Guess What Time it Is?

It's Very Important That We Talk About... SQUIRREL!

Like most people, I will probably die someday. And, like most people, it will probably happen while I’m doing something incredibly stupid. Unlike most people, though, I will probably not be aware that I’m doing something incredibly stupid at the time that I’m doing it, so I won’t even be able to enjoy myself while I’m dying.

And that, dear children, is why dying sucks.

Last night I realized that I am probably one of the least attentive people in the world, worse than a Nazi in a Russian winter (“Is it just me, or is it getting cold out here?”). One year, while I was at college, I went from August to March without realizing that our apartment had a toaster. I wept over the many cold Pop Tarts I had eaten that year, knowing that they could have been warmed.

I’ve never been to a shrink… as far as you know… but, if I were to go, I imagine that I’d get diagnosed with ADHD – Attention Deficit Holy-crap-would-you-look-where-you’re Driving?! Yeah, I know that women are supposed to be the bad drivers in the human race, but, really, compared to me, most women are like Amelia Earhart.

…Get it? Because, you know Amelia Earhart was a pilot, and, like, a pretty good one, so that’s kinda like saying that all women are good drivers compared to me… Okay, forget it. That joke just didn’t land.

Neither did Amelia Earhart. Ba-doom tisk!

So I realized that I’m kind of a crappy driver about the time that I decided to go out driving last night. There’s something different between driving in the evening and driving in the morning. See, most mornings, I drive to work, and, most mornings, I nearly kill myself on my way to work, but I don’t really notice it because I’m usually still half-asleep at that point. So, in the morning, I guess you could chalk my poor driving up to sleepiness.

At night, there’s no excuse. Seriously, last night, the LEAST ridiculous driving mistake I made was cutting off a fire engine because I didn’t see all the flashing lights – an easy mistake to make, right? Anyone?

Yeah, so I went to a haunted house last night with a group of friends – and let me say that haunted houses are kinda cool, but, really, if you’re a guy, don’t even bother going unless you’re with a group of girls. I mean, the haunted house we went to was kinda scary, but the real fun came from standing to the side and watching all the axe-wielding psychos chase the girls around. I don’t know if that’s some kind of creepy voyeurism, but boy howdy it was FUN! WOO!

*ahem* Anyway, after the haunted house, I was kind of in a hurry to get back out to Magna so I could spend another fun-filled evening with the Jesters Royale, Magna’s premier comedy improv team (admission is only $5 – bring a friend). I impatiently shooed my four passengers towards my car so I could get on my way, hopped in the driver’s seat, and took off.

From the backseat, I vaguely hear these shouts of, “Hold on! Chris isn’t in the car yet!” I couldn’t make out exactly what I was saying, because I was still in the middle of flipping a U-turn. Finally, I decide to turn my head around so I could see what all the commotion was about… and sure enough, there was my car door, wide open, and Chris several feet behind, running to catch up.

Okay, yeah, so I’m inattentive, self-centered, and inconsiderate. I’ll admit to all of that. At least I didn’t do something REALLY egregious, like standing idly by while CREED decided to stage a comeback.

President Obama, I am SO ashamed of you! Next time, I’m voting Libertarian!

Self-Improvement: Sketches (Part Two)

I’ve now been involved with the Jesters Royale, an improv comedy team based out of the Empress Theatre in Magna – which, for the most part, has been a lot of fun. The team is full of great people, and (if I may be so bold, blunt, and boastful) we’re pretty funny, too. And that’s probably why I got so disappointed last night when we had to cut our workshop short. I’ve been in a pretty sour mood ever since.

Thank goodness for my sketchpad! I’m feeling a bit better now.

Thought I’d take a minute and share a few more sketches with you:

Pretty good, huh?

So one section of Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, the book I’ve been working out of, asks the reader to try sketching a landscape that they might have drawn in their childhood. I don’t remember much about what I actually drew. I’m pretty sure I drew the pointed roofs like that, even though my house didn’t have one. I also remember drawing corner suns, which probably means something on some Freudian level, but, frankly, screw Freud.

(Don’t read too much into that)

And here we have an exercise called a contour drawing. I drew my hand without actually looking at the paper I was drawing on. The idea is that I could better interpret the shape of my hand if I didn’t actually look at it.

I kind of see the point. If you cross your eyes a bit, the lines kinda come together and look like… a giraffe. With wings. And big, googly cartoon eyes. Which I should probably draw someday.

Well, when I actually LOOK at my hand, it looks something like a hand. Turns out it’s a pretty good technique, which is why I went on to draw… my computer mouse. For some reason.

If you look closely, you can probably tell that I tried to actually write the word on the side of my mouse, and I totally failed. I’m sure that’s indicative of the fact that I really hadn’t let my right brain take over, and I was still trying to copy the SYMBOLS of letters my left-brain is familiar with rather than duplicate exactly what I was seeing. I’m also sure that Batman’s parents were shot on their way out of the movie theater after a showing of Zorro – like that matters to you. So let’s just forget about what I’m sure about and move on.

…to more comic book characters. I decided to try the upside-down drawing thing again, this time with a character called the Immortal Iron Fist. And, you know, it’s fun to copy other pictures that look good, but I don’t feel that makes me any better an artist. So here, I finally decided to draw a couple of things by myself, without any real visual aids. I didn't get very far.

I realized I don’t know much about facial features, so a lot of the faces I wound up copying from other sources. A lot of the artwork comes from different comic artists, including Tim Sale, whose mouths always look like weird little lines (as you can see from the Boris Karloff-esque face in the lower left up there).

Sharp-eyed readers may notice that there’s a face on the right side of the page that looks a little TOO good to be mine. Well, it’s not. I copied it from Manelle Oliphant’s design for the poster for the Empress Theatre’s production of Little Shop of Horrors. Manelle’s got a good sense for how a face should look… and I don’t, so I tried copying her.

I AM kind of proud of that weird-looking hunchback guy with the pimp-cane, though. I mean, it’s not exactly FANTASTIC artwork there, but that’s MY weird-looking hunchback guy with a pimp-cane, and there aren’t many people who can say that they’ve got a weird-looking hunchback guy with a pimp-cane.

So, yeah, I’m seeing some progress, but I know I’ve got a long way to go. It’s a fantastic experience, though, learning to draw, and I’m glad I’ve started.

Self-Improvement: Sketches

I've always had a kind of passive interest in art. I took a few art classes WAAAAY back in elementary school and junior high, but I've never really done anything since. Well, I recently decided to throw myself back into drawing, and so I'm gonna share a bit of that journey with you.

Why yes, you ARE exactly that fortunate.

Since it's been so long since I've really done ANY type of drawing (and I've never really been that great an artist), I asked my friend Manelle Oliphant for some suggestions on how to get started. Manelle, by the way, is a FANTASTIC artist - check some of her work out at http://www.manelleoliphant.com/.

Manelle recommended a book called Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, by Betty Edwards. The book's full of exercises which are meant to teach your dominant left brain to let the right brain take over when attempting to draw, as the right brain has a better sense of shape, curves, and so on. I've been working through the exercises, and, frankly, I'm kind of surprised with what I've come up with. It's not exactly Picasso-level art (well, most of it), but I'm still pleased.

The first exercises are just to overcome the fear of the blank page by drawing random lines - any way you feel - across the page, like so:




Next, the author suggests copying the "face vase" optical illusion. First, you draw a face from memory, identifying as you go the features of the face (brow, nose, lips, etc.). This is a left-brained activity. Then you copy the image on the opposite side of the page WITHOUT naming the features. Instead, you let your right brain focus on the visual aspects of the image - the depth of the curves, the length of the lines, etc.:

After that, you repeat the exercise with a nonhuman face (and I must say I enjoyed this one):

The first big exercise - the one that actually had me kind of intimidated - involved copying a picture while studying it upside-down. The theory is that the left side of the brain can interpret an image when it is oriented correctly. Thus, the left brain will try to draw a hand on its own (usually resulting in a very childish drawing) instead of copying the original image. By flipping the image around, though, the left brain is forced out of the picture, and the visual right brain can take over.

Here is the original image I tried to copy (as recommended in the Edwards book) - Pablo Picasso's portrait of Igor Stravinsky:

And here's my take on it:

Finally, since I'm a big comic book fan, I decided to try the upside-down technique one more time:

That's Stan Sakai's Usagi Yojimbo, a samurai rabbit who represents everything RIGHT with comic books (I mean, he has his own Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle action figure!).

I'll admit that these sketches aren't perfect - Usagi's head is a bit too flat, and Stravinsky's hands look awful. Still, though, it's a lot better than I thought I was capable of. We'll see what else I can come up with.