A quick sketch of a man holding a cup of coffee. This was drawn from a reference photo. Lately I've been practicing portraits. Trying to limit myself to 20 mins or so and just draw the basic form as best I can. Otherwise I'll fiddle with the details and spend hours trying to adjust things. Sketching in ink helps also since I can't erase. Need to get more comfortable sketching faster, but I like the way this turned out.
One of my high school friends went on a family trip and returned to find his girlfriend obsessed with a dead bird. She had found it, extensively photographed it, and kept it in a box. He broke up with her. I cannot, for the life of me, get over this story, even though it happened almost 20 years ago. I want to hunt this girl down and ask her approximately one million questions.
This coffee cup doodle is in honour of everyone who works or who has ever worked the night shift. For those of us who work all night and still have responsibilities that can only be dealt with during the day, sleep often seems like a luxury for those who work the day shift. Coffee is our go to comfort and caffeine kick, our best friend who we can always count on to help us through those working nights when everyone else is sleeping.
There was a royal lineage in Europe that was so inbred that their jaws started getting really distended and weird. Like Jay Leno, but inbred. (I'm going to give him the benefit of the doubt.) Feel free to look up the Hapsburgs. I'll wait. The second picture is a Fiji mermaid and a merman. I think I want a merman tattoo. SMOLDER.
Our local antiques store had a huge treasure trove of vintage Native American themed toys and gifts this weekend. I realized that 1) I'd owned a lot of them and 2) none of my friends had. It never occurred to me that my collection was particularly large or unique. Doesn't every kid have a fixation on this country's indigenous population? Apparently not. I love the visual language of the Navajo and Hopi especially. My Kachina doll collection was the bomb.
"Man on the Train: Hey, are you a dreamer?
Wiley: Yeah.
Man on the Train: I haven’t seen too many around lately. Things have been tough lately for dreamers. They say dreaming is dead, no one does it anymore. It’s not dead it’s just that it’s been forgotten, removed from our language. Nobody teaches it so nobody knows it exists. The dreamer is banished to obscurity. Well, I’m trying to change all that, and I hope you are too. By dreaming, every day. Dreaming with our hands and dreaming with our minds. Our planet is facing the greatest problems it’s ever faced, ever. So whatever you do, don’t be bored, this is absolutely the most exciting time we could have possibly hoped to be alive. And things are just starting" - waking life (movie).
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So the other day I had a beautiful conversation about lucid dreaming with some friends. We shared amazing dream memories that we all had experienced and right the next day this sleeping beauty started showing up on a piece of paper.
What about you, are you a dreamer? :)
♠️
This drawing looks a bit like one of those "how are you feeling?" hospital charts. It starts out okay ("smiling cat", "drunk pirate"), and descends into full Lovecraftian Horror. I was driving toward a local town known for its unpleasant yokels, which probably explains the progression. Today, for the record, I'm 75% Apathetic Lumberjack, 5% glassy-eyed cat, and 20% Vampire Waluigi.
Before you is a touching tale of true friendship between a capybara and a mouse. The capybara is the world's largest rodent. If you google "capybara friends," you'll see that there are a lot of instances of other species just hanging out with them in the wild. For some reason, all animals are attracted to the capybara. I'll wait while you look this up.