In 1788, the British First Fleet sailed into Botany Bay to establish a penal colony. Finding Botany Bay unsuitable, they sailed 12km north to Sydney Cove, pitched a few tents there… and BLAMMO! Australia was born.
Today, people celebrate Australia Day/Hottest 100 Day/Invasion Day… call it what you like, I’ll still be eating burnt sausages and drinking beer. Though I tried not to be political, I at least made it tongue-in-cheek… sorta.
This drawing took 20 minutes and was done on January 26th, 2011.
Carl Sagan was a pretty cool guy and a hero of mine. Sagan was also an astronomer, astrophysicist, cosmologist and author and many of you would probably have seen one of his most famous docos, COSMOS. Space and the betterment of the human race was his thing and he did it very well.
The best introduction to Sagan in my humble opinion is a little clip called Pale Blue Dot. The first time I saw the below video I was pretty floored by it. It begins with an photograph (which the clip is named after) of a tiny speck in the vastness of space… that speck is the Earth as taken by Voyager 1 at a distance of 6.1 billion kilometers. Im not going to try and put words to what I felt and thought, as Carl Sagan has already done that a lot better than I could as he reads an excerpt from his book (funnily enough called, Pale Blue Dot).
Now, the drawing. I was trying to come up with an iconic symbol to represent Sagan… In the end with lots of stuffing about I was running out of time so I used his head with that wonderful mop of silver hair he rocked later in life! 🙂
Here it is: This drawing was done on 25th January 2011. It took 20 minutes.
OK, it’s early Monday morning… thought I better knock this one out now as work will be hectic this week as it is most weeks!
This drawing was done on 24th January, 2011 at 7.05am. It was completed in 20 minutes.
So, the story behind Leeroy Lion with the mash potato mane. I really dig Dick Bruna books… always have. I love his simple style and bold colours. I was reading a Miffy book to my daughter Neave a few nights ago and thought it would be cool to do Bruna-style character of my own. Luckily this thought stuck in my head and I remembered it! Now, I’m not comparing my skills to Ol’ Dick’s. As you can see the inspiration from his style is there in this drawing but this is my own take.
Now, most of the time it takes me ages to get animal faces right, but for some reason I can do lions pretty easily… only a few shapes and it looks pretty good so I began with a lion’s head. I was drawing away and was trying to make the lion not too scary as this was meant to be a fake children’s book character after all. As I was drawing his mane started to look “sloppy” and reminded me of mash potato – Mash Potato Mane! I LOL’d and got to refining the look and adding in some colour.
At this point i was about 17 minutes in and I really wanted to hand draw the helvetica text but to be honest it looked like crap so I ended up using the proper font… lazy I know, but I wanted to knock this off in 20 minutes. And the name Leeroy? Sometimes, for a laugh I call my little brother Liam, Leeroy. He also happens to be Neave’s uncle and her favourite person in the world, so this drawing is a bit of a dedication to Liam and Neave’s friendship.
1. Heard when someone is excited or pleased with a situation, event or prospective engagement of a future event… and stuff.
2. Popular with surfing, hang-gliding freaks named Alex.
Inspired by my brother from another mother Alex Cleland… did the “yew!” first then remembered back to the days of old in primary school when everything needed that bubble-text, drop-shadow, 3-d coolness so I added that. The diamond-y heart-ish shape just formed around it from then, no reason other than I thought it looked cool as…. that’s it!
This drawing was done on Sunday, 23rd January. It took 17 minutes.
The WristWatch® Rock Clock is an Australian Precision timepiece and disco-resistant to 40 feet.
I did this drawing on Satuday, 22nd January 2011. It took 19 minutes to complete
I wanted to do something that would kick ass as a t-shirt and I wanted to feature a very hairy arm in some way. If you would like to purchase this image as a t-shirt, please email me and if I get enough interested I may consider thinking about feigning interest in producing t-shirts. But seriously, I really dig the way the word Rock looks when written in my style of script and started off with just that word. After a little while of playing around with a few different options of how the word could look I got the feeling just one single word might look a bit *meh*. Some clever wordplay later, I came up with “Time to Rock” which in a short while generated the same *meh* feeling… and at that very moment, for some unknown reason I looked at my long, pasty, hairy arms and wondered why I didn’t own a wristwatch…
<funny story>
Whenever Im on the phone with someone and they ask me if I have time to do anything or want to make an appointment and give me a specific time (or I to them) I look at my wrist like I have a watch on, even though I have never really worn a watch for most of my adult life… its weird and I’ve done it in front of people I’ve been with and they have LOL’d… lots
</funny story>
Anyway, yadda yadda yadda, Wrist watch, rock clock… you see how I made the connection!
What time is it?! *note the hands pointing to 666... ROCK AND ROLL!*
OK, here is drawing two which was done on Friday, 21st January 2011. The drawing took 20 minutes.
I had heard someone say Kenoath that day and was chuckling to myself how some friends of mine used to shorten down the saying to just Ken! (for those who don’t know what Kenoath means, it is aussie slang for f**king Oath which in turn is in itself aussie slang I suppose).
Anyway, I got down to drawing! I started off with the word kenoath, just playing around the size, style etc and thought it was a little plain by itself. So I added in a crude map of Australia, reversed the text out of it and thought, yeah… looks cool but it’s not really saying anything to me. I pondered on this for a few minutes and asked myself what would I think Kenoath means if I was not from Australia and had never heard the term… would I think I was a person, this Ken Oath fellow? So I went with that thought and started drawing in the Aussie Mystery Man.
Now, the mystery man bit got me thinking again of another mystery man that had his name used without people really knowing what the term meant… WHO IS JOHN GALT from Ayn Rand’s huge tome, Atlas Shrugged. With that in mind I added in the WHO IS, drew a quick silhouette of an Aussie looking outback man and there you have it!
is a good Smashing Pumpkins song and also featured on the soundtrack for Batman and the trailer for Watchmen but I digress.
Well, after a false start at blogging many years ago Im going to give it another go! Essentially, I will be posting an image a day which I have drawn. The drawing will be about anything and everything and the only limit is it should only take me 20 minutes or less to draw (if it takes longer Ill let people know so they can chastise and ridicule me in dark places over drinks)
And now Im playing catch-up as I starting this drawing thing on FaceBook three days ago… so lets get this sh*t done!
The first image I did was Sausage Jesus… Thursday, 20th January 2011.
The Creative Panic 