Buster Bunny - More Sketches

More developed drawings of Buster.
As I mentioned in the previous posting, I wanted to substitute the balloons for something more material and representative of love and romance. After all, he's with his "girlfriend"; this ain't just cheap thrills. I started thinking of "I love you" balloons and chocolates, and developed the drawings here. They're the same drawing-- one was scanned and then I added the heart box of chocolates and scanned it again. I may nix the chocolates, but have not decided yet.

Buster Bunny

I haven't done many pet portraits, but when I do I try to depict something unique about the pet. Sundae Bunny was done for my younger cousin Hannah, whose pet bunny was actually named Sundae, as in ice cream.

Now along comes another pet commission, and if it isn't of another bunny! This is for a friend of mine and his wife as a memorial to their bunny Buster, who unfortunately passed away recently. My friend, Jeff, supplied the perfect photos and background story about Buster's "girlfriend", a stuffed animal that he gave the bunny lovin' to on a fairly constant basis. Buster and his girlfriend would even allegedly lie together post-coital for a while afterwards. The sketch here is my first response to the idea, but I was already thinking that the hearts should be replaced by something more material and representative of love.

More Preliminary Sketches - Cats

Here is another original sketch from an earlier journal (late '06 or early '07) of a man walking and being swarmed by cats. It is the first, in regard to the idea of a man with cats, and probably inspired the ones of the sitting man in the Aug 13 and 14 postings below.

Originally there were no cats. The drawing evolved from a very simple ink sketch based on my memory of wearing a suit in Japan in the Summertime. I was teaching English and it was mandatory to wear a business suit to orientations early in the contract, August and September, when it was still ungodly hot and humid. I was smoking then and have a vivid memory of myself trying to find my way to a meeting from the train station, getting lost, chain-smoking, and utterly baking along the way. The cats were added arbitrarily, although not that arbitrarily since cats pop up in my sketches here and there in my journals. There is one drawing I did of the same guy walking through a bunch of tulips. I thought cats would be funnier, as if they are the guy's fans, or entourage or something.



This is a much more recent sketch from last month. Now the cats are on their own; no man to harass. There is no concrete prior back-story driving this one. I started with abstract shapes as I often do in my journals and just let the imagery take shape freely with pencil and gouache. The totem cat on the left is an example of the kind of stylistic cat that pops up every once in a while in my books and the orange burst with the blue shapes exploding outward is simply form in search of meaning. The totem cat led to the addition of the cats on the right, and wanting to situate them in some kind of landscape I habitually chose a wide, desolate space with volcanoes in the background. This kind of landscape has worked its way into some of my more recent pictures, such as the two giraffes and the dive-bombing pigeon. Cats being the playful creatures they are, I thought the one should be batting around a fireball that erupted from the volcano.

Both of these sketches will be developed into more developed drawings like the other cat and sitting man drawings below.

Preliminary Sketches - Man with Cats

Just to back up a little bit, here is the original sketch in my journal for the sitting man with cats as it came to me on 7/7/07. I didn't know what to do with the idea then, but I'm hoping those lucky/holy numbers will turn out to be the harbinger of some good art. That remains to be seen, and I'm not any kind of numerologist or anything, but for what it's worth...

Another cat sketch

Next up in the man with cats series...
So far I've kept both sketches more linear than rendered in order to emphasize a more graphic quality in the eventual paintings. I've been playing around with the idea of veering from my usual painterly style into something more design-y with cleaner edges and flatter color. Likewise for the color, I'm hoping for a more vibrant palette than the warms and the earth-tones I have been using.

Start of a new series

This is one of several in a new series I'm trying out. I'll elaborate more on the series as I develop more ideas and post them here, but suffice it to say there will be cats. I also have plans to integrate Japanese subject matter, and sometimes there will be Japanese subject matter without cats, but that all too will become more apparent over time. This drawing is based on a quick sketch I'd done months ago of a melancholic man in a chair, being swarmed by cats. I have been this guy, but the deeper meaning of what's going on is still unknown even to me. My aim in this series is to develop a personal body of work in which the narrative will follow from the imagery, rather than the other way around. Hopefully I can elaborate more on that over time as well.

If you're following along, thanks. If too much time goes by between updates, email me to jog the blog machinery back into action. It'll keep me on task.