Finished with this one…

…and then made a couple prints with the good art room inkjet…

Oh lord have mercy I do believe I’ve outdone myself this time. This photo does Not do the final print justice. I really hit the bullseye with this one. Just delighted with it.

I was browsing the work of an illustrator whose ink wash techniques I greatly admire, for some pointers as to how to do shading on arm and leg joints, when I came across one of his that inspired some imagining on my part.

I did this in Procreate on the iPad Plus…I find myself doing more and more artwork digitally like this. It was easy…I knocked it out in just a hour or so, then went to bed. When I looked at it this morning I saw I’d got the scale of his head wrong in the initial drawing, and that was an easy fix in Procreate. I find I need to put things away for a while so I can look at them with fresh eyes later and see where I get it wrong in the detail. I’m going to keep working on this throughout the day here at Casa del Garrett, then get back to the next episode of A Coming Out Story.

I’ve no backstory for this character…I just spent a few moments visualizing him and then drew him adding detail as I went. He’s a character in some fantasy or science-fiction adventure but I’m fine with not knowing the details of his story as I draw. It gives him an infinite universe to exist in. I did that with several panels in A Coming Out Story episode 19. Three panels in that episode are fantasy imaginings that could be about anything. Consider them the beginnings of stories that could go anywhere.

Yes, yes…costuming in fantasy and science-fiction illustrations and especially in comics can look ridiculously scant. But then again…so what? It’s all wish fulfillment. The stories…the artwork…the sexy characters…

This first weekend of 2022 has been a bust here in central Maryland. So I decided to finish a drawing I started a while back in Procreate on the iPad plus…

May our 2022 be as much fun as this guy looks like he is…

Getting better and better with Procreate. Here’s one I just finished this morning. A fantasy hiking companion…

Managed to finally hike all the way to the Maryland/Pennsylvania boarder yesterday. Today I’m stiff as a board. I think at my age I need to be more religious about doing the stretching exercises my cardio therapists are teaching me.

I think I’m pretty well done with the blue ink roughs on the figure. I had his body shape wrong due to putting the book in place before I’d finished with the rest of him and it confused me a tad. The solution was to put the book on its own layer I could switch off and on as I worked on drawing him.

Procreate has a nice perspective grid you can switch on and set vanishing points for. It’s going to help a lot as I draw the bookshelves he’s leaning against. 

Wow…the JPEG artifacts here are really annoying. But I’m just posting these to share my process with whoever stumbles onto this blog. When I post a finished piece I’ll use a better compression algorithm.  

Probably get the inks on the figure done, or close to it, tomorrow. I haven’t decided on a title for it yet.

Well…okay that How To Draw…thing is a bit of a running gag around here and this is a more serious attempt to to do some quality sexy sketching, and keep my mind occupied on something other than how quarantine is making it sadly obvious that I need a road trip Now and I Can’t Go Anywhere!

This one’s going to take a while like the last one did, because the plan here is he’s leaning up against a huge set of library shelves. Dozens and dozens of books. It’s the sort of drudge work I dislike because it gets so boring and I get impatient and then I get sloppy. So I’m trying also to consider this an exercise in artistic self discipline. 

I’m being a tad more Safe For Work here on these than I’ve occasionally been here on the website because I’m also sharing these to my Facebook page, and so they’ll probably show up in co-workers screens. They all know I’m gay, and my employer is fantastic about supporting their LGBT employees, nobody really cares. I’m just trying to stick to a line I’ve drawn about my sexy sketching for the time being so I can freely share. But deep down it’s also, maybe mostly, about my getting more comfortable being an out gay man.

You’d think by now that wouldn’t be an issue, but I came out to myself in the early 1970s, and it’s been a struggle all my life to simply give myself permission to be me. I gain a little more ground every year but it’s never the whole of it. Gay kids of my generation had to hide their desires. The adults we grew into have had to work and freeing themselves from that ball and chain ever since. My cartoon series A Coming Out Story is about the beginning of that struggle. I’m 66 now and it never has ended. I’m actually feeling proud of myself sharing these on Facebook with Everyone and shining a small light on this part of me unafraid (mostly). 

Also, it Is fun to walk up to the line and not go over it. I would much rather be teased than have my buttons pushed.

It’s too late for me to have the young adult life I should have had, that we all should have had. But I can at least nod to it from time to time, look back and relive the wonder of discovering the beauty of men.  Well…of a certain sexy to me type…

Finished. On to the next one tomorrow. But must mow the lawn first…

You can go back through the sequence of these and almost see my desperate hunt and peck, erase, draw, erase, draw, erase, draw technique. I will frequently draw something one evening that I am thoroughly satisfied with, that upon viewing the next morning looks completely wrong. Once I drew a figure seated at a park bench with his legs crossed and I gave him backwards left/right feet by mistake and didn’t see it for a couple days. Luckily I was in the stage of things where I was adding colors to it in the computer and I was able to fix it. But the inks in traditional media still have that mistake in them.

This is why cartoonists don’t always sell or give their originals away.

This is helping me stay sane during quarantine. When the abyss stares back into you, shout beauty back.

This one’s probably not as safe for work as the others. But I’m dealing with quarantine and a variety of other things I won’t bring up now and I reckon I’m just more willing to share this side of me and my artwork than usual. Hopefully everyone who can’t handle that Bruce is gay and likes guys is already out of my life (Hi Glenn!), or has already defriended me on Facebook (Hi Burt!), and this is about as brazen as I get artistically anyway.

He’s looking out into a bright sunny dawn, from inside a darkened old stone building. This is going to take some more work than the others, so probably won’t be finished with it for several days. I actually have to spend most of my awake time teleworking until the weekend.

Well this one’s done…

I think I’m really warming now to the advantages of digital media. And I’m actually getting comfortable with the tactile feel of drawing on a glass iPad screen. I didn’t think that would be possible.

Probably start another one tomorrow. That’s a Jackson Pollock bandana he’s sporting. In color while the rest of him is grayscale because I do that mixing up color and grayscale when it works for me. Have I mentioned how much I hate that damn hanky code?

If you were to ask me why I’m doing these just now, and if I was still religious, I’d refer you to the morning headlines and the daily death toll, then point to this one and say that beautiful guys are my proof that, despite everything, God is good. Well I’m not a believer anymore and haven’t been for decades now, but I can still say they’re my proof that life is good and worth living despite everything in it that makes you hurt. Like the daily death toll from COVID-19. Like Trump and his death cult republican base. I very much need these proofs.

In my worst jags of cynicism and pessimism I never expected to see the human depravities I’m seeing now. Not even during the AIDS plague when they were all but openly rejoicing in our suffering and dying. They’ve gotten worse since then. So I draw beauty. When the abyss stares back into you, answer it with beauty.

Doing another one….

No go-go boots this time. I’ve moved on.

These are coming out of me pretty easily now. I seem to be doing more work than usual at the kitchen table lately. Possibly because the iPad is easy to use here whilst snacking out. More probably because the basement isn’t really a good place for an art room as its only light is from the ceiling fluorescents. But I have no other place in the house to put it. There is no sunlight. And the bar is way too nearby. That’s really not a good atmosphere to be creative in. Unless maybe you’re a detective novel writer.

The kitchen seems to be my hangout when I’m not teleworking. But I’m beginning to appreciate why Van Gogh once said it was either paint or go mad. But then he went mad anyway, so there’s that.

I’m going to make his bandana a tie-dye just to confuse everyone…

I still see a few tweaks I need to make…but this is pretty much finished. I’m really coming to love Procreate’s charcoal sticks. I’ve tried a bunch of digital drawing apps and none of them get the charcoal sticks right. Procreate gets them almost perfect. Now if it only had a torn kneaded rubber eraser.

[Update…] Okay I’m done here. Tweaks made, I’m satisfied with it. Now to move on to the next…

More progress at the breakfast table…

Whenever I do one of these I keep thinking about a cartoon R. Crumb did in “XYZ Comics” back in the day, that had a panel in it of him drawing (it looked like he was using an old Rapidograph) one of his sexy ladies (he had a very distinctive type of full figured gal he liked) with a caption to the effect that he drew to get the objects of his desire. But I suppose we all do that. Look at this…

This is the sculptor Luo Li Rong and one of her works. This isn’t just an artistic reverie on the female form. Check out some of her other work. That’s a muse. Those pieces of hers ache with desire struck awe.

I will never be near that good. But I have my muses. They keep me feeling alive.

Plinking around with Procreate on my iPad Pro, to keep my mind occupied and myself from climbing the walls during quarantine. It’s bad enough we have to severely limit our outside travels, but it’s been raining almost daily here in central Maryland and that’s been keeping me indoors far too much. So I really need to keep my mind occupied with Something.

And what better something than sexy sketching, I ask you…

I do confess that skin tight short shorts and go-go boots thing the ‘phobe was going on about a couple years ago still intrigues me. I could muse on this for hours. Days even.

[Update…]  I went back and revisited that blog post from July 4, 2018 (“I Get My Best Ideas From Homophobes!”) and discovered the correct quote was “skin tight short-shorts and go-go boots”. I didn’t get it quite right when I posted this sketch to my Facebook page, probably because the “skin tight” part goes without saying.

Further refinement of the sketch I posted the other day.  I’m experimenting with Procreate’s charcoal effect brushes. This was mostly done with the Willow charcoal stick. The boots were done with the medium charcoal block. I used the dry ink brush to ink over the technical pencil sketch lines.

I’m actually coming to like this mode of sketching and drawing now. It’s still a little clumsy to me because I’m still having to break concentration every now and then to find a functionality I need right then. And the tactile feel of drawing on glass still seems very weird. I’m never quite sure then I put the stylus down where the mark will appear. But I’m getting more use to it and for a hunt and peck draftsman like myself it’s very nice to be able to draw, erase, draw, erase, draw, erase, and not worry about digging a hole in the paper.

…and once again…Thank You Ted, for the Motivation I really needed!

This article in The Advocate came across my news stream the other day…

Calls to for the vice mayor of Dixon, Calif., to step down hit a fever pitch over the weekend following a post to his blog in which he called for Straight Pride American Month, or “SPAM” as he unironically called it. In his wildly homophobic post, Dixon Vice Mayor Ted Hickman gleefully clung to the differences between straight and gay people, referring to LGBT people as “tinker bells,” “fairies,” and men in “skin tight short-shorts and go-go boots.” 

You say men in skin tight short-shorts and go-go boots like it’s a bad thing Ted…  So I thought I should sketch that to see if he’s right about the wrongness of it all…

Well I certainly don’t see anything wrong with that Ted. You must be confused. 

Some months ago on the advice of Rick Worley, he of “A Waste of Time” comics, I splurged on an iPad Pro 12.9 specifically so I could use it to sketch on, and maybe get some episodes of A Coming Out Story done with it. What I discovered is drawing on a glass surface is different enough from drawing on paper that initially I was struggling so badly with it just to get anything decent out of me I just kept walking away from it. Adding to the struggle was the iOS interface model is to have no or very few actual menus, but instead use stylus or finger gestures and taps to access different functions, and it kept making me break concentration on what I was drawing to go on an Easter egg hunt for some function I needed just then…like how the hell do you Undo!?

So the iPad quickly fell into disuse. Which itself was a source of stress since I’d paid so much for it. I’d bought the version with cellular data functionality because I wanted to travel with it and I didn’t want to have to depend on WiFi hubs, some of which could be letting hackers into your computer. I bought the version with the least amount of memory on the basis that I’d store my sketches in one of the cloud services and it was still about a thousand bucks, plus another 250 for the Apple Pencil (to draw on it with) and a leather sleeve for it that had a holder for the pencil. All told with the Apple Care and taxes it was close to 1500 bucks and for that money I needed to be using it. The problem was how to motivate myself into learning to draw on glass, and getting familiar with a new user interface.

So…thanks Ted!