Unca Jeffy's Sketchbook 12-18-14!

Sketchbook while I think.  TBT?

I really did used to just sit at that table and draw,

It was awesome.

Talk to you soon.

Unca Jeffy's Sketchbook 12-17-14!

Christmas doodles.

Santa Claus

Shiny pretty Christmas Tree

Frosty the Snowman

Rudolph

Some of Santa's Elves.

A polar bear.

Talk to you soon.

Unca Jeffy's Sketchbook 12-16-17

A circus ringmaster, along with stream of consciousness thoughts about who he is.

A kid and his comic book.

Alien guy,  Looks like he'd make a god Muppet.

Saturday morning type super-hero cartoon, "Super Foods"!

Kale, Blueberry, Pomegranate and Carrot with the Wonder Twins:  Turmeric and Garlic!!

Talk to you soon.

Unca Jeffy's Sketchbook 12-15-14

Doctor Who doodles

left to right:  William Hartnell (First Doctor), Matt Smith (Eleventh Doctor and my fave!), Patrick Troughton (Second Doctor - unfinished) and Christopher Eccleston (Ninth Doctor and my least favorite)

An amorous hot dog I did for work.

The hot dog's "object of desire" a bun.

The bun looks overtly vaginal.  It was better defined that she was a hot dog bun after the designers at work added color.  Fitting though.  The relationship between hot dog and bun are innately sexual.

Talk to you soon.

Daylight Saving Time Rebellion! - Uncle Jeffy's Sketchbook

Our semi annual participation in yet ANOTHER out-moded and archaic concept/tradition!

Celebrating an early 20th century law (which actually made more sense in the 18th and 19th) that has NO bearing on the time I'm living in at all.

I didn't plant any soy beans today.

My electric bill remained the same.

Happy stuck in the mud day everyone.  :)

Talk to you soon.

Early Leprechaun - Uncle Jeffy's Sketchbook

A leprechaun as surprised as I was to see him almost 3 weeks early.  He was still kind enough to pose for this sketch.

I call it "Relaxed Leprechaun sans Hat" or "He probably hasn't got a pot of gold or a window to throw it out, anyway!"

Talk to you soon!

Uncle Jeffy's Sketchbook - Like Lazarus!!

Hiya Kids!

Doodling a little yesterday.  Character sketches for the story of "My Christmas Sabbatical!"?

:)

Talk to you soon!

Blog-meister Birthday!

I turn 49 today...A trifle past half-way-to-dead.

I'll get back to toying with my sketchbook tomorrow, for now it's a blogger holiday.

Go out an have a piece of cake on me...tell 'em "Jeffy said it'd be OK.".

Talk to you soon.

Spontaneous Comics!

I think one of my problems with writing and drawing a comic story to completion (other than finding uncountable excuses of why I can't) is all that fancy-shmancy cleaning up and layout of straight lines for panels and stuff.  I like what color adds, but I don't necessarily enjoy coloring.

Then I thought (as I spent last week posting sketchbook stuff) hey, this is a blog, not a commercial comic.  It's OK to show work at all stages, even if it never goes beyond the working out stage.  And the reason I started this cockamamie thing is, I wanted to work things out and possibly get some feedback.

Part of what I don't like about slick-finished cartoons sometimes, is they loose a lot of the spontaneity of what makes cartoons awesome to me.  They are tweaked so that they can LOOK spontaneous, but they rarely are.

Jules Feiffer's looked spontaneous, but I'm not sure if they were as free-wheeling as they appeared, not knowing how he worked.  Shultz didn't use pencils, except in laying out the placements of characters...any cartooning waited until his inks.

When I get the idea for a story, I want to see it through to it's conclusion.  If I take the time to do it formally, I seem to loose the point by the end.  Again, these are probably things a lot of cartoonists have already worked their way around and I just don't know it yet, forgive me if I'm going over ground that is probably already trail-blazed.

Here's a quick one from yesterday.  Took maybe 1/2 hour to do.  I like the feel of it and only a little time will tell if I like the thing totally or find it something I have to explain.

I know my penmanship is pretty illegible, so I'll type the dialogue before each panel.

TV ANNOUNCER;  And THAT's the news for tonight!

JEFFY:  Incoherent mumbling

JEFFY'S ANGEL:  What's the matter, Jeffy?  Too much bad news in the world got you down?  Penny for your thoughts!

JEFFY:  It's not so much the BAD news, per se...it's the amazing contrast between IT and the GOOD news.

JEFFY:  In the past 2 weeks - amidst all the other horrors that we're accustomed to...war...famine...We've seen 2 mass shootings of innocence in our own back yard...innocent people in innocent places...

...a movie theatre in Colorado....a church in Wisconsin...Innocence lost.

The worst of the worst of what humanity is capable.

JEFFY:  And in the same time frame, we've witnessed the best of the best excel at athletics.  Push the physical boundaries past their limits!!  A man with no legs ran...THE most awarded Olympian dove down and swam o even MORE MEDALS THAN ANYONE EVER HAS...

JEFFY:  Our brightest minds hurled a 2,000 pound robot at the sky and then it landed 352 MILLION miles away, over 8 1/2 months later...RIGHT where we said it would!!!!!

JEFFY:  The BEST of the God damned BEST of what humanity is capable...and a hint that MAYBE we can do more!!!  BE more!!!  That 2 million years of us trying to be better, hasn't been a WASTE!

JEFFY:  The contrast of these things, good and bad, make them seem even MORE extreme I think!  The good makes the bad worse and the bad makes the good seem better. 

I wish we could have the good without the bad...but we can't...the good needs the bad to be better than.  The contrast is what MAKES each side.

JEFFY:  And I'm not the first person to realize this...I can't be.

...But O will be the first to reject it.

I say I CAN see the light without the dark to frame it.  I CAN see the good and it's value!

I choose robots on mars over dead bodies inn our street.

I choose.

Not the most light-hearted of comics as I re-read it.  But a balance will come as I do more.

This is the way we did comics when I was a kid...just doing it, from start to finish, not knowing where it's going to end until you end it.

I like it.

Talk to you soon.

Uncle Jeffy's Sketchbook! - 8-3-12

Last peek at my sketchbook for the week.  I flipped back to the beginning (from before I put it away, not getting how sketchbooks work, probably back in 2008-9)

I think my concept here on page 1, was to make the sketchbook an anthropological notebook written in the 1920's and 30's by the worlds dumbest explorer.  See here the hilarity as he discovers an elephant (not knowing that they'd already been discovered) and miscategorizes it as an insect.  Hilarity ensues?

Then I think I got the concept of doing a strip featuring EVERY comic and cartoon character EVER created.  Not thinking about the logistical nightmare of telling an understandable story with 8 million characters, I just thought it would be cool to see.  I kind of did that any way (and will again) with my "A 'Slight' History of Golden Age Comic Book Super Heroes" thingy I do here from time to time.

Here's me attempting (and liking) my take on the Duck's (Donald and Daffy) and then being thwarted by that dang hard-to-draw-for-me-anyway, Mickey Mouse.

My horrible Mickey meeting Daffy Duck, Superman and Ko-Ko the Clown at what ever event I imagined them all meeting at.  Batman and The Yellow Kid look on.

You see, I'd never really drawn other peoples characters before.  I have always (from a very young age) known that it's the cartoonists style that makes the feature cool, the character comes second.  Jack Cole's Plastic Man is awesome.  Joe Staton (who is extremely talented in his own rigth) doing Plastic Man was a bad take on a character and missed the point.  So at 45-6 years old, I was trying to see if I could even draw them, and have them be recognized.

Here's a sketch of me looking bad-ass with my posse:  Goofy, Donald, Mickey, A horrible Bugs Bunny, the Golden Age Green Lantern and being evesdropped on by a very Bob Clampett-y Tweety Pie and a sloppy Sylvester.  Over all a decent Mickey there.

Which brings us back to the present as I doodle myself some more.

Sketching trying to find a new avatar for facebook and Twitter and the like.

Not the way Van Gogh spent his time...but I am a cartoonist...and that's a wonderful thing.

Thanks for sifting through this with me this week.

Talk to you soon.

Uncle Jeffy's Sketchbook! - 8-2-12

Playing with a fat black pen on bright white paper drew me to doodling (I mean that in the most polite way possible) a few black and white era animated cartoon characters.  And if I was going to start there, I might as well delve straight back to the silent era - thought me to myself.

Otto Messmer's Felix the Cat.  Long before that new fangled Felix the Cat in the 1960's with his bag-o-tricks, Paramount produced the biggest cartoon star for the next decade Felix...

...and here's my sketch of him...my style?  When it comes to animated characters in particular, I have an extra block against getting loose with them and still keeping them recognizable.  Something keeps wanting me to try, though.

Meanwhile, Max Fleischer was doing his own "Out of the Inkwell" series and doing a lot of innovations, such as combining live action and animation and even sound.

Here's his first big star, "Ko-Ko the Clown".  Often rotoscope over brother/director Dave Fleischer. 

I have never ever ever gotten the knack for drawing Mickey Mouse...it simply eludes me.  Turns out I do the same "fall-short" job when attempting Walt Disney's earlier star, "Oswald the Lucky Rabbit". 

I like the one on the bottom, but it doesn't look much like Disney's character.  Or Walter Lantz' later version either.  But I do still kind of like it.  The top one looks like an "Animaniac".

After 1928, when Mickey Mouse did his sound gig in "Steamboat Willie", suddenly all the studios wanted their own little black and white cartoon-y star.

Here's Van Beuren's "Cubby Bear" and Harman & Ising's "Bosko the Talk-Ink Kid", the very first Looney Tune.

Ub Ising's "Flip the Frog" and Fleischer's "Bimbo".

The 8 major studios each started off the 30's with a diminutive black and white anthropomorphic cartoon star.

Except Paul Terry.  "Farmer Al Falfa".  Is there a sketchbook story in there?

Hurrrmmmmmmmmm.

Talk to you soon.

Uncle Jeffy's Sketchbook! - 8-1-12

Is I firmly stand at middle age (49 and rising) and am just learning to do the things I should have done when I was a boy, I continue with my sketchbook.

I think when I first pick up a clean sketchbook, I try and emulate what I've seen other people do when they draw.  NOT copy what they draw or the style in which they dray it, but the sketchy/draw over things style that is very foreign to the way the process works for me.  I try and work looser like the way I see "rough sketches" from artists look.

I've spent a lifetime drawing straight in ink though, and worked at a cartooning style that appealed to me...one that seemed spontaneous and unplanned...illusional improv in cartoons.

So when I see me being sketchy in a sketchbook it right away feels false.  I gotta stop doing that.  If the sketchbook isn't true to the person filling it, then what is.

Baby steps, Jeff.

Here's a few animals.  The zebra started as examining a simplistic style and I liked it, so I proceeded to the elephant and I liked that a lot.  Then I drew the tiger and it all looked wrong...too short a snout/muzzle.  Then I grazed my pen against the page and made a line that sullied the remaining blank white space.  The line looked like the top of the spectre's cowl, so I finished it.  success...I reached the flowing sub-conscious, if only for a second.

I wondered what an ant would look like leaning on a bar.  All six appendages having to find a slumpen home.  Then I thought I'd draw a woman from a rear 3/4 view, because I think girl's butts are cute...the face turned into one of those sketchy things I don't like, but I knew if I drew just a headless butt, I'd be picked out as a perv.  Then I drew a circle and charlie Brown wanted to get out.

I thought pulling a random common noun generator up on the Internet would give me some words that would make me draw out of my comfort zone.  All it did was make me skip over words I didn't want to draw.  Then I got to "breakfast" and got hungry.  I also thought I'd work on my sloppy lettering and filled up the page...my depression-era parents would be proud of me for not wasting.  I think it reined my eggs though.

Thanks so much for the encouraging comments yesterday on my thoughts and use of sketchbookery.  I know working out ideas on paper instead of in my head would be good, I wasn't confident in what I was doing for sure until I got some input.

Thanks for validating me, outside world! - Maybe that's another issue.

Talk to you soon.

Uncle Jeffy's Sketchbook! - 7-31-12

I've bought lots of sketchbooks over the years, but I've never been very good at filling them.  I guess I was never taught the purpose behind them and was always nervous about touching pen to paper there.

See, there's part of the deal right there....I think most people would touch PENCIL to paper in a sketchbook, but I've never been able to draw with a pencil.  I don't like the scratchy feel of it across the paper.  When I was about 6 or 7 I started using felt tip markers when I drew and immediately liked the way the dark lines "popped" off the page and the smooth way my line would flow from the pen.

High praise for a "Flair" pen.

I was always given loose leaf paper to draw on too, so the book has a feel of permanence to it.  "Don't make a mistake, or else there'll be a crappy drawing between your good ones!" is what it feels like to me.

As I've grown older...I mean like, just this last month...I've learned the obvious, that it's the opposite of that.   "What if there's a work of genius between all of your crappy drawings?".  And have started carrying one around and giving it a go.

Here's a bunch of scribbles and notes...an aborted "Little Nemo" there on his side in the right half and an attempt at disguising someone with an afterthought beard in the middle on his side.  I see Bob the Alien and another alien with a space helmet conversing across the page, and an early working out of Hulk, Archie and Richie Rich from before I listen to my heart and knew I liked Jughead better.  Oh, and apparently Mickey Mouse wanted to go on their road trip, too.

So I kind of figured out (at the cusp of turning 49 years old) that a sketchbook is where you work out ideas. Not just on the page, but in the right half of your brain.

No one ever said I was a genius.

Here's me prodding myself to NOT fill up the sketchbook with pics of things I can already draw...work on stuff you have a block about.

And I'm hoping that's the point.  I'm diggin' on the freewheelin' of just drawing.  Something I haven't really done since I was about 11.  I've always drawn with a project in mind and lost a little bit of the fun of just tickling that side of my brain and seeing what comes out.

See...I'm just a slowwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww learner.

Here I am playing with widths of a pen.  I had one handy that had a fine point in one end and a bold in the other.

Just drawing for a while and waiting for all those ideas to unclog.  Working toward clearing those drains in my brain that don't flow the way I want.

But right now, I'm apparently trapped inside of a aspirin-headed-pineapple suit.

meh...my brain will sort it out.

Talk to you soon.

Uncle Jeffy's Sketchbook v. 4.0: "Jeffy TV"

I found a strip I did in January 2008 that I thought I'd share. It's all about "Jeffy TV".

A few years ago it dawned on me how much of a time waster television was. Not the things you can see on it, films and sit-coms and dramas and documentaries are all worth while. I have a problem with the commercials. And the power stations airing a show in syndication have for editing content so they can fit MORE commercials in. I have a problem with the time it takes, searching through 500 channels to find something worthwhile to watch.

Basically I saw myself and people I know sitting in front of the box, not using it to enjoy a program they like, but using the channel surfing thing as a time waster. Occupying themselves (myself) mindlessly instead of actually seeing or hearing something good.

So I cancelled the cable and disconnected the antennae and started buying DVD's of things I liked. That way, when I sit down in front of the television, I am guaranteed to see something that I appreciate.

I ended up with a few thousand DVD's. I have, basically, reeeeeeeeeeeeally expensive TiVo. I'm not that bright.

I took to calling the broadcasting schedule at my house "Jeffy TV". I still use it as background noise to be on while I'm futzing around the house, the difference is, it's ALL stuff I like. I will occasionally plan a series of movies or shows that I'll pop in, just to keep that part from taking up my time.

NOW who's a time-waster? Sigh!

I did a strip about it to rationalize it. I ended up using it as an excuse to draw a naked lady.

Here's the strip.







I was going to put one of these at the beginning of the post:

Then I remembered. It's not my job to raise other peoples kids.

See ya tomorrow.