why so serious, Eminem?

Uh oh, Eminem's been possessed by the Joker...

Think about his nickname "Slim Shady" - it's just an alter ego he used in order to clown around and say all kinds of controversial stuff. Its purpose was to protect him as a person. He would always say it was just a character and that he really didn't believe the things Slim Shady said. Pretty clever!

Tupac and Snoop Dogg

Alright, so Tupac Shakur wanted to change his professional name to Makaveli in 1996.  It was a reference to Niccolo Machiavelli, an Italian philsopher/writer.  Fun fact: The Black Panthers based some of their ideas on his writing, that's where their "by any means necessary" motto comes from.  That's probably why Tupac came up with the new name.  Anyway, I thought it would be cool to try and mix the two together - ol' 2pac looking like a guy from the Renaissance period.  Oh yeah, and Snoop Dogg over there was definitely a no-brainer, heh heh

KRS-One: The Blastmaster

 

Here comes another one, KRS-One!  The guy has the nickname of "The Blastmaster" because of the way he would win rap battles.  When I first heard the nickname, Ironman instantly popped into my head.  Yeah, THAT guy fits the description pretty well.  So, lo and behold, Krs-One in an Ironman-esque super suit!

Rakim: The Microphone Fiend

A couple of months ago I was reading about all of these rappers with clever nicknames, and I came up with a new idea.  I thought it'd be entertaining to draw some of these guys and kind of mix their respective nicknames into their character in a literal sense.  This is the first one - Rakim.  He always loved to call himself the "Microphone Fiend".  He probably wasn't prepared for this, however.  I turned him into a REAL demon/fiend, yet I still let him keep his rapper look a little bit.  I've done this with 2 other rappers and I'll get them posted soon. At the moment I'm actually working an Eminem one.  Stay tuned, everyone...

Sketchbook 2012

Ok, here goes the first sketch dump.  All of these are selected pages in chronological order from my first sketchbook from this year.  Medium used for all of these are a mechanical pencil and a touch of white charcoal.

- first few were mainly for figure practice.  The best poses always come from breakdancers, shaolin monks, streetball players (in that order!).  I pieced these pages together into one big scan, hence the wacked-out borders.

- Probably my favorite thing to do is draw caricatures.  Don't know why, but I end up drawing rappers half the time I do it!  Why is that?  Here we've got Jay Z, Snoop Dogg, 2pac, Kanye, and 50 cent.

- Alright, here we go.  When I want some off the wall idea I usually ask one of my roommates to give me a random subject to work off of.  I asked for a random time period, and for a few animals.  The result was this: a raccoon, frog, rabbit pirate crew.  Had loads of fun doing it, which is probably more important than anything else.

- Haha, these guys showed up because of that same game.  The challenge was ''rats in the 1920's''.  BOOM baby!  Had no choice but to bust out the rat mafia.  The rat Al Paccino on top with the tommy gun is probably my favorite.

- Gotta get the cityscapes/landscapes up in here, too.  This was based off of a couple of photos somewhere in the northeastern U.S, probably Boston.

- This one here if I remember right was from Bryce Canyon in Utah.  I'll probably color this one in photoshop later because the colors in the canyon rock were gorgeous.

- heh heh....don't ask, what was going on, ok?  I drew the guy in a weird perspective at first then decided to throw in a background to make it work.  I liked the effect so much I painted the thing later.

- yep, you guessed it...it's a guy horrifically being turned into tree against his own will.  Shame.  There he was calling to me for help and all I wanted to do was draw him.

- once again, shaolin monks have some of the best poses for figure drawing.  Love these guys!  I may have overdone the folds a little on the top one, but I'm happy with it.

- and there's another one of 'em...I should probably do some more soon.

-  my professor once suggested to us that we try mixing references together to try and better understand what was going on with the skull structure and all that jazz, with humans as opposed to other animals .  That night my buddies and I saw an episode of Futurama where Jack Nicholson had been transformed into an ape.  soooo I kinda thought I'd try it out just for a laugh or two...

- drawing old geezers is super fun.  Plenty of detail in the face, lots of stuff to pay attention to.  I just like doing portraits in general, I guess,

- so......penguin on a hang glider.....good stuff.  Just having fun, really.  No other way to explain it.

-  I had the urge to do some city scenes again.  First one was my own composition, no photo references.  My focus was to play with the shapes in the buildings to make them feel more alive.  The other one was a mix of photo references.  I was going for more of a European style there.

- obviously practicing figures again.  Turns out gymnasts are great references for some really unique poses.

- I hope those of you that come across this site are into the show Community.  Then you'd recognize these two guys right away - Abed and Troy!

- more caricature practice.  I tried exploring how just the shape of the head can be manipulated to make someone look unique.  [Keanu Reeves, Jay Leno, Alfred Hitchcock, Tom Cruise]

here I took that principle and practiced it with body shape as well, in order to design some characters.

- shopping cart jousting?  Yeah, I did just do that.  Don't tell me you've never thought of doing it.

- I might be lying to you if I told you that I've always wanted to draw a bear on a motorcycle.  But come on, you've got to admit that most biker gang members look like bears.  It was bound to happen.

- so I found myself drawing yet another rapper (Rakim) one day, and I slowly started turning him into this demon like creature.  I finally got my hands on some Prismacolor markers, which had never used before, and I thought it'd be good practice to do the shades and highlights on this guy.  I've still got work to do, but the markers are actually fun to work with.



WHEW!  The FIRST file dump is finished.  What a doozy.  I pray nobody was injured/disfigured in the process...