It's Just Bills

  

  This post is the sequel to A Hodge Podge of Mannliness which featured drawings of Bill Murray and Bill Hicks. Here, above, is Bill O'Reilly. He's always fun to watch. WE'LL DO IT LIVE! That's his catch phrase. Fox News is fun stuff. It's one of those things. Either you LOVE it or you HATE it. It's very controversial.

  And here's Bill Maher, a polarizing political figure if ever there were one. He always looks like he's got some wiseacre thing to say. His face fits his persona perfectly. Also, he's got a New York socialite mullet. Also he looks like Christian Bale trick-or-treating as a treasure troll.

  Post internet Bill Clinton is the Bill Clinton who got confrontational with this goofy looking Fox news guy. It really does feel too entertaining to be real. Ah, but I guess it is a little tame compared to Jones and Morgan if you know what I mean..., but for it just being Bill Clinton and a goofy looking guy it's a pretty lively exchange. 

  I think of two things when I think of post Internet Bill Cosby. I think of Pokemon and I think of a tough old man criticizing black culture as it's portrayed in the media. Here's some sketches I did. I was gonna just post the top one, but then I decided that if I showed the whole page you could just soak it all in.

And the last Bill is Bill Burr. He's an ordinary everyday guy in his comedy. He's like "Hey, I mean come on, people." Maybe his persona is so extreme in the direction of "Hey, I mean come on, people" that maybe he's exactly the opposite in his private home life. The exact opposite is "Ho, I don't mean go off, animals." Makes you think. I like his face a lot. It has a really interesting feel. Not necessarily in this drawing, but in the videos I see of him, Bill has the vibe of a cute little Norman Rockwell kid wearing a big football helmet made of flesh. 

Thanks, friends. Come back next week. I believe I'm gonna focus on Korean plastic surgery which should be interesting and hopefully disgusting.

Some Approaches

  It's a caricature of a photo I drew for some cool customers. It maybe took almost an hour. Had they come back in half an hour, it woulda took half an hour. My new thought when I draw from a photo is to try to just make sure it looks like this specific photo I'm looking at and no other photo. Why should I worry about the likeness of the individual If I don't get to see the individual? (Apart from a desire to please the customer, of course. But my thought is that if I really get all the nooks and interest of the photo, surely they'll be pleased.)Yay!

So that was my vision for drawing from a photo, but then..it may have been the very next day, I did this one. I'll tell you what happened. I did a live caricature for some real nice Chinese people and it was real cartoonish so then they asked me if I could draw their dog from a photo, and I thought it looked like a fun lil pooch so I drew the shape as such, but then I was like, I'm gonna be faithful to the colors in the photo, but that was a mistake if I do say so.

   Ick. Look at the poo stain near the heart. Failure. Regret..and the blue spot..and the orange spot..So bad... But it's from a photo...and it's a dog.

Not from a photo. Fat kid. He liked it. He was cool.

  Ahh. This coulda been way better. He had an awesome face and the lighting was hitting him perfect–ah and he had a small head. I coulda made this way funnier if I hadn't of got caught up in some the lighting things; if I'd have held on to the bigger issues. I think his nose could have been the main thing, but I wanted to get the lighting but it woulda maybe been scary to have such a big space with potentially difficult lighting. You'll notice how ambiguous the lighting on the nose is compared to the rest of the face. I jumped on some lighting situations but I think it's more important to keep the mass of the forms in mind perhaps.

I was happy with this one, and they really enjoyed it too. The likeness were good and I liked how the color relationships came out. I got her hair color good and her skin was very light and grayed down compared to his peachy skin color and I got that.

  For how long this took (which wasn't all that long) the reaction was a little lacking, but they liked it. Actually, yeah, they did laugh and like it and all that, but I thought this was gonna be a real kaboom of a reaction, but not quite. 

You'll notice that the drawings have all been about color stick...ahhh except for the previous one, but this next one is a lot more in the good spot for me conceptually speaking. I made fun of her big legs. I did a weird thing with the cheek. It looks like an illustration. A couple regrets. I should have made her mouth much smaller. It would have been funnier, but I got a little caught up in the moment and my feeling was like, if the mouth is more open it's funnier, but she had some big bulky faceness that was compromised by widening the mouth..but you'll never know cuz I didn't take her photo MUHAHAHA!!

Awfully cutesy though

And this is the best reaction in the bunch, actually.

I like the hat. This is a blurry photo huh?

Saemee at the computer

  I found an amazing photography portrait artist named Robert Wilson, and I tried to draw his awesome photo of Kevin Spacey. It's really fun to draw from an awesome photo and not care about what it ends up looking like, but the down side is that when I'm finished I usually don't end up liking what it looks like, and when it's all said and done in the long run, I didn't take the photo..but then it's not my face either.

  This is Jin. I posted a bunch of her before.

Lulu and Yung Eun. They went to the caricature convention this year so you may have met them. He won an award for Retail Style. Congratuations, big fella!

  And here's a pretentious markerless approach I tried on her. I know it's blurry. If you're trying to spot where the likeness issues are it's her bottom lip area. If I cover that up, I can see her in there.

  In conclusion, let me say, there are many different approaches to caricature.. and also to life. Thank you.

Culture Clash

   In the olden times, a well learned Englishman would travel to some God forsaken corner of the globe, and there he would sip tea on the veranda of the bungalo overlooking the rainforest, and there, he would write about the things he sees – the strange cultures, the strange people, the bizarre religions. My last name is "Philby." I may well be related to the famous British spy by the name of Philby. I may have that white anglo business in my blood where I have to look out upon the world and classify it. Maybe that's what Modernism is. I think I got a Modernist streak in my blood. I wanna show you what Korea feels like. It feels very odd sometimes. Rightfully so, it was cut off from the western world until only very recently. Sometimes I think the men I see walking around are like what my grandpa must have been when he was doing his thing. Most Korean working men wear baggy suits like you see in old photos from the 1940s. They smoke. They drink. They work. Mom takes care of the kids. 

  They sleep on the subway.

That's Saemee. (bad likeness though)

  Korea has a gritty feel to it, with the spitting and the smoking and the drunks and the motorcycles speeding through stoplights and zigzagging down sidewalks around hunchback old ladies pulling towering loads of garbage behind them. 

  By contrast, the entertainment is emotional and romantic and feminine. And everybody seems to be on the same page with what good music is, and the answer is K-Pop singers. The answer is a young couple with guitars singing about being in love, or a girl gyrating on stage, singing about being in love, and every song has a hip hop break. 

  In America, at least when I was growing up, music was about finding some strangeness that you enjoy but nobody else ever heard of. I thought that was just the norm, but shortly after I arrived here, I asked a fellow artist if she liked K-Pop, it being one of the few things I'd heard of that had to do with Korea. I expected "Haha no. Just cuz I'm Korean doesn't mean I like K Pop," but her answer was yes. And then, naturally, my next question is do you like dog meat which got a "no." 

  So Koreans like feminine music like this rather than masculine music like this, and on their tv dramas there's always an old lady crying and some guy calming her down. If it's a talk show there's sound effects and instant replays and special effects to emphasize what the person's talking about and there's always somebody breaking into song.  Koreans like cutesy stuff, and they must have high likeness tolerances because they don't loom over your shoulder like "how's this con man gonna make me think he drew my daughter in five minutes with no pencil?" A lot of times they go over and sit on a bench and wait for you to finish. But this drawing has nothing to do with all that because this is some Chinese people.

 But you will notice some hearts and some bounciness. When you see her photo, you're not gonna think it looks like her, but...but..it wasn't so far off as all that.

  

and this is a Japanese couple – caricature artists, Gota and Genki. They are kind and lovely and talented.

I wanted to post this bit about drawing from photos, but it's way to unrelated so I may do that next time. Until then, go back to whatever you were doing.

Diarrhea Cha Cha

  In Korea the word is "sulsa"(설사). Which is a good word for it if you think about it..for a couple of reasons that I can think of. Nobody likes a case of the sulsas, but it happens. If you eat some half conscious octopus, it's well within his rights to sabotage your whole system. I try to stay away from the strange seafood, mostly because I don't like the taste or the texture. It's healthy though, I think, and it gives you diarrhea.

 So what is distortion guys? Anywhere there's caricatures, there's people talking about caricatures, and anytime a bunch of people talk about caricatures long enough, somebody drops the word distortion like some word sulsa. So I wanna figure it out here. 

  If we define "exaggeration" as being separate from likeness, than we can use the word "distortion." If I can say "the exaggeration on that caricature is a ten," and you don't see the caricature I'm talking about, and what I've just said gives you no insight at all as to the likeness of the drawing I'm referring to, you would be defining exaggeration as separate from likeness. I say "there's a lot of exaggeration," but your answer would be, "but is it good exaggeration? Is it correct?" Because if it's not, than it's just a lot of distortion. I think the math would be like this.

So every time there is less likeness than there is exaggeration, there is distortion present. If exaggeration is 10 and likeness is 0, than distortion is 10 also. Distortion = Exaggeration in that case.  This also means it's possible for there to be negative distortion if the likeness ends up being greater than the exaggeration. Hm. Negative distortion. I'm still trying to make sense of that. 

If you don't like the idea of negative distortion, you could try this on for size.

Division. But how do you feel about a drawing with perfect exaggeration and perfect likeness having a distortion quotient of 1? Yeah. I'm not to crazy about that either. But I like the idea of how the level of distortion gets closer and closer and closer to zero as the likeness gets bigger and exaggeration gets smaller. But all of this is just ridiculous anyway, because the idea of distortion is completely useless, if you ask me. If you ask me, good exaggeration=good likeness; bad exaggeration=bad likeness and vice versa.

Drawings of Coworkers 5 - Jinha

 A good face. Very Asian. A lot of fun.

   My first drawing, an utter failure, but it felt like I was doing all the right stuff you know. There's that shape, there's that shape, putting it together like a puzzle.

    This is the strongest likeness in my opinion, but some people can't tell what he's suppose to be holding. It's a chocolate chip cookie. 

   I don't know how, but he must have managed to stay in the same position long enough for me to manage a more realistic lighting approach. He wasn't even posing. He must have been sketching. Yeah, I think he was sketching at the same time I was sketching. I like doing drawings like these when I'm able to do it without the use of a photo... like a purist... like an old man set in his ways.

   Here's Jinha, simultaniously praying for and receiving God's blessings and love energy.

  Jinha has a small head, especially for an Asian, so here I attempted to shrink his head. I like the idea on this one better than the likeness, but the likeness...yeah the likeness is a little generic.

 

  Winter is nearly upon us. It sure did get cold quick this year. I'm glad to say I got to travel around and enjoy the spring and summer though.

touch the dust. feel the earth.

 Look how small Korean trucks are! Cartoonishly small. This is not a replica of a truck. This is an actual truck.

  A few posts back, I showed you Jongho. Here's another drawing I did of Jongho, yesterday, using every color stick in my set. I want to congratulate Jongho on his fresh new perm.