Art vs Artist - 2019

Here’s something that happens on Instagram: “Art versus Artist.” At its most basic, it’s an image of the artist surround by samples of that artist’s work. Where I could find hard rules about sampling the works, I chose my personal representative favorites from 2018. So, is this the 2018 edition (the year of the pool of stuff posted) or the 2019 edition (the year that these have been curated)?

As my favorite eight pieces, this differs from the “Top Nine” a.k.a. “Best Nine” posts of 2018. The latter determined by a simple counting of likes.

(clock-wise from top-right)

STAN LEE TRIBUTE - This represents my caricature/ portrait work.

CHEF SKUNK - This represents funny animal comics. The character is Nick from the long on-hiatus strip Tags from the a new one created for my 2018 Christmas card.

LIFE DRAWING with MARKERS - From one of the sessions done later in the year, chosen because I think it demonstrates better mastery of “highlighter art” than sessions earlier in the year.

YELLOW RABBIT - Another funny animal. She’s Hilarity from the short lived Cartoon Monday strip.

MICKEY - A rare example of my digital (Photoshop) painting.

BUNNY the BIRTHDAY SQUIRREL - I can’t drawing Bunny for every birthday notice that pops up on Facebook, for example, but I do draw him fairly frequently.

BELLE and the PRINCE as a HOGWARTS STUDENTS - Here’s a mash-up idea that was suggested for one of my “What Shall I Draw Today?” sessions.

TUFF-GIRL - Of course, I need to shamelessly promotion my adventure comic, Unstoppable Tuff-Girl, with the title character and with her pup, Wichita. This piece was created as the marketing image for last year’s WonderCon comic book convention showing.

Check out my Instagram feed @monstergram7

monstergram7 Hits 3,800 Followers

Having quickly blown past the 3,500 Instagram followers milestone during the holidays, I take a few minutes in the less hectic January 2018 to celebrate 3,800 followers with a sketch of Hilary Rabbit. And I recorded the sketching process with a time-lapse video.

THANK YOU for following my Instagram feed and this blog, monotonae!

https://www.instagram.com/monstergram7/

Hilarity Rabbit (some times Hilarity Hare) is a character from my failed comic strip, Cartoon Mondays. Cartoon Mondays was supposed to scratch my cartoonist’s itch when I hired on at Cartoon Network’s marketing/ licensing group. The style inspiration was classic 1950-60’s Hanna Barbera, the Huckleberry Hound and Top Cat era.

I frequently miss the H&B mark by adding a lot of shading, a lot of details and a lot of hash marks. But that discrepancy sits well enough with me, since the drawings lack the benefit of animation.

This piece, I believe, represents the first time that I really had to assign color to Hilarity. So I went with Top Cat inspired yellow with, again, additional non- H&B details of shading and modeling. Obviously there’s something about Hilarity that appeals to me that she lives on past the short-lived comic strip in sketch books and doodles like this. Maybe she’ll hop in to something in my future work.

As seen on Instagram.

Cartooning Mondays

(clock-wise from top-left: Dash the Dachsund, a Chihauhau, Marbols the Cat, intern bird, a pig, Hilarity Hare, Hilarity (again), a sheep dog).

Sketches. ink on paper, 2013

Have I never discussed Cartoon Mondays on Monotonae? Well, then this is going to be a poor introduction to it. My apologies.

Above in the mix of anthropomorphic critters are Dash, Marbols, Hilarity and an intern bird. They were created for my attempt to make a weekly comic strip at work after I was hired at Cartoon Network in 2001. You see, I thought I’d be able to find a few free minutes at days’ ends here and there. I thought I’d be able to do a little work satire to blow off steam or deflate some of the ridiculous aspects of the job, much as I had with BackSTAGE and STAGElights when I worked for Disneyland’s French Market Restaurant, Second Hand Comics at Disneyland’s New Century Timepieces, and mini-poster series at Disney Consumer Products. It turned out that free minutes were hard to come by. The strip died after, I don’t know, maybe two dozen irregularly posted installments.

A few years later, I pitched it to the Network as an idea for a series of two-minute shorts.

Now it only lives in my repertoire of things I sketch at work, I think largely because there’s something about a character by the name Hilarity that just shouldn’t be allowed to fade.