compo2 week 7 weirder than this is illegal?

Last week I had my main character discover a secret night civilisation, and encouraged by Glenn who found that it was obvious I was having fun doing such drawings, I decided to stick with the topic. Glenn is always there to help us express our real style and self – if you could see the works of my classmates, you’d realise we are all getting stronger and stronger in our personalities and more secure in expressing them – thanks Glenn for that, he gives us the tools, we build what we want, he helps us do our sh*t, to use a familiar expression that always

makes me laugh.

“Do more, explore this!” he told me (apart of technical advices that allow me to move forward artistically).

OK, so what have I got? A boy and his dog…. not a very original idea, bulldozers, mice, skunks and other beasties being friends and having their own civilisation…hmmm better, but the real topic or genre of my work from last week was surreal cartoon or wacky insanity. I wanted to see how further into madness I could push.

I had an idea about all those machines and beasts having human like interests like sports: what if they organised a competition?

The possibilities were many, and my mind went on a roll: hopscotch for jackhammers, tennis for dustbins with pivoting top lid, etc, etc, the more ridiculous the better. Which one to choose, knowing that I would have to draw an audience for the scene?

I decided to be really insane and not just mad, and did a poster will all my ideas – that’s 4 competitions and 3 complementary images…. 7 images in all! As Dracula always says: I’ll sleep in my coffin :-D. That was indeed an allnighter job.

If this was going to be a poster-like work I needed (I decided) a border of some type to give it a touch of “the official photo set”.

With seven drawings and lots of characters – many in action poses – I did not have the time to draw the art déco border I wanted (it meant hours in illustrator) so I just went to creativemarket.com and bought the commercial and personal right to use one made by a designer. Yes, deadlines do influence an artist’s workflow. If Michelangelo lived today, he would work on a 27” cintiq (paid for by the Pope of course) to have access to Photoshop and it’s layers and control-z!

Here is the “thing”. I did not count the number of characters, but I think there are as many as in the School of Athens by Raphael, which I copied in markers a while ago.

 

While we are talking about the legal side of things, the fonts here are legally used and so are the ornaments around the text (commercial license). It’s too easy to forget such things, but if I want to have a right to get angry is someone steals an image from me, I have to be a customer of fontmakers, not a thief (fonts often are free for personal use only, beware and read the licenses).

I registered this work at the Library of Congress, it’s worth it, it wont protect you from theft, but it means immense damages for the thief to pay…. which should make them think twice.

Glenn’s reaction upon seeing this set of images was rather interesting: he laughed for about five minutes (particularly at the jackhammers doing hopscotch).

He had a few things to say about people and things in my audience being too at equal distance from each other, and a few other technicalities, but the main thing to me was he said that this was crazy (good!) that it was really me (the man knows me, lol) and that I should make a book or something out of it.

That got my brain gears working.

Glenn doesn’t know where I come from, well I don’t know where I’m going, but I do know that I’m having lots of fun, my crazy ideas come easily by the dozen, and the drawing style is super easy to me.

A book, hey?….. see you next week while I ponder!