Friday Night Art 3

Welcome to another instalment of "Friday Night Art"! One of the things I've been enjoying and finding challenging about having a whole night dedicated to just creating art, is what to draw! You see for a long time now, if I drew something (other than the odd doodle and sometimes an incomplete drawing) it was solely for a purpose, mainly a cartoon, or relating to one. So during the week I started thinking about what I like drawing, and in the next few weeks I plan on doing some practice on drawing animals. But this week I remembered I love drawing clowns! I have this old diary that I leave in the lounge room that I do really rough pen sketches in, and most of the time my 2 year old son draws all over them at the same time, so we both share! It's fun! This week I started sketching some clowns in it and as I do I ended up drawing Engelbert (or 'Bert as I tend to call him). Who's Engelbert I hear you ask?

This is Bert, you may recognise him from the logo at the top of this page, he usually gets referred to as "my clown character".He's a character I've been drawing for a very long time now and he's always been my 'logo' of sorts. I love drawing him and it always cheers me up when I do, I can't even remember when I first drew him and why to be honest. I've never used him in anything either, although when I was studying art, a couple of mates and I were planning a comic book and he was the main character. It was a bunch of rejects who meet in an unemployment office and decide to form a 'hire a superhero' team. The concept was that they were born for their jobs but were bad at them, Bert for example was born looking like a clown and he tries to be a clown but he's very violent and not a very cheerful person. We also had an ex-postal employee who was a weapons expert....man I should try and do that one day! Anyway so every few years or so I redraw my logo and update ol' Bert, so as I'm planning a big over hall of this website, I thought I'd update him. Eventually I want to get a tattoo of him, I just need the perfect design....


Next up, I thought I'd stick to my series of "Red and Black" pen pieces by doing another clown:

Another thing I plan on doing with my Friday nigh sessions is experiment with different styles and try some more wackier ways of drawing stuff, this is not so much, but it's heading in the right direction. It's going to take some practice to get out of my 'comfort zone' of drawing.  It does include two of my favourite things to draw, afro's and buck-teeth.....I have no idea why and when you read that is sounds weird, but it's cute right? Right? The afro thing is because afro's rule! And back in the day I used to have one, (I only have one surviving photo, I'll try and find it and scan it) and here's useless fact, when I make a character in a video game I nearly always give them a purple afro. The teeth thing comes from another well drawn character of mine, who's changed and evolved a lot over the years and I seriously do plan on using him in a comic strip soon, more on that another week I think....

Ok, see you on Monday for a new cartoon!

Mike