I’ve actually restarted work on an art piece I began several years ago and I can’t tell whether that’s improved my head space or that a better headspace has somehow made it possible for me to go back to my drafting table. I suspect it’s the former because I have no idea what could have possibly improved my mindset at this time. But it could be anticipation of my upcoming Walt Disney World DVC vacation. But there’s pain there too, this particular visit.

The art piece is an absolutely unique one for me, in that it’s a pencil and charcoal drawing, no ink, and there will only ever be that one original. Only my oil paintings have been one-offs up to now. The artwork doesn’t scan well but I’ve no plans on making high quality scans anyway. I wanted to try something entirely in pencil and charcoal on high quality cold press paper, not the Strathmore board I usually use for my artwork. That sort of paper is usually used for water colors but I thought the texture would be good for how I work with charcoal. I wanted to try something without ink, all grey scale in graphite and charcoal, and I wanted it to be a finished piece, not something I would tweak later in the computer. Something frameable.

But that caused my innate fear of failure to bring a halt to it after I got only a third of the way through it. The computer has turned into something of a crutch over time, and it’s why I don’t use media I can’t easily erase and redraw over. Some of the most amazing political art I’ve seen employed Conte Crayon or grease pencil and once you put something down with one of those that’s it, unless you’re working for publication and can get away with white gauche correction like Herblock did (you should see his originals…they’re full of that…but it didn’t show up in the halftone newsprint process so he knew what he could get away with). One of the grand masters of the form, David Low, once said that every cartoon he did took three days to complete, two spent in labor, and one “removing the appearance of labor.” I have tried over the years to take heart in that. Instead I’ve felt badly all the time about not getting over my fear of making a mistake on the drawing and learning to use those old techniques of the masters. This was going to be an attempt at making a start on that and I choked.

So I put it aside, but somewhere I could see it every time I went down into my art room. I needed it to remind me.

Somehow, the other day, something clicked and I could see a way forward with it, and I got a renewed interest in it coming from who knows where. Maybe it was something adjacent to my sudden interest in developing and scanning in some film that had been languishing for years. Maybe it was a willingness to visit its themes, which are full of so much joy and pain both after watching and reading so many new stories of young gay couples in love. But one day I took another look and I saw a way forward with it, and I put it back on my drafting table for the first time in years. I’ve been working on it in little baby steps for several days now and for the first time in years I’m feeling really good about where it’s going.

The work in progress is here at the end of this blog post, but be warned: It’s not pornography, I don’t do pornography, but it’s probably NSFW either. As I said, it doesn’t scan well but I can snap some shots of it off my iPhone. My intent though is there will only ever be one copy.

There’s a backstory.

Somewhere, possibly a Fark Photoshop contest, I came across an image of someone wearing bluejeans. But the image is tightly focused on just their hips…bare skin above the beltline and these tight fitting blue jeans below…with a product tag hanging off one of the belt loops. The tag reads:

WARNING: Removing this article of clothing guarantees the wearer a portion of your soul.

Most of us, except for low life creeps, know how that works. You lay down with someone and afterward they will be somewhere deep in your soul forever, for better or worse, but hopefully for the better. I thought the image was cute in its way and I made a print and stuck it on the wall behind the art room bar.

Time passes, the universe expands, and one day my brother came for a visit to Casa del Garrett East. While he was here he wanted to go to the local Harley-Davidson dealers to get a t-shirt from each with their locality on it, because collecting those is a Harley thing. So we went to the dealer off RT 40 near White Flint and while he was browsing around so was I.

Time was I really wanted a Sportster, so I was gawking at some of those. Then I walked over to where they had their fashion selection. Leather jackets and various Harley branded items. Over in the t-shirt section where the usual motorcycle culture prints, including one kinda rude one I’d seen many times before…

Gas, Grass, or Ass. Nobody Rides For Free.

And looking at that t-shirt I remembered the image behind the bar back home and thought: there’s two sides to that coin isn’t there.

And immediately an image came to mind.

A young guy is camped camped on the side of a dirt backroad somewhere in the middle of nowhere. It’s somewhere deep in the empty wide open spaces of the American southwest. The road he’s camped beside goes in a straight line and vanishes somewhere over the distant horizon. His motorcycle is nearby, and also his empty sleeping bag and camp stove. The young man stands looking to the sunrise in the far horizon with his morning cup of coffee in one hand, and the other resting on his naked hip; he’s only wearing a t-shirt since he’s just got himself awake and hasn’t dressed yet. His back is to the viewer, his t-shirt drapes suggestively just above his very cute butt. On the back of his t-shirt is a message that reads: Nobody Rides For Free.

This came fully formed to mind in that moment I saw the t-shirt there at the Harley dealer. The only change I made to it when I set down to draw it was initially he had a companion with him who was still asleep in his sleeping bag. But the more I thought about it I decided that, no, he’s alone on his road trip to somewhere.

At first you might think it’s just an effort in sexy art. Which it is, but there’s more to it I hope the viewer sees. It’s not just about whatever struggles he’s having in the romance department (because he wouldn’t be wearing that t-shirt if things had been easy for him), it’s about he’s looking ahead to the life he wants to find…somewhere, somehow, over that horizon. Desire and dreams. Life as a road trip. Nobody rides for free.

It’s interesting how the artistic process works in your head. Or mine anyway. I have such a vivid imagination that I rarely do preliminary drawings and roughs. I think it until I can see in my mind exactly how I want it to look before I start drawing. I do make tweaks once I start, but they’re very few.

So it was really important to me that I get this one right. It had to be my best ever, and deep down inside I don’t see myself as being that good. But I work on it because there’s no other way. I have to get it out of me. And this one says just about everything I’ve ever wanted to say in my art paintings and drawings…if not my art photography, which is just relentlessly bleak (unless I get to work with a model which I haven’t in decades (are you out there Robbie? I bet you’re still beautiful…thanks for nothing Jon and Joe…)). My other art is a lot more positive. This includes A Coming Out Story. The political cartoons are what they are.

So here is the work in progress. Please be kind…it is nowhere near finished, but hopefully you can see where it’s going. Some of this is cropped because of how I had to capture it in the iPhone, so there is more to it on the sides than you see here. There’s probably still months of work ahead because I’m doing this in baby steps. I may post more updates as I go along.

Something seems to be reawakening inside of me. Hopefully it stays away for a while. I feel so much better today than I have in a long time.

It was an all too brief period of time in young American male fashion. But I look back upon it fondly, and reminisce about the life I once had, before the heart attack, before I found myself suddenly knocking at the door to 70 and realizing that dating and mating part of my life is all in the rear view mirror now, and I didn’t even get to partake because back then gay teenagers didn’t exist and gay men were all better off dead than in love.

I have this theory that the fashions and styles we find attractive as adults are what were in vogue when we were coming of age. We glom onto that period and all those first crushes and first heartbreaks, and forever after it’s what gets the heart beating.

The problem for me (artistically and…otherwise) is that while “retro” fashions seem to have made a comeback, it’s only among the ladies. Long hair low risers and cutoffs haven’t made much headway among males young and slender enough that, IMO, they could benefit from them. Okay…so I could benefit from them.

It’s a shame. So when I get an itch to do some sexy sketching I usually end up riffing on photos of pretty young ladies I see online or in magazine fashion ads. When you know the basic skeletal and muscular differences between the sexes it’s not hard to convert female to male if you really, really like what they’re wearing or how they’ve done their hair. This drawing I posting some months ago being a good example…

I actually sold a print of that one.

I have a folder in my NAS of pose material that maybe I’ll get to someday and make a drawing from. Stuff I’ve got from various online sites and Facebook pages. Like the one I just started following a few days ago of 70s memories.

That photo was labelled Teenagers hanging out on Van Nuys Blvd. Obviously from the styles and the cars it was taken in the very early 1970s, or maybe even the late 60s. The time of my sexual awakening and that first magical crush. I’m thinking it’s a night shot under very bright street lamps, otherwise why would the sky above that store in the background be so dark. The comments on it are mostly about how street racing at that location was a thing back in the day. Mostly.

I take one look at this photo and instantly the longhair leaning up against the foreground car (check out the mag wheels) gets my attention. Nice jeans, thinks I…okay…I can do something with that. No smirking, please…I didn’t realize at first…. Anyway, it definitely speaks to that time in my life. Those low risers. That long beautiful hair. The floppy sleave shirt. I don’t think many people nowadays get how wide belts were back then, and the huge belt buckles that went with them. You can’t see the feet, but I’m pretty sure those are bells.

So I immediately grab a copy of the image for my “poses” folder. And I’m already thinking about what I need to change around a tad to make her a cute long haired guy…

I’ll have to adjust her pelvis a tad…oh…wait…

Nope. Don’t have to adjust anything.

The pose was just enough to make it unclear which sex you were looking at. What clued me in was figuring out how to change the curve of the hips to the thighs and then realizing that work had already been done for me. I wish I had his jeans too. And the 20-something body I had once upon a time that fit into them.

And…a boyfriend back then.

I wish I had more beautiful guys like that in my world now. Even if, as I said, that part of my life is in the rear view mirror. It would still be nice to have some beauty in my life, even if it’s just to look at now and then. But American males don’t like those styles anymore because HEY ARE YOU SOME KINDA QUEER OR WHAT!? I’m not even all that pretty, and wasn’t back in the day, and I got cat-called lots just for wearing my hair long. I Still get those cat-calls. HEY HIPPY…ARE YOU A BOY OR A GIRL…HAW HAW HAW…

But what’s refreshing about the comments on that photo on that page is there wasn’t any of that. If you remember those days fondly enough to be following 70s memories pages, then you remember that was how guys dressed and wore their hair back then.

And it was all good. At least it was to coming of age gay teenager me.

So…anyway…if I do something with the figure in that photo I’ll post it here. Probably not use the shirt though.

Here’s a little something for the (according to my server logs) fans of my sketches of cute guys in cutoffs. They’re just wistful daydreaming on my part…I had no idea anyone really liked these. But while I was on vacation my web site got Google hits from people specifically looking for my name and cutoffs. Wow. I may be no Tom of Finland (whose males I never found attractive but I was in awe of his skill with a pencil) but I could do worse then be known for drawing beautiful guys in cutoffs.

Normally you Google for images of nice looking guys in cutoffs and what you get are a lot of pictures of guys who really shouldn’t be wearing these at all, which people post as a way of ridiculing cutoffs…or at any rate, cutoffs on guys. Yes, yes…you need the physique for it…but lotsa guys have that and in any case the ridicule isn’t about guys who have no fashion common sense, it’s about reenforcing the male fear of looking too sexy below the waste because that’s teh gay.

When I was a young adult this look wasn’t uncommon even on straight guys (though admittedly straight guys didn’t usually wear them quite This short…) and I guess my emerging libido just glommed onto it. But damn I like this look and I reckon I’ll just keep drawing it…

If this means I’m stuck in the past so be it. As I said, these are just the random wistful daydreams of a single guy. If you like them then I’m happy. If you think they’re ridiculous then go away.

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…

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!

…by the way…  Happy National Underwear Day!