Lanky Kong

 

     This guy was lookin' at me the way most fluffy orange monkeys that read my blog look at me with the whole fuckin' "You said 3 posts a week you dick sweater, and you barely do two." 

   And when you're talking to monkeys you have to make sure you don't smile or bare your teeth or anything or they'll think you're opening invitation to have your arms torn off, so I sort of made a face like a gummy grandma with my lips over my teeth and said: "Sir, for you, I will try to do better."

   So I'm going to try to do better.  The Friday Recommends shit has been harder for some reason, but from now on that won't be left behind.  This Friday will be the start of Magic Month, where I'll be posting videos and writing shit about magic and illusion on Fridays.


   And yeah, sometimes a Monday, Wednesday, Friday update will happen the day after, shit comes up late at night a lot before I update.  No need to get all frightened about that; the day is less important than the amount per week.


  I'm going to start doing video essays to hopefully widen my audience.  The ideas in your writing are a lot easier to consume when someone is just reading it all for you, and all ya have to do is click and listen and watch.

  So hopefully I get my first one out this Wed or Thurz.

  I'm submitting some short stories to this "Best of Ohio Short Stories" project soon.  One of them needs to have all of the swear words edited down to a single utterance of "fuck", so I'll probz post that one in its entirety here at some point.  The other one's only been seen published before, so I'll post that on the occasion it's not accepted, which it has a better chance of than previously mentioned one.

  Brush your teeth!

           -Max

Heffalumps

One day late gets you one extra heffalump.


The second one's just a blob, but the first one is one of my better recent kinda-constructed drawings trying to figure out line of action and clear silhouettes and stuff.  Sillouette would have been better if I separated the head and shoulder, line of action would have been better if I started it with the legs as opposed to arranging everything on a line inside him starting at his ass.  So it just sort of looks like there's actual thought just stacked on top of two straight legs holding everything up.


Again, not something I'm terribly great at, but it's fun stuff to think about and work through as a break from the things I am competent at that boil my PRECIOUS BRAIN

The Easyman

  
     I been drawing this guy for a while now.  I think I first drew him sophomore year in my blocked German class when I was trying to draw one of those John K Lummoxes from Ren and Stimpy.  He then just sort of became this default guy I'd doodle on desks and notes and shit. 


    I called him: "The Easyman", because I was listening to the Barenaked Ladies (Fuckin' shocker there, huh?) album Are Me a lot and there's this song where they say "Easy" a bunch and I was writing EASY all over my doodle pages with flowers twisting around it and shit right by this guy.  I sort of thought it made him sound like a swindler kinda crook or something.
   

     I made an ongoing comic featuring him a while back.  I'll probably re-upload that, but actually scanned as opposed to the pictures I took just holding the pages up to photobooth.  It's pretty shit, but its weirdness more than makes up for that.

        I'll need to find the first drawing I did of him.  Maybe do an evolution or something.  I should probably just unearth all of the drawings I've done since middle school that I've saved and put some of them here someday...

Randal

   I'm not that great of an illustrator.  Truth in that appears quick when I learn of some new rule in drawing and start to apply it to doodles and it's like night and day before and after.  Here I'm trying to figure out how to do line work better.  You try and make heavier, thicker lines to the objects that are closer to the eye, like this guy's nose and teeth and shit, and then the farther away, the thinner the lines get.  It's something I've always known is important, so I've been wanting to figure it out for myself for a while now.  When line work is done shittily, it's really noticeable and makes your comic or cartoon look like shit.  This is especially true for comics, though.


    Fucking comics get squeezed down so that they're tinier than all fuck and Dilbert still only uses 1/16th of the microscopic four frames it gets per day, no colors, so some of the only ways left that the artist could ever show that they know a single thing about drawing things with are construction and line work.  And Scott Adams poops this out:

    Construction built from those transparent, green ruler/stencil things you get in fourth grade to draw 10 different shapes and measure angles, and every line is the same exact weight.

    It's just always made my eyes hurt with how awful it looks.  It's what you do for a living, guy!  Do you have any idea how many artists with even the slightest bit of knowledge on illustration would kill to have 1/50th your readership and 1/50th of your income?  At the very least you should try to maintain the illusion that people like you deserve at least a little to be where you are, just for the sake of these people not just fucking blowing their brains out on your heart-wrenchingly unfunny comic one morning.

   Just comparing Dilbert and something like Calvin and Hobbes or Bloom County is like the difference between Picasso and a drawing of a smiley face in a trail of pee in the snow.

   So yeah.  Doodling is good for experimenting and understanding new artistic things too so give it a try why don'

First Monday Doodle

  I owe a lot to doodling.  It took me out of the blaring, fuzzy anxiety hole of school and let me focus on something else.  I doodled so much that even later on in school, when I started having some classes that were great and engaging, my hands would just go on doodling simpler things that didn't take that much focus, like their default switch was stuck.

  At least that's what I thought.  It actually turned out that my hands were possessed by a demon tapir named Nicole, who was trying to cause mischief and get me in trouble because my great, great grandfather burned down the rainforest her and her family lived in when she was just a calf.

  I unwittingly flushed her out last week when I did the cinnamon challenge with my sister.  I was all like whaaaaaaaat  

  So here's to doodling!  It's not just for when there's boring things trying to destroy you slowly over the course of 13 years anymore!