Our booth at last year’s Scare-a-con

Tarot Moon

#tarot
#themoon

High Priestess

Here is my first Tarot card original art for 2018. The High Priestess.

#tarot

Creature Factory

Could not break away from work to write this week as I was far too busy building the new extension to my live art business. I give you: CREATURE FACTORY! What it is: at request of a customer, I will draw their choice of dinosaur, dragon, horse, animal, or mythical creature for a fee based on the time it would take to complete such a commission. The illustrations are decided by difficulty in two pay scales: light illustration, or complex/heavy illustration. If a customer would prefer only the black and white illustration of course the piece will be only half the price. The best part is the buyer can leave their order and come back to my stand to pick it up later, or for the price of shipping they can have it mailed to them. But the drawings only take about thirty minutes, to an hour (at the latest) to bring together, so they are fun to watch as I flesh the drawings out. Still feeling it out, and I’m hoping to pick up my speed and technique as I advance with the project. Here are some samples what I have made thus far.

Clydesdale!

Horses are difficult to get down fast from their awkward build, and their shiny coats, but this one would still fall under light illustration at $45

Velociraptor!

Customer wanted the Superstar, Blue from Jurassic World Series. $45

Parasaurolophus!

His brother wanted bloody teeth, and he wanted Plant-𝐋ife! $45

Working on some back wall banner ideas. 

Graphic Design project: Oliver Spitts

Here is the original illustrations I was commissioned to do as a promo for an upcoming hiphop community event, hosted by Pennsylvania’s own Oliver Spitts of F.I.T.C.H TEAM 

lots of nature! Everything in this illustration was orchestrated by his wildly creative mind. I brought it to life with ink and photoshop. 

She Figured Me Out

It’s late...

It’s October...

It’s Halloween and I’m stuck here...

We were pushing toward the home stretch on a day that I hold very dear to my heart. Unfortunately I was stuck at work, drawing caricatures for the good’ol Alabama Peanut Festival! Don’t get me wrong, I love that carnival, and I mostly enjoy my guests there... Mostly... Alright, that is my last Aliens throwback joke this week. Anyhow, I’m out there working with Flash Cartoon Fan and V-Blog legend Ashley The Man with the master draw Hand Ro**** (name edit for privacy, but this man is an ol G, just don’t ever say the phrase book-on-tape around him) occupying the candyland stand (the kiddy area stand) on the last painfully slow hour of the day. 

Look, I have ADD, and I LOVE Halloween. So when things get slow at a time like this, it gets me pacing, it gets me facebooking, and it gets me jabbering about off-the-rail nonsense. I just want to get the heck out of there! But darn it, I’m committed! And I’m suppose to be the manager, so I have to stay, tuck in my shirt, thumbs up, smile, quietly hate myself, and count the minutes of my life ticking away waiting for someone bold enough to bail on Trick-or-treating to ride some sick carnival rides and buy an awesome cartoon face of themself. But sadly, what happens is not really that. The trick-or-treaters are in bed, high on sugar, and dreading the school day waiting for them in the morning. And then the ones who do come out—there is no safe way to say this, so I’ll just go ahead and call them the late-hour-carnival patrons. 

So we are hanging out up front. The carnival is dead, at least our end of it is. The midway circle where all the rides are always appears busy, but its wristband holders, it’s teenagers abandoned by their moms, and it’s a bunch of kids with not much else on them then what little can keep them from dying of hunger or dehydration. We are back in the dark, hanging out next to candy castle. I’m staring at it debating going on a diabetic run, but then a Mom approaches with her children. She wants a caricature. She sits them down. I’m a little bit annoyed, a little bit relieved that I got guests to draw. But somehow—call it intuition—I get this feeling that no matter how I draw her kids she is going to hate it. She took two seconds of deciding before she put her kids in my chair. I never saw her so much as glance at our displays, or ask even what the price was before she got the impulse. My strategy in this situation is to succinctly explain our pricing so she can understand that we have to charge per person. And yes that means every face we have to draw. Never quite understood why people think their babies would be cheaper or even free sometimes. They don’t cooperate, (though sometimes they are better than their adults) their heads are about the size of yours, and they are mostly crying... mostly!! Damn it, I did it again. Get out of my head, Newt.

So, my strategy didn’t work. But never fear, they are still going to reject it. So I sit at the board and I start drawing. Ash is watching. I feel the mom’s eyes burning into me, scrutinizing every line. She doesn’t say a thing for a time. She just gets lost in the magic of it. Suddenly, Mom gets flummoxed. She starts scoffing my work. I get flustered. I turned around to try and explain what a caricature is. But before I could Mom gives me a I-got-your-hustle-figured-out side-ways glance. She says to her children, “naw, come on now. He got a trick marker.”

That left me nonplussed, and Ashley laughing his ass off. 

I could do nothing but watch, dumbfounded as they scurried off as though I was some sort of scam plague they might catch before they spend all their money trying to win an on the brink of death Carny fish. 

That day I knew I should have just went trick-or-treating... or at least just stayed out in the woods to get drunk with some Dead family members by the fire. 

Carny Cartoonist: Weather

It was that raucous alarm they used in all the video games and techno horror movies when a contagion was released that jolted me like a bolt of electricity through my senses. I sat up; my bearings whirling wildly off track. The dream I was having melted away from my eyes and my memory. It was a weird thing because I remembered it having been a pleasant one. Somehow none of it could stuck to the front of my brain. Like the callous pull of temporal gravity it yanked down the veil of fantasy to let the burning light come pouring in. I winced, and blinked, and caught my breath. My muscles were tight all around, they hurt. That was the first thing that came back to me. Then I heard the blaring tv right in front of the bed before I even saw the picture. It was Game of Thrones. I left it on before I fell asleep. That’s right! I’m in a hotel... this isn’t home... but where’s home... where am I? Oh yeah, I’m nowhere. In the middle of it to be precise.

It took me awhile to get the gunk out the gears. 

I drove six hours to get there. Deep Texas, and most of Stephen King worthy Middle of Nowhere America was like that. You know where you are going until you get there. And then you dream of somewhere better. I remembered setting up my tent before checking into my hotel. I draw caricatures for a traveling carnival company. This episode in my life was spent with an unbridled lot that operates in the wilderness. Tornado Valley, oil country: where the nearest big city is always a hundred miles away, and the featured corporation that feeds the town grows their employees. Seriously! I had one memorable encounter with a guest some time ago who was stunned that I had once drawn in New York City.

“Oh, I wish we could go there,” the 24 year old husband and father of SIX said dreamily to me. 

I asked, “why not take a vacation and go.”

He laughed it off as if the suggestion was just otherworldly absurd. He said, “we can’t leave, we’ll lose our jobs at the meat factory.”

Come to learn in that said town you had three options as a youth coming into adulthood: study for a better position at the slaughter house, study to aspire for bigger and move out of town almost like an exile, or get a job at Walmart. Before I left that town I drove along a road overlooking the holocaust fields of cows with a grim sickness stirring in my stomach.

That was awhile ago... well, maybe it was a week ago. Can’t tell anymore. When you are in a new place surrounded by a new corporate agenda driven ideology every ten days the weeks and days sort of blur together. When I was a kid there was this show called the Twilight Zone—this rout was an episode of that. These days I guess people would liken it to American Horror Story. I don’t know. Don’t have Netflix. 

Anyway, I’m sitting in bed. My body hurts from traveling all night, working all morning, and now the plague timer went off meaning it was 4 o’clock. Time to get my ass to the fair. 

In small towns like Canadian Texas (don’t ask, all these places got weird names) the annual rodeo and fest was their backyard theme park and swapmeet. The locals saved up their money all year to splurge on the carnival, and therefore it was often good business for me. “Ain’t never seen no one doing them funny face drawings around here before!” 

The hotel I was staying at looked like a shit-bomb waiting to give me an excuse to buy a new wardrobe when I checked it out on the internet. This meant that I could afford it. In Oil-Vile the hotel jockeys jack up their prices knowing their visitors would pay it, having no other option. So it wasn’t too uncommon for me to have to fork out  six or seven hundred dollars a week to work a show in town. This one was only 400 so I was relieved. Beats waking up in your tent to find that your air mattress was floating from the silent deluge had filled your campsite while you were past out drunk. Don’t ask me how I know that. But I got to the hotel and it was like a mansion. I couldn’t believe it. Newly renovated, new hd TVs, a pool, a gym, the works. Bad weather leveled the place not so long ago and they have been trying to Phoenix the hell out of it ever since. So I was spoiled that week. 

Now keep in mind, at this time I was traveling alone, and thousands of miles from my closest lifeline. Some real gypsy shit. So now and then I have some crazy moments where I just don’t know how to proceed, and get a little panicky. That day, that fucking Day was one of them goddamn days.

I noticed nervous commotion in the lobby. But I figured something new and horrible was going on in the news and I did not want to stop and see. Going outside I am greeted to the cry of an alarm that put my heart into my throat. There, before me, was a group of oil workers crowding around drinking beer, laughing, and pointing up. I looked and saw the tornado terrorizing a vacant, flat horizon, swaying blithely like a dancer on ice skates. The alarm was defining, and disorienting. But the oil guys, fresh off their shift were eating sandwiches, pounding brews, and taking fucking selfies in front of the thing.

“Umm should we be worried,” I asked the lady at the desk. She just shrugged. “What do we do if it hits this place?”

“Pray?”

It was the best disaster plan an atheist could hope for. Just then an ambulance came blazing down the street to the hospital that neighbored our hotel. 

I went outside and did the only thing I could do, watch as the fat black funnel sashayed around the Ferris wheel there in the distance, and called my mom. Then, as I was on the phone, the temperature went from hot to freezing in an instant. I turned my head up and saw the skated skies churning. The air around me went still. The party of drunken oil guys got excited. I got scared. A funnel started to form directly above me, where the heavens were turning. But it stopped and it dissipated.

Later we learned that the ambulance was carrying back an oil worker who died when the tornado touched down moments from where he was working. Nine twisters came down that night. But they never hit the carnival. I got to my stand knowing it would have been toppled by the winds. Instead I found it sucked into the ground somehow. I needed a couple of carnies to help me dig it back out. We opened the fair. Nobody came. 

That was a night I had in Canadian Texas. 

Hairy Triceratops

Three Horn Beastie! I wasn’t quite sure where I was going when I started this one, but damn it I was ready for the adventure. This one I envisioned shedding his shaggy hair to prepare for the hot summer. Mating season is almost done, and now it’s time to get hot and get fat. Enjoy! 

Graphic Design Project

About a month ago I was asked by a friend if I’d be interested in designing her “logo” for a midwives company she is apart of. She sent me a few pictures for reference to work off of, and an old fashiony flyer to try and emulate. She sent me a pic of a drawing that her friend’s daughter made and so I went off of that. 

Now at first I doubted myself. I wasn’t sure how to begin with it. I’m not all that big into graphic design, but she gave me confidence. Went and purchased Adobe Photoshop and I got to work. The end result I thought was great! Thank you, Andrea for giving me the chance, and for being such a great client. 

King of Birds

#dinosaurs
#trex
Got in me the urge to rethink our favorite dinosaurs growing up. Mine was the T-Rex. She has a genealogy of over one hundred million years of existence, she was the biggest carnivore to ever walk the earth, and would have continued challenging the evolutionary food chain were it not for an extinction level event to lay her down low. We now believe she was extremely intelligent, she had razor sharp vision, and a powerfully keen sense for smell. And she was covered in hair and possibly feathers. Here is my drawing of her.

Black Panther Caricature

All Hail King T’Challa 

Marvel’s Black Panther is not only a great superhero movie, it redefines the genre, and it was incredibly inspiring for everyone I believe. Drew this caricature right after seeing it. Just loved that movie! Can’t wait for Infinity War

New Character Draw

My first sketch of the main character to my new Science Fiction, Fantasy, Action thriller story. 

Taron

Creating new characters

2018 has come. Time to develop some new characters. This one is called “D.”

Read my short, Bassy’s Basilica, to learn more about her. 

My live caricature drawings from 2017

It Begins

She is hungry...

Black and White Caricatures (free hand traditional, and digital)

Nick Diaz (UFC Fighter)

Conor McGregor (UFC Fighter)

Some black and white drawings I did of friends and as a warm up exercise, taking 4 to 8 minutes to complete. The bottom entries were from my iPad where I drew the subjects using only my finger as I am too cheap to buy a stylus that is worth having.