Trying to get the creative juices flowing so I can get a cartoon out by tomorrow for my newspaper. Sometimes it helps to just draw any random subject that might help motivate you…

No porn…porn is obvious and I don’t do obvious…just your basic male nude figure study, plus another in our series of beautiful longhaired guys that wear glasses reading books while naked.

I sketch on layout paper because it’s easier to draw and re-draw over and layer other scraps of layout paper over it and strongarm the lines around until I get them where I think they’re good. I have no college level or above formal training..am a self taught, hunt and peck kinda draftsman.  So smudges and foundational pencil lines are all visible. These are just things I’ve been doodling at the drafting table this week…something to keep my mind from gnawing over Valentine’s Day coming soon.  Not sure and don’t particularly care whether I’m assuaging grief or  wallowing in it.

Maybe I’ll make one of these into a finished work someday. What I’d like to do is get my oil paints back out and start working in that medium again. But I have very little heart in anything I can do creatively this time of year.  It hurts too much to look inside.  I try to distract myself with simple little sketches but everything keeps coming back to that empty place inside and I have to step away from it.

NSFW below the break.

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As I often do, I posted the last couple sketches here onto my Facebook page with a brief explanation…

I’m finding suddenly that technical pencil and a graphite stick work pretty well for me on these sorts of sketches. If I tweak the contrast up in Photoshop they almost look inked but they aren’t. Just pencil and graphite drawn on layout paper, then scanned in.

The models for these are mostly taken from fashion spreads I find here and there online and in magazines, like Out, Details and GQ. I have a filing cabinet folder full of poses I tore out of magazines I use as a reference. When I get in the mood to do one of these sorts of sketches I dig up a pose I like, do a rough sketch of the body, then just add whatever face, hair and clothes to it that come to mind.

It’s probably not as good as sketching from life would be but it’s the best I can manage. If I had it to do all over again I’d move mountains to be able to afford art school.

A friend there responded that I could always hire a model. But that doesn’t fit into how I work on these.   When I do a political cartoon I do almost the entire thing in my head before I even touch pencil to paper.   I know with a pretty good certainly what I want to see on the paper when I begin drawing it out.   But these drawings of beautiful guys are more like daydreams.   As I said in the previous post, the wistful daydreams of a single guy, who has been single just about all his life.

I wouldn’t know where to even begin with a professional, or even an amateur model. What I have are file cabinet folder full of pages I’ve torn over the years from fashion spreads in magazines like Out, Details and GQ.   I use those as a reference when I sit down to a little sexy sketching.   I do a rough of the body in the photo, and then I work on it, firming up the lines, moving them a tad here and there to get the body shape I want.   I add face, hairstyle and clothes purely from my imagination. I have done this for so long now I have no idea how I would work with a model.

When I was a lot younger…about the age of the guys you see me drawing here, I had a small group of friends I would hang out with and I would snap photos of them.  But I don’t have anyone that age in my local group of friends now, for pretty obvious reasons, and even if I did, they’d be of their own time and place and I strongly doubt I could talk any of them into dressing like they’d just stepped out of the 1970s. So those days are gone to me and with them I guess pretty much the last opportunities I would ever have to draw from life in a way that would be both helpful and inspiring. I might see spontaneous things and snap away with my camera, or if someone was patient enough, I’d ask them to pose. But that isn’t the life I have.   If I’d had a boyfriend I’d have probably driven him nuts by now with all my sudden requests to pose while we were out and about. But that wasn’t the life I had.

My art sketches, as you can plainly see, are mostly young twenty-somethings. If you look closely what you see is they’re from a time when I was that age too. I’m stuck. I think this is what happens when you don’t connect, miss out on that chance for first love. You get stuck in a passage of life you were always meant to move on from. That dating and mating thing is part of the maturity process and when you fail at it a part of you gets stuck in that younger mindset, that once upon a time frame. Yes, a part of you does go on to some sort of maturity. You get a job, you enter the workforce, you start earning a living on your own, and accumulate responsibilities in the normal course of life. And you learn to fulfill those responsibilities, be dependable, because others at your workplace depend on you. You earn trust, you manage your finances, you gain various kinds of life experience and it grows you inside. All but one life experience. All but one so very vital life experience. And so a part of you does not get that chance to grow.

And yes, it’s not a completely dire fate. Keeping that youthful mindset keeps a part of you inside awake that too many adults let go to sleep. You ask questions the middle age guy might shrug off. You stay curious, open to new ideas, willing to turn the box upside down, never mind think outside of it, just to see what happens when you do that. So many of my generational peers are still afraid of computers and the Internet and the new technologies, so afraid of being left behind, and to me the fact that the world is constantly changing before my eyes, growing, getting bigger, is the same feeling it always was back in grade school. Something I have learned from being stuck, is that there is no such thing as growing up…there is only growing.

And if you’ve gotten on with the business of life with your eyes open, both to the inner and outer world, then you know well that a younger lover would not get you unstuck. What I need is someone my own age, or nearby. Someone who remembers what the world was like when John Lennon was still alive, before personal computers, cell phones and the Internet. Before cable TV and twenty-four hour cable TV news and over the horizon line was a beautiful tempting mysterious other world only expensive long distance phone calls could penetrate before the six o:clock news or the morning newspaper. Back when cars had lots of chrome and the teachers passed out assignment papers that smelled of mimeograph fluid and Jimi Hendrx played on the radio, not Rush Limbaugh. I could be a kid again with that guy. I could find my way to the rest of growing up that I missed out on.

Maybe then my artwork would grow up a little too. Or go in some different direction that I would have never known or suspected was even there had I not, finally, found my lover, and had my eyes opened to things I’d only imagined before, but never really knew anything about.

[Edited a tad for clarity in a few spots…]

This may strike some of you, or most of you as odd…but most of my sexy guy sketches start with my seeing something aimed more at young heterosexual males…some pin-up photo of a sexy woman…and I’ll find myself thinking Hey…that’s a nice pose…but I’d rather see a guy in that photo… 

The young pirate I did some months ago was actually one of those little pirate statuettes you find for sale at some seaside resorts…a sexy female pirate being served a jug of ale by a little monkey.  I bought the statuette and when I got it home did several quick sketches, recasting her as a young man, and adding some background detail and giving him a slightly more direct and challenging look.  I guess you could say I butched him up a tad…but only a tad.  I was reaching for a sense where he’s beautiful and sexy but not in a passive way, such as I often see in most male heterosexual skin magazines.  I’m trying to thread a middle ground between the hyper-masculine art I see in a lot of gay magazines and the hyper-feminine stuff I see in straight boy magazines. 

It seems the gay sensual archetype here in the U.S. is the hunk.  I’m really not into that.  But I’m not really into uber twink either.  There is very little I find myself responding to in any of the gay magazines or the online photo galleries.  I’m not into porn.  Porn is obvious.  I want to be teased.  I like the sensual and beautiful over graphic sexuality.  And no…this isn’t just a middle aged guy loosing his interest.  I’ve always been like this.  In a world that must seem to the pulpit thumpers like it’s swimming in sex, there is very little in it I actually like.  I don’t see that as my being particularly finicky.  I’m an artist.  I don’t like saying that about myself because it sounds so damn pretentious, but there it is.  I spend a lot of time with my feelings…alone at my drafting table, or out and about with one of my cameras.  I know perfectly well what turns me on and it’s not that I have a sexually narrow bandwidth, it’s that the culture I live in does not like to admit that men can be beautiful and sexy that particular way.  Most of my skin magazines are Asian and that’s not because I have a thing necessarily for Asians, but because Asian cultures seem more willing to admit that males can be beautiful and sexy in a way that isn’t hunk.

There are males like that everywhere.  But here in the U.S. they have to dress like slobs or butch up or they catch grief from other U.S. males.  Once upon a time, back in the 70s and early 80s, sexy lean and beautiful guys could wear their jeans tight and low and their hair long and their cut-offs high and nobody gave it a second thought.  That was a great time to be a young gay man I’m here to tell you.  But then as the gay rights movement grew and became more vocal, heterosexual males experienced a kind of gay panic and then those gawd awful baggy pants and swimsuits began to appear and all the sexy beautiful males went into hiding, lest someone think they were gay.  Meanwhile, gay males, after being told for generations that they were pathetic mincing swishy faggots, began to reclaim maleness for themselves.  That’s a good thing, but alas it’s become too much of a good thing.  At least for me.

So when I want to spend some sexy time at the drawing board, I find myself inspired more by straight boy pin-up girls then by anything I see in the gay press or online on the gay websites.  It’s weird I guess, but except for the passivity I usually see in it, I find myself drawn more to that then to explicitly gay stuff.  I just mentally switch the gender of the subject a lot.  I find myself looking at something that is very nice, but would be greatly improved by adding a few ‘Y’ chromosomes.  But not too many. 

The sketch in the previous post started out as a photo of a gay guy in low riser jeans with thong straps rising up slightly in a very sexy way from the pant waist.  I thought that was a good idea, but I didn’t like his pose and he was a tad too muscular for my taste.  I like muscle…I like the hardness of the male body…but there are limits.  Then I saw another photo of a woman in a very tiny bikini and a hat.  She was looking at the camera in a pouty pin-up girl kind of way.  I took her pose and the idea of the low risers and thong straps and tried to combine the two.  I made the pose a tad more assertive and changed the facial expression from pouty pin-up girl to more introspective and sensual male.

I do most of my pencil work these days on layout paper because it’s easier to erase and re-draw and I am a hunt and peck kind of draftsman, not a professional by any means.  I am completely self taught and it probably shows.  When it’s sexy time at the drafting table my goal is making myself all hot and bothered.  It isn’t like I have anyone in my life to do that to me.  So I do it to myself.  I find that it’s often the simplest strokes of the pencil that can have the most dramatic results.  The concentration level is intense…almost trance like…while I’m working with the pencil.  That logical analytical side of my brain is working on the mechanics of drawing, and at the same time it is dispassionately watching the libido.  I draw to make my libido go…Damn!  Goddamn! 

Beats sitting alone in a bar pondering the fact that Facebook is feeding me ads for Mature Gay Dating now.  I would love to find a nice, good looking, good-hearted gay guy about my own age to date.   As long as he wasn’t mature.

[Edited a tad…]

It rained practically the entire weekend here in Baltimore, and I was able to get very little yard work done.  It’s just been rain rain rain rain rain here.  Especially today.  Just steady gray sky rain all friggin day long.  Foo.

So what’s a single, lonely gay guy to do on a rainy day?  A few indoor repairs I suppose.  Some chores.  Call my ex-boyfriend and mope around the house afterward…  Do some filing I’d put off…  

Oh…I know…I know…!  I can draw some pencil sketches of guys who wear hats…

I’ve always wanted a hat like that…

Step 1:  Start with a pair of circles for the glasses…

Step 2: Decide what kind of frames you want them to be.  For this lesson we will use a basic aviator frame example.  Just keep it simple to start out with…

Step 3:  Now add the rest of him.

NEXT: Drawing a paycheck in today’s economy.

Okay…you all remember our last lesson…right?  Fine.  Today we’re going to build on that a little…

Step 1:   Create a basic stick-man frame.  Try not to make it too detailed.

Step 2: Add the major body segments as oblong bean shapes…head, neck, chest, arms, legs…and so on…  Again…try to keep it simple.

Step 3:  Now add the detail.

NEXT: Can you draw Muhammad?

I keep getting hits on This Post, via search strings like "sexy guys" "sexy guys underwear" and so forth.  And from the most interesting places too…like Ogden, Utah and Dubai, Dubayy and Islamabad, Pakistan, where they’re only a little more sexually repressed then in Utah.  No, I am not kidding about the hits from the middle east.  I get an amazing amount of search engine hits on gay topics from that little sex hostile part of the world, and lately that post in particular.  Oh…and the American bible belt of course.  And…Utah.

Let’s face it…this poor world is hungry for images of sexy guys wearing little to next to nothing at all.  And I’m here to help.  Time for another drawing lesson.  Bring your drawing pads and sharpened pencils here tomorrow.  It’s easy.  It’s fun.  You could be excommunicated from the Mormon church!

I have finally…Finally…finished the pencils and inks for episode 11 of A Coming Out Story!  And it only took me…what…a year and four months?   That obviously wasn’t an actual year and four months worth of work.  For the longest time I simply could not go anywhere near my drafting table, for some reason I still don’t really understand, other then so many stresses in my life just all came together all of a sudden and I just couldn’t even bear to look at my work area down in the art room.

But it’s coming together now.  I still have some work to do in Photoshop…adding the panels and text and touching up this and that.  It’ll be the touching up that takes the most time, because I want to get things as right as I can before I put anything up.  This episode comes to seven and a half pages.  That’s two rows of drawings per page, at about four panels per page.  But some pages had more then that.  I think I did 29 panels in all for this one.

I have it all scanned in.  Now I have to polish it up and put it online.  I’m hoping to get that done by next weekend.  Finally.  Yes…I know…I’ve promised finish dates before that I’ve let slide.  But the heavy sweat work was the pencilling.  That part of it really gives meaning to the phrase 10 percent inspiration and 90 percent perspiration.  Actually, I’d say it was more like 2 percent verses 98 percent.   But now that’s done, the rest is just a matter of cleaning up.

I actually had to go back and re-do some of it after I’d been away from it for so long.  I wasn’t satisifed with many of the earlier panels and I re-drew a lot of it.  Then I added two more pages to the beginning of it.  But those two pages came out of my pencil pretty fast, compared to the rest of it.

The next episode may run to as many if not more panels, but I think it will go quicker because it tells a story more then this episode does.  The drawing for 12 will be a lot less repetative then 11s was.  You’ll see what I mean when I put 11 up.  Finally.

For some reason I was suddenly able today to sit down at my drafting table and finish two pages of the next episode of A Coming Out Story.  Just…bang, bang bang…one panel after another…just…came out of me.  The first hour or so of it was very difficult, but there was none of the reluctance to immerse myself in the storyline that I’d been experiencing for the past year or so and after a while it just kept coming.  Two pages of good quality pencils.  It was as though I’d never stopped drawing it a year ago.

I’ve got another two and a half pages to go and the pencils are done.  After that, the inks should only take about five or six working days and the Photoshopping another two or three.  By working days, I mean solid four hour stints at the drafting table.  That’s a working day when all I have to give it is the time I have after work, or weekends.

I have no idea where all this just suddenly came from.  I’ll probably be pondering it for the next few days.  So much has happened since I started this little tale.  So much, just over the past couple months.  But I was able to churn out pages of this thing during other times of stress in my life.  For some reason I just couldn’t so much as bear to look at this thing for a long, long while.  Now I can.  And…it’s fun again.  I think that’s probably the biggest thing.  I was banging out panels and quietly laughing to myself at the humor in the storyline as I drew them.  It was a fun I haven’t had in a long time.

I’m going out for a brief walk now.  I need to take a break.  But I feel as if I could do some more when I get back inside.

I’ve lived with this creative urge inside of me all my life and I still don’t understand it.  It comes and it goes in its own good time is all I can figure.

[Update…]  Did two more panels before turning in for bed tonight.  I keep this head of steam up and I’ll have the next episode out the door before the end of the month for sure…

So…I was fiddling around a bit at my drafting table…still trying desperately to get my drawing groove back so I can pick up and continue on with my cartoon series, A Coming Out Story.   It’s been almost a year since I last updated it.  (sigh)  I think finally getting in touch with the object of my affections from way back then has really messed up my head on that one.  It’s probably messed up my head in a lot of other ways too, all coming back to my creative sense.  It just feels too tender right now.

Every now and then I see a beautiful face or a beautiful pose and it sticks with me and I have to at least sketch it out, and maybe improvise on it a tad.  So I’m not completely dried up.  I suppose as long as there are beautiful males on this planet I will never be completely without inspiration.  I sketched this out a little while ago, based loosely on a photo I ran across online.  The pose was lovely, and you very seldom see nice cutoffs anymore.  But I had to change it around a tad to suit me…

This is the sort of thing that causes some of my gay friends to question my homosexuality.  But I am not into hunks, and I really hate the pejorative ‘twink’.  Not that ‘twink’ doesn’t fit some guys, just not the guys I like.  This guy’s entirely a figment of my imagination, like the pirate I drew a while ago, and like the pirate, I felt somehow like I was coming to know him while I drew him.  He’s a bit on the lean side, but fit, and I tried to put a sense of playful energy in the pose, like before he’ll give you a roll in the sack he’d like to run you around the court a few times first to size you up.  He’s no airhead.  I tried to put some intelligence in the direct look he’s giving you.  But he likes to be sexy too.  There was a time when that was okay.  

I’ve worked on the pirate some more too, since you last saw him…most background stuff.  Hopefully I’ll have enough energy this week to charcoal and ink up these two.  But I can’t promise that.  There’s a part of me that’s aching now…really, really badly…and it’s all tied up in with the drawing side of my brain.

Now I’m going for a cigar walk.  Then to bed.  Hopefully to dream. 

…then you may have what it takes to be an artist.

Lesson One:

No silly…not that Pirate.   This Pirate… 

This is a work in progress.  I’m trying desperately to get my drawing groove back.  I took a sick day off today because my insomnia came roaring back last night for some reason and I felt utterly miserable this morning.  I stumbled down to the basement to do a laundry and laid eyes on the little pirate statuette I’d bought in Catalina a couple of summer’s ago.  My brother probably remembers it.  The subject is female but I took one look at it and knew I could draw a really sexy male pirate from it.  So I bought it and took it home and it’s been sitting on one of my art room shelves ever since.  This morning I picked it up and plopped it on my drafting table, taped some Strathmore to one of my drawing boards and somehow, even though I could barely think straight, managed to wrest out a pretty good pencil sketch of what I had in mind when I first set eyes on it.

A few slight adjustments to the body here and there…somewhat broader shoulders, a slightly different curve on the backside, a somewhat sharper jawline…and there was my beautiful and dangerous young pirate.  I think I’ll leave him blond.

I’ve some more work to do on this, mostly background stuff now.  I need to work on the monkey a bit too.  Then I’ll ink it up.  Stay tuned. 

Anyone can do it!

Step 1:   Create a basic stick-man frame.

Step 2: Add the major body segments as oblong bean shapes…head, neck, chest, arms, legs…and so on…

Step 3:  Add the detail.

NEXT: Can you draw the pirate?

This program is not bad at all.  I could do things with it…

The color tools work so much more naturally for me then the ones in Painter.  Ironically, Painter bills itself as a tool that goes to great lengths to mimic the behavior of traditional artist’s tools…even down to mimicking a wide assortment of paper types.  But I’ve just never been able to get it to work.  This was my first effort at a color drawing in Sketchbook Pro and I’m very pleased with it.  The software never once fought me.  I can do some stuff with this…

Still experimenting with Sketchbook Pro.  I thought I’d post one in the middle of working on it, so you can still see the rough sketch lines leading up to a finished drawing…

Sketchbook Pro is making it really easy for me to use the Wacom tablet to sketch out a drawing on.  Here I’ve tightened up the lines a bit and started to add some color… 

I don’t have a fill tool in Sketchbook Pro, so I’m having to add color one brush stroke at a time.  But there are layers so what I did was add another layer over my pencil lines and used a pen tool to draw the inks over the pencils.  Then I added another layer for color between the two and started coloring in.  I’ve started here, to erase some of the lines on the pencil layer to tighten things up a bit.

In retrospect, if I’d had half a brain I’d have done the pencils in a light blue color, so I could easily differentiate between them and the inks on the ink layer while working on it.  But I’m not used to using blue pencil like some other artists, so it didn’t occur to me until I was well into the inking process.  

There is a marker tool, which works to blend the colors between layers.  I’ll start using that later to add depth and texture.

I notice I keep using the terminology of traditional tools to explain what I’m doing, even though it only applies in metaphor.  I’m not really creating pencils or inks…just using software tools that mimic how those things work.  It seems a bit dishonest to call them "pencils".  But I can’t think of another word to use here.