Influences and Inspirations

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Following up the steam engine (train wreck?) that is my interest in automotive art, I picked up a bunch of magazines and books with different images that seemed like they might provide some push and fire to the whole shebang. Juxtapoz magazine does “low brow” art – weird stuff that’s cool and different and likely isn’t going to show up in any kind of fine art gallery or event anytime soon. The top and middle images are from that mag. The bottom one I got kind of on a whim, and it’s pretty awesome. It’s a custom car magazine from Japan. It’s written in both Japanese and English, and I have to say that those guys have built some pretty impressive machines over there, especially considering the fact that they can’t just drive down to some junkyard and pick this stuff up locally.

Keep trying

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Here are some more efforts from me on the caricature “monster car” drawing style that was typical of shirt and decal designs of the sixties and seventies. To the left you can see a couple of examples of the sort of thing I’m aiming toward. This stuff was first popularly made known by a guy named Ed Roth, although it had been going on in one form or another for a few years prior. Roth was the guy that put it out in the public eye on a wide scale. Later on Roth concentrated on building his crazy show car creations like the Mysterion, and he left the shirt design in the capable hands of guys like Ed Newton.

I’ve always enjoyed art like that, but never figured I could hack that. These days I don’t much care if I can be the best, at least not enough to stop me from at least trying to have some fun with it. These are pretty amateur efforts, but they are still fun, and it seems that the second and third drawings are slightly better than the first, so there may be hope for me yet. I may not be another Ed Newton, but maybe I can at least get to the point where someone looks at the picture and goes, “Cool…what kind of car is that supposed to be?”

Traveling art

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Check it – I was on my way to work and got stopped at a railroad crossing. Lots of times you can take advantage of a situation like this to check out what’s going on around you, take in something you might otherwise miss while you’re berating yourself for leaving for work five minutes late that morning (or maybe that was just me?). Anyway, as the train rolled by I grabbed the camera and waited for an opportunity. The very last car had some fairly interesting art on it. I thought “Bile” actually looked pretty decent this morning! I always admire that people can get this stuff put up so quickly while sneaking around a rail yard with rattle cans. I also love the idea that it travels all over the country, and you can look at it if you just sit still for three minutes. There’s not even an admission fee to the gallery!

Woody wood wood, Part 3 – More than I hoped for

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Woah! Check ’em OUT! These humble pieces of timber started out as mere leftovers from dad’s scrap pile! Remember this? Don’t they look awesome now?!?!?!? Yes, they do! I was expecting just some straight cut stuff with rounded corners, and he’s gone and made stuff that, well, it looks really nice!

Man, now I have to get some decent rolling ball sculpture built to mount on them. Crap – dad’s making me look bad!

Rough start

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It doesn’t matter how good your gear is, if you don’t have the ability, 20 bucks worth of pencils and markers isn’t going to make you a master of the arts on the first try. I didn’t squish this photo, either. I drew the car squished! Niiiiice. Oh well, hopefully I’ll improve? It took five days to get up enough courage to attempt this. I read most of the book and kept coming up with reasons to do other things, but tonight I finally put the pencil to the paper, so that is pretty awesome. It turned out better and worse than I hoped, but at least now there are pencil marks on the page. Even if a person is not destined to greatness in an effort, there is always room for some amount of improvement, and I hope that with practice I will improve to the point that I am at least proficient enough to satisfy and amuse myself and maybe make a buck occasionally. In the meantime, I’m being reminded of a LOT of stuff I forgot from high school art classes!

More art with Jem

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The one on the right is looking pretty sweet by now. This evening we finished up the separate pieces of that project, so there wasn’t a way to switch on and off on it. To give both of us something to do, we decided to start another project and swap between the two. I pulled out a scrap that was sitting around and seemed to be of a size that we could finish the two projects at about the same time. I started the design while Jem colored on the larger piece, then she added her own design work to the smaller one while I traded off and did color on the larger piece. I think Jem did some amazing color work on the smaller one. We’re tossing around different ideas on how we want to use color in the future, and I’ve purchased a few different supplies to help us out on some things later. This just keeps getting more and more interesting.

Another log on the fire

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I bought this book for myself today, largely because playing in a band, drawing abstract art with Jem, learning guitar, working on photography, writing novels and short stories, building rolling ball sculpture, and drag racing didn’t occupy my time enough already.

Something’s definitely wrong with me, but it’ll be fun finding out what it is!