Now we’ll lick ’em for sure!
Bill (still the .00358% of my traffic that’s from Iraq) T sent me this snapshot. It’s the personal insignia for the Mobile Transition Team based near him and somebody will be out soon with the crayons to color it in.
Thanks, Bill (blah de blah de blah) T!
That’s it. Don’t want to step on the thread below (which you’re welcome to keep adding to). Have a good weekend, everyone!
June 25, 2010 — 10:24 pm
Comments: 10
Happy EDM day!
I don’t actually approve of this, you know.
I went to a particularly flaky art school (the Rhode Island School of Design) during a particularly flaky era (the late Seventies) and I’ve seen enough mental retardation masquerading as art to last a lifetime.
There was one egregious kid in my year — I’ve just Googled his name, and I’m delighted to report Google knowest him not — whose whole schtick was sit around thinking up offensive shit. For his end-of-term project in 3D design, he went down to a slaughterhouse and got four bloody severed horse legs, piled them in the middle of the studio floor and called it “Goodbye, Mister Ed.”
Offensive is for people who desperately want attention but don’t have the talent to get it the usual way. Offensive is the “moon, June, croon” of the post-Modern world — it’s dumb, it’s formulaic and it’s so fucking boring.
In a free world, we have to tolerate offensive but we don’t have to celebrate it. Or for chrissakes give it government arts grants. You hear me lefties? I have to put up with Piss Christ, but you shouldn’t oughta have made me pay for it.
When offensive is aimed at the same groups over and over again — people who can’t do much about it but wave a sign or boycott an advertiser — that’s just plain bullying.
Bullies. That’s the word for people who only pick on those who can’t or won’t fight back. “Courage” isn’t even in the same zip code.
So, sorry Muslims — have a little sacrilege. It’s only fair. You want SUV’s, cell phones and dialysis, you’re going to have to put up with stupid offensive shit, too. Freedom is the common denominator.
When you have to live in a world where some things make you crazy angry, my advice is — don’t go looking for them.
Picture was EZnSF’s idea. Dude, I wish you’d said something earlier. I’m tight for time this week; I could’ve used a couple more days to have fun with this. Here’s a big color version just for you. Kidding — it’s for anyone who wants it, but EZ can have the FaceBook honors.
Update: Since EZ doesn’t seem to be around, I posted the illo to FB. But I gave you a shout-out!
May 20, 2010 — 5:45 pm
Comments: 39
It begins…
I don’t even HAVE any damn chickens yet, and already I’m drawing chickens.
No, no…I’m not trying to sell you guys chicken merchandise. I just didn’t have anything to say today and it’s friday and — look, I drew a chicken!
One thing I’ve learned trawling the chicken forums(!) over the last few days — man, the crazy cat ladies got NOTHIN’ on the chicken people! Holy geez! Once they start growing their own, the dial gets stuck in the MAKE MORE CHICKENS position.
Not me. I promised the neighbors positively no roosters.
Have a good weekend, everyone. May all your dreams be of weasels and chickens. But not together, because that would get ugly REAL quick.
May 14, 2010 — 10:09 pm
Comments: 34
Shiny
That there is a tiny sterling silver mustela frenata or American Longtailed Weasel, the most widely distributed mustelid in the New World. Honestly, I think B does all his gift shopping at ShitWithWeaselsOnIt.com.
And that’s it from me. I didn’t spend much time on news today, apart from five minutes yelling at the radio while I brushed my teeth. I’ll tune back into the UK government when the wheels start coming of the Cameron Express.
Deep down, I hate politics.
May 12, 2010 — 9:23 pm
Comments: 22
And, no. Nobody had him in the Dead Pool.
Frank Frazetta died today. Stroke. 82.
Me, I was a huge fan of his art — a thing I am completely unembarrassed to admit, despite the pulp-y, porn-y nature of so much of his work.
He had the best grasp of how all the pieces of the human body interlock and slide around each other since Bridgeman — which is not surprising. Apparently, early in his career, he was given a copy of one of Bridgeman’s books — probably Constructive Anatomy — took it home, copied every drawing in it, brought it back and said, “okay. Now I know anatomy.”
I have reproductions of some of his early work — notably Shining Knight comics — and they were…oh, what is the word?… really not very good. There were only a couple of hints that he was an artist of extraordinary promise.
How he went from that to the painter and draughtsman he became is, I guess, tribute to the gigantic amount of art a comic artist has to crank out to make a living. Practice making perfect, and all.
At the height of his skill, he not only made a living, he was one of the few to get rich at it. I remember reading in the Seventies that he just painted whatever he wanted and they found books to suit them. Frazetta covers moved merchandise.
His wife died last year and he’s been ill with one thing and another for a very long time, so. Well. Rest in peace. I wouldn’t sell my immortal soul to be able to draw like that, but I might hock it for a few months.
May 10, 2010 — 9:47 pm
Comments: 34
Save the date!
Hooray for Draw Mohammed Day!
The kids who came up with the idea have already pussed out. They thought people would submit nothing but respectful drawings of Mohammed. Apparently, yesterday was their first day on the internet.
Couple things. First, you weren’t supposed to make drawings of Mohammed, as I understand it, so his followers wouldn’t worship his image. And the prohibition is relatively recent.
So there’s nothing at all in Islam about infidels drawing Big Mo. I mean, not that I’d care, but it’s technically not even an issue.
Second, the “death threat” came from a true blue American boy who was doodling pentagrams in his High School notebook two years ago. Now he’s twenty, he’s grown a scraggly beard, wears a doily on his head and has converted to a dumbass whitebread kid’s vague understanding of Islam. He lives with his mama.
In other words, it’s a pretend death threat from a make-believe Muslim. Which makes Comedy Central’s censorship act look even stupider.
And takes all the fun out of bravely defying it.
Feel free to keep going in the Favorite Scars thread. I’m enjoying that one. I think Glenster’s dad’s flesh-eating bacteria scar is my favorite.
Though mesa’s ironing board accident has a certain charming Wile E. Coyote quality. I imagine the iron turning over a couple of times in the air before landing on his little face.
April 26, 2010 — 10:41 pm
Comments: 19
Magnum opus
When I woke up this morning, I was in the middle of the most vivid dream. I was doing one of those huge, insanely detailed pencil drawings we had to do in art school. Mine was called “Three Crisps and a Corn Flake.”
My mental picture was so clear and impressive, I briefly considered buying a big sheet of bristol board and drawing it for reals.
Then I remembered that those drawings took us, like, ten hours a day for several weeks. Whereas going to Google images, typing “potato chips” and ‘shopping around with the result takes about ten minutes.
See, this is why I don’t paint.
Anyhoo, sorry for the laminosity of posts this week. A former cow orker of mine from the Olde Countree is in England on vacation and planned to drop in on Casa del Badger. I’ve spent my time slaying dust bunnies and vacuuming up spiders. When those snapshots make it back to the Land of the Free, I want envy to burn with the fire of a thousand white hot suns in the breasts of one or two of my former colleagues.
That is, assuming there’s a Rhode Island to go back to.
April 1, 2010 — 10:53 pm
Comments: 28
Arachnotoad
Hey, remember back in 1995, those Minnesota schoolkids who found half the frogs in their local pond had extra limbs, leading to the obvious conclusion that ZOMG WE’RE ALL GONNA DIE!!!!!? Yeah, it turned out to be perfectly natural and not caused by evil Gaia-raping modern chemical corporations.
Scientists discovered all the frogs with deformed limbs were in ponds with a certain snail, which plays intermediate host to a certain fluke. The fluke gets into the developing frog embryo and fucks with its limb-producing buds. Instant mutants, just add water.
Of course, hippies still talk about “high incidences of amphibian deformity in response to environmental degradation” but at least they’re doing it with some cool pictures. New York artist Brandon Ballengée has collected gefukt frog specimens from all over the world, which he dyes in cheerful contrasting colors and scans on his flatbed scanner.
Which is EXACTLY what I do with my eight-legged frogs.
His show opens in London today. Uncle B and I have to go up to London soon, but I think we’ll be giving this one a miss.
March 16, 2010 — 9:48 pm
Comments: 11
Play money…
The long, slow process of replacing my professional artard gear continues — my new scanner arrived this afternoon. First task is digitizing bits of my worthless coin collection.
No, seriously — I collect what real collectors call “lunch money” — heavily circulated world coins that are worth, at most, the value written on the front. Bought them in ten pound lots on eBay (my dealer doesn’t seem to be in business any more). Ten pounds, let me tell you, is a buttload of small change. Took weeks and weeks to go through them all, and every one of them guaranteed to be worth jack shit.
There would always be lots of fascinating and beautiful stuff, though. Mid-19th to the mid-20th Centuries and every continent on the globe.
You could tell a lot about a place from its money. Like, money with pictures of food on it comes from places where people are starving. Money with food and industrial equipment comes from Communist places where people are starving. In the immediate post-war era, the smallest coins in Europe were sometimes made of horrible cheap and nasty aluminum. Oh, and I’ll never forget the first time I turned over a coin and spotted a swastika on it. Brrrrrr — Nazi lunch money!
I thought some coins would make interesting merchandise. You would think that coins, being as public and emblematic as national flags, governments wouldn’t be all anal-retentive about copyrighting their images. You’d be wrong. This’ll be fun to figure out.
Oh, and the coin in the picture was, I thought, the one time I put one over on the bulk coin people. Without the holes (which were used to make it into a button or charm), a George III sovereign like that would be worth upwards of £1,000. But I’ve been digging around, and that there is almost certainly Victorian brass play money, worth nuffink.
So it’s consistent with the general high quality and value of the rest of my collection.
March 9, 2010 — 11:20 pm
Comments: 7
Happy b-day, P’shop!
Adobe Photoshop turns twenty today. And, oh, what fun we have had!
Actually, the image editing system I learned on predated Photoshop by several years. Several years was a millenimum in early computing days; desktop computers couldn’t do shit in 1987. They certainly couldn’t do shit graphically. But my machine was stuffed full of a hundred grand worth of special bits and it could do shit. The image editing software it ran gave P’shop a run for its money for years.
An important part of my job in those days was a sort of vaudeville routine where I demo’ed that big boy for clients in real-time. So they’d know what a righteous, bad-ass research and engineering firm we were.
Can you remember a time when people said things like, “photos don’t lie” (and really believed it) and Leisure Suit Larry was a cutting edge computer game? Well, that’s when I was taking snapshots with a video frame grabber, lassoing bits and moving them around before a customer’s very eyes.
You shoulda seen their faces! (Particularly after I erased their noses and replaced them with supplemental eyes). Many thought it was some kind of trick we were playing with video. Computers couldn’t do things like that!
Anyhow, I know I’ve told all my war stories before (blogger’s privilege, telling them again). Happy birthday, P’shop — and here’s to the next amazing technology nobody ever saw coming.
February 19, 2010 — 6:55 pm
Comments: 20