nights, that involved a plane crashing near me.  I was never on the plane, just always close to the crash, sometimes running toward it and sometimes running away from it.  Sometimes, I was even helping pull out the victims.  It was usually in a field or in a residential area with lots of suburban houses.  I don't have the dream anymore.  I'm going to take that as a good sign.

Jack Rabbit Slim

I finished reading The Plague and started reading the last book in Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy, Cities on the Plain.  I really liked the previous two books, All the Pretty Horses and The Crossing.  I drew this here jack rabbit after reading this passage:

"The Oldsmobile had this big ovalshaped grille in the front of it was like a big scoop and when I got around to the front of the car it was just packed completely full of jackrabbit heads.  I mean there was a hundred of em jammed in there and the front of the car the bumper and all just covered with blood and rabbit guts and them rabbits I reckon they'd sort of turned their heads away just at the impact cause they was all lookin out, eyes all crazy lookin.  Teeth sideways.  Grinnin.  I cant tell you what it looked like.  I come damn near hollerin myself."

Check Out the Big Brain On Bert!

Here's my quick, weirdo portrait of Albert Camus.  I've been reading his novel The Plague and really enjoying it.  Last year, I read The Fall and it's become one of my favorite books, for now, I think.  Anyway, if you haven't read him, I would recommend both of those books.

Mortality, Final Fantasy, Drinking Hennessy

This is from an image of a Final Fantasy cos-player.  He (or she) is dressed up as the Black Mage character that appears in several final fantasy games.  I was inspired by playing Final Fantasy IX again, which I haven't played since it was released way back in the terrifyingly numbered year 2000. 

In this particular Final Fantasy the Black Mage characters are artificially created, mindless, magical soldiers programmed to kill and destroy who or what ever their master wishes them to.  The crazy thing is that, at one point in the game, you discover a village of Black Mages who have become self-aware and have run away from the war.  One of the mages has discovered that after one year of awareness their kind dies.  The other mages don't really understand death and have buried their dead companions under the ground only because they've seen humans do the same thing.  In one conversation, a mage plans on cleaning up his dead friend in the pond when he "wakes up" from his sleep, while another asks whether you think that it is "warm or cold" living under the ground.  The mage that knows about the lifespan stuggles with depression and finding meaning in his life knowing that he and all of his companions will soon die. 

Pretty heady stuff for a PS1 RPG that looks like an anime for children.  I was really impressed with this section of the game, and I can't believe that I didn't remember it from my first play-through.  So, in honor of FFIX, I dub this picture "Is It Warm or Is It Cold (Under the Ground)."

P.S.  I don't think I've ever drank Hennessy before.

Diablo 3: Electric Boogalee

Sorry for the lack of posts, but those bastards at Blizzard finally released Diablo III.  It's swung into my life like a demonic wrecking ball, pushing everything to the sides of its beautiful, spiky goodness. Diablo II was one of the first PC games that I ever really got into, and it's still one of my favorite games ever, so you can imagine my excitement for the decade-in-the-making sequel.  The game does not disappoint.  Once my addiction to the game plateaus, I'll be back with more drawings.

May the Lords of Hell always drop rare loot for you.

Frozen, Dead Commander

The dead, frozen officer from the sci-fi/comedy Dark Star, one of my favorite movies.

Death by Unicorn

This is drawn from a still from The Abominable Dr. Phibes.  This was a film I checked out because of this recommendation.  It has some really great imagery in it, really gorgeous stuff.  The gentleman above has been killed by a statue of a golden unicorn hurled at him from a catapult.  Pretty cool.

Where's Mom?

So, back in the olden, moldy, golden days, you had to stand still for a long time to get a good photo, and mothers used to sometimes hide under blankets to hold their children still for the process.  I guess nobody realized that it looks creepier than goddamned hell.