Sketches I did in the Pacific Northwest

After driving from Ohio to Washington (with my Katie cat), I was so messed up I just couldn't draw for a while. In fact, I hadn't gotten out my Little Sketchbook again until I had lived there for a year - and my Katie Girl died! I was so sad. I wasn't allowed to mourn, however, until years later.
` Anyway, to help cope with my grief, I tried going back to drawing labels. Here you go - Opus the Penguin blended with peach tea! (I lived in the high-rise next to the Co-Op at this time, having moved there the day Katie died.)


peachopus Yes, HonesTea - because they're honest about what they put in their tea! Hey... OMG! It's Butters the Insane Cat! That's right! And you can see her go insane! And; hear her beg for a visit from her best friend in the world - Food! (Hilarious stuff!)

buttercookies This is also around the time when Jason Baxter and company had returned from Canada. Also, notice that there's a reference to Everyone Knows it's Butters! "That's Me!"


jasonbandbutters I drew that Jason picture because I also was planning to draw this guy, EdgeWalker, who also happens to be named Jason in real life. See how very different they look? (More photos/drawings of EdgeWalker vs. Butters hilarity right here!)

edgewalker He did a lot of computery things, and frankly, I'm pleased the way the Jason sketches turned out, complementing one another somewhat.

` Anyway, these are the last of my Little Sketchbook sketches which had been captured with his camera and had been sitting on some hard drive or another, nearly being destroyed once or twice, but miraculously surviving. (Thank goodness for backup drives!)
` I uploaded them for this post in February, but kept forgetting to finish these posts until more recently. Hey, to those of you still out there; thanks for your patience!

` The only newer sketch in the Little Sketchbook at the moment was done almost a year ago in compensating for not drawing our little alien furballs when we first got them....

The Last of the Ohio Sketches....

` This was a very difficult period for me, by the way, what with having been tortured by a mad doctor and locked up by more mad doctors! (No, I'm not joking with you!) It all happened in August and September of 2003... or was it 2002? I don't remember now....

Anyway, I don't think I indicated anything of this in my sketchbook, as I was too messed up to draw at all for a while. Anyway, this first sketch was a while before that ... it was the bedroom of a nerdy guy, practically the only person I used to hang out with sometimes. It was partly a storage area, so it was filled with all kinds of stuff.
` So, I decided to replace much of that with my own filler; a reminder to watch a sitcom Beware of Dog - which was too stupid to survive on the Animal Planet - and the label of a kind of Raven's Brew called Deadman's Reach - our fav!


philsbedroom Ah, another sketch of things, Phil, and his family dog, Hoochie, who I heard the other day had to be put down due to heart failure. This is partly because of a very stupid and crazy family member's very stupid and crazy actions.
` Let's just say, we learned that leaving a dog in your car in the hot sun for hours because you said you were taking the dog to the park when you were actually going to have sex with some chick is very bad for your dog's heart!
` Please. Please don't give animals heat stroke by deliberately locking them in your vehicle when it's humid and ninety degrees outside! This message from the Be Kind to Animals or Else League.


atphilshouse Er... more of this. And a Katie!


stuffandwhatever And now, we have... Smoothieness! Unable to be inspired enough to draw at all for the longest time (probably because of the mad doctor incident), I decided to start drawing the food packaging of my time.
` In eighty years people will be blown away, right?


tropicanasmoothies This was my attempt to capture the very last of one phase of Yoplait containers before they went extinct! Andy Warhol, eat yer heart out! It even has a Gourdy and some kind of dragony thing!


yoplaitwhy Oh yeah, and I drew it sideways in respect to the next page, which has more of the same themes going on as previous drawings. And at the top you can see that this girl crumpled my book, thus smearing it. I'm not sure I deserved that, but whatever!


goodearthchaietc Oh yeah, and I also made note on this page that Blackie the Dull Boy had died (I mentioned him in last post). And ironically, in this case, I had been urging my mom to take him to the vet for months, and she just ignored me, and at the time I don't think I had any source of income to pay for it myself.
` Finally, one day I saw two thick runnels of green pus pouring out of his eyes and I said, "Aha, mom! This is what I'm talking about - he is very sick!"
` And she responded by saying, "Aw, he just needs his eyes cleaned again," and got a paper towel!
` Though I hate to say this about her, this is exactly the crap I had to put up every time I had a serious medical emergency - instead of taking me to the ER to get a look at my broken bone, etc. she would just look away like I was embarrassing to her and not help me at all.
` Anyway, by the time she took him to the vet, it was too late. His kidneys were beyond hope.

Next up we have sketches of stuff going on at the house of the girl who crumpled my paper - her nephews playing video games and such, her cool chair and pillow, and as for the Chinese coin things (attached to bracelets)... well, it's too weird to even begin describing!


emilyshouse Oh, and at her house were lots of DVD movies.... How do you like what I did with Monsters Inc?


goaway Er, yeah, not sure I'd like to run into those blokes at midnight! Anyway, this must have been the time that Phil's mother found this really great stumptailed cat named Figgy - Figgy the climbing and talking kiggy. And you know what else?
` He wouldn't stay still for me at all! As you can probably tell, it was extremely hard for me to draw him....


figgy1 Oh well. Anyway, he was strangely humanlike and always did strange things like walk on his hind legs and suck on his paws - and sometimes suck on his paws while standing on his hind legs (upper left)!


figgy2 Oh God! Do you recall how I described Blackie the Dull Boy's having gone insane from being declawed? Well, let's call this bad boy Yuki the Very Dull Boy. Such a neurotic mess, always trying to grab you with his nubs and bite, even harder than Blackie!

yuki Well, that's truly the last of the Ohio Sketches... stay tuned for my first Washington Sketches!

More Little Sketches from 2002...

More sketches from the year 2002! And Data is a cute widdle Andwoid! Especially when Commander Riker had the power to allow him to laugh that one time....


datalaugh Ah, my gold-skinned obsession-of-the-time! (I also liked LeVar Burton, which is why I watched his segments of Reading Rainbow, which was ironically on in between episodes of Star Trek TNG!)

In other news of 2002, I had bought an Olympic torchbearer's medal at an antique shop and tried to make a rubbing of it (below).
` The wolf who receives this medal refers to a comic strip I made when I was about eleven, where the wolf enters a joke contest. I don't remember his name, but his competitor was Hickey the Hyrax, who tells such terrible jokes that the wolf eyes him hungrily.
` As a last resort, Hickey tries to surround himself with speech bubbles, but the wolf bursts through them and eats him!

medal This is actually supposed to be a reflection, so it's upside-down.


upsidedown Here's a bizarrely-enlarged drawing of Gourdy I did with my left hand.


leftygourdy I actually did quite a few 'lefty' drawings and compared them with 'righty' drawings - of note is Sideshow Bob. (God, I love Kelsey Grammar!) Do take note of the Zorak beside him....


sideshowbob You can see these better, of course, if you just click on the image. Below here, on the left page, is more bunny/Gourdy/Katie cat goodness, along with Lt. Commander Data. On the right hand page are some strange things.
` One of them is a Christmas tree topped with the head of a Ferengi, those ultra-capitalist aliens from Star Trek. It garnered a lot of laughter (considering that Christmas can be considered an ultra-capitalist holiday)!


randomness More random and purposely-distorted sketches of Katie Girl cat. Oh yes, and the mouse heads are actually inspired by one of the gross mouse stories from way back in the day of early blogging.


catsnmouseheads I had this friend Tiffini once... or twice, as she moved far away for several years at some point. I remembered I used to draw us as these little creatures - a gangly Spoonodon and an Armored Tiffinitank!

mentiffini On the next pages, I kinda got on a roll with something I invented in third grade. The black rats were the kids in my Special Ed class while the white lab mice were the 'screws':
` I was having huge conflicts because the adults would drag me down the steps and such and I believed myself to be a bad kid. Not only that, I was in a class of bad students, so I thought; Hey! Let's make a party out of it! Now we were bad... to the bone, while the adults were a bunch of pansy lameasses.


whitemiceandblackrats Actually, the original idea, I believe, came from being forced to sing - in music class - gospel songs like Angels Watching Over Me. Well, people kept telling me that there were these things called angels and that they were real and that they got rid of evil or some such thing.
` Well, as my psychotic, paranoid dad had always made sure I 'knew' I was a horrible, crazy, manipulating bitch all the time (little did I know, it's because he's that way with everyone and it is because of him that I was so fearful of everyone that I had to go to Special Ed), anyway, I figured those angels would get me sooner or later!

So, I got myself a piece of green construction paper and drew the kids as angels and the screws as devils, because I knew who was really good and who was really bad. (And yes, I was right!) Then, I saw just how cool my drawings of the devils were as compared with the dorky angels, and decided that since bad was good and good was bad, might as well switch it around, eh?
` It wasn't too long before I became too uncomfortable with the 'devils and angels' bit, so I tried a number of various creatures which look cool in black but dorky in white, and one set that I settled on was the black rats and white mice. (The black rats always had a stealth bomber, by the way... the mice just had a hang glider or something....)

` Moving on, I found it odd that I'd drawn Katie all over my sketchbooks, but not once at that point had I included any other cats. Well, here, for the first time, Katie's sister Ashlie, the former outdoor cat Polydactyl Amy (who I think may still be alive at this time), and Blackie the Dull Boy, who was always so messed-up from my grandparents having had him declawed.
` Though Katie napped with the best of 'em, and apparently snuggled with a Velociraptor, I'm pleased to see how lifelike I managed to draw the other cats in some cases.
` (I suggest clicking on this one to view its sheer size.)


thecats Oh, that one in there isn't a cat, though... it's a Tommy. In 2002, he was New To Her, and today, they live in a boat in the Atlantic somewhere.... Nice, huh?

Some classic sketches, interspersed with nonclassic ones

This is what I'd call a 'Classic Sketch'. (Just smile and nod, like I've taught you to.) It's a portrait of me with the Nightmare Bunnies, Gourdy the MIR Space Filler and Katie the cat... all mah best frienz back in 2001 or so! 'Cept for the Nightmare Bunnies.


selfportraitwithcreatures This is decidedly not a Classic Sketch. It's just a random assortment of creatures, including a new and improved version of Batmantis. Just to the left of Batmantis is a Nightmare Bunny and just to the right is an upside-down version of Katie lying down with her back to me.


batmantis Hey, it's my former piano teacher person, Dawn! She must look really funny because, at least back then, there was just no way I could draw her without it looking all... weird. And so, it kind of progressed into a vicious circle between the two of us....



dawnthedemented This is, I believe, what I'd call a Classic 'Ambidextrous' Sketch, meaning I used both hands while drawing it. It has deformed clones in it. I likee.


deformedclones This is, perhaps, a Classic Sketch. It has an Ornithomimus, a hedgelty-hog and I think that's supposed to be a Phil. (Phil is no longer with us; I failed to catch him when he fell off a cliff.)



nopieces Aha! This is not a very impressive sketch, although it does illustrate what I was doing on my first scene as an extra in American Splendor. (If you've never seen it, go here to see a really dandy theatrical trailer! Except you have to watch an ad first - it's worth it!)
` This airport scene is also the only scene I'm very visible in, though when I finally saw the movie I was actually surprised that you can see me better than I had supposed here:
` (You can view my images full-size by clicking on them.)


americansplendor Finally, this sketch would be a 'Classic Sketch' involving the Amazing Katie under which I drew a checkerboard grid.


gridcat I miss my Kiggy Cat. You know what's really irritating? She died in pain, in a hospital, and was thrown away in the garbage.
` Katie's sister Ashlie, on the other hand, died recently - about three years after Katie - in her sleep whilst on a boat in the Bahamas with my mom and her boyfriend. Burial at sea.
` I wish I'd taken Katie to the vet earlier. Even though I'm such a good mommy to Violet and Vada, I still feel bad about that.

Adventures of the Bean Rooster

` Okay! This post was supposed to appear magically appear on June 22. Or so I thought.... (Oh well, at least Lou Ryan's and Nate's and technically my production got an even longer chance for a few people to notice.)
` Here's what I was supposed to have posted by then:

On with the Little Sketchbook: It was 2001 and I was nineteen. And I had a friend at the time. She was very strange, as I recall, and had such unusual, alien mutant habits as... collecting Beanie Babies!
` And thus, it was she, not me, who put me up to drawing this... this... well look at it!

beanrooster1 Oh no! Whatever could possibly happen next?
beanrooster2 Uhhhh.... wha?

` If you weren't satisfied with that, then look here!
mustache What the...?

` Okay, I'm sorry about that, folks! Just come back later. Like in... five days or somethin'.

A Trip To OSU, 2001

Oh goodness yes, I feel old now! Look, it's my former roommate Phil's college roommate, Joe! (And a "Braktaur"!) I wonder what Joe is up to now?

heyjoeyjoejoe This is actually one of the hallway columns in Orton Hall, which has lots of hominid skulls, not to mention the bunny and the doggy!

gourdycolumns There's also one of these things.

megalonyxskylight Yes, that's a Megalonyx jeffersoni, a huge ground sloth, and behind it is a Tyrannosaurus rex skull.

There was this one guy who was showing people around and he pointed in the door and said there was a dinosaur in there.

"Oh yeah," I said, "there's a Tyrannosaurus skull in there." but no, he actually meant the giant mammal in front. I'm sorry, but since when are sloths dinosaurs?

Orton Hall also has gargoyles! Have you seen them? (Fantastic photo!) They're meant to be real fossil animals. Somehow, I still managed to portray them as anthropomorphic wrestlers.

ortonhallgargoylewrestlers Wow, look at the date on that. It was still September, 2001! And what was it with me always adding little vignettes of my Katie cat later on?

ortonhallgargoyles The fountains at Mirror Lake!

mirrorlake And then, there was this....


crazy Whoa-kay! Back to Mirror lake... at the time it was densely populated by goldfish and a mixed flock of ducks, including two pairs of wood ducks (the wood duck says "Svzzz!"). Occasionally, the pond was also inhabited by... dogs!

You might want to click on this one to actually see it properly:


dogandducks And the winner was... the ducks! Because they're built for swimming!

Last but not least, this is Browning amphitheater, where we sometimes ate.


browning Ugh. A bit grotesquely enlarged for its detail, no? That's supposed to be Phil and Joe, but it doesn't really look like them.

More sketches in a few days!

Disturbing and Disturbinger! Where do I come up with this crap?

On with the old sketches - from back when I lived in Ohio. In Hinckley, which was somewhat near Medina, there was this dam....
hinckleydam It's called the Hinckley Dam. Really. (I would have made it nice an' pretty, but it was a 3-minute sketch.) I also used to have more hair. I always dreamed of chopping the back of it off, though (and my dream's finally been realized)! lotofhair Can anyone guess when I was drawing these? sept11 What's sad is it was originally labeled September 12! Then again, maybe I actually made the drawings on September 12. Whenever it happened, Zorak sure seemed glad. shutupzorak Yay for terrorism and death! theplane Somewhat irritated by the whole news phenomenon of it all, I turned to Brak once more. Hey, it's Brak's parents! braksparents But I much prefer Brak. As you can see in this grossly enlarged photo of a tiny drawing, you can see just how cute the little fella is. brak Apparently, Gourdy also embodies Zorak. Do not ask me what's going on here. He's a shape-shifter, because he's a space-filler, a'ight. I don't claim to understand these things. zorak1 No! Not the cute bunnies! Click this one to see the outcome! zorak2 What the hell?

Then, on the next page we find one of my deepest, darkest secrets.... fillpants Thus, my true feelings were revealed! Argh!

Hey, does anyone know I made a post in 2006 called My Sketchbook is Full of Brak? It has all the funny stuff I wrote in my sketchbook, but no sketches - i.e. there are quotes such as this titillating exchange:

"Oh my God, he'll tear your arms off!"
"But I love my arms! That's where my hands live!"

So please do see that post! They go together. Like Peanut Butter and Jelly!
tansit Tansit is such a weenie. And I totally forget what's going on with the Fat Albert Eyeball thing. thisthing My favorite character of all was Thundercleese. What a sweetie! thundercleese Somehow I just gave up on drawing him, though. It was taking a while, I guess.

` I still recommend going here to read about this section of my sketchbook. I know... I'm just too lazy to combine the two posts. Like a lazy person.

` *Attention* I'm also too lazy to come up with an ending for this post, though my next post is scheduled for May 15!