In the Laboratory

 

Here's a little fellow who seems to belong to a genus of critters that I'm beginning to think of as "Advanced Stick Figures."  Since he has a labcoat and a clipboard, he must be a scientist.  Television has taught me that.  

Since we're (or rather I'm - you may be thinking about something entirely unrelated at the moment) on the subject of scientists, I'll take this opportunity to repost my rules for safe and proper laboratory behavior:

• It doesn't go in your mouth.
• It doesn't belong in your ear.
• Don't stick it up your nose.
• Don't get it in your eyes. 
• Don't drop it on the floor. 
• Don't touch it if it's on fire. 
• If it smells bad, it's probably bad for you. 
• If it smells good, it's probably worse. 
• If you can't smell it at all . . . well, it's been nice knowin' ya. 
• If it can be pointed, be careful where you point it. 
• Just because the radiation won't kill you now is no excuse. 
• Read the label first. 
• If it ain't broke, don't break it. 
• If two substances are in separate containers, there's probably a good reason for it. 
• If it kills other living things, there's a chance it's not good for you either. 
• If metal dissolved in it, odds are your fingers won't fare much better. 
• An experiment that causes physical pain is a poorly designed experiment. 
• If you didn't do control experiments, you didn't do any experiments. Start over. 
• A result you don't like is still a result. 
• If it didn't work the first time, repeat the experiment. 
• If it did work the first time, repeat the experiment. 
• That which does not kill you . . . usually hurts like hell anyway. 
• Learn to cope with frustration. 
• Lightning may not strike the same spot twice, but just about everything else will (corollary: if it exploded last time, it's likely to explode this time too).

Knights of the Mystic Turnip

I seem to be stuck on a root vegetable theme.  If that is so, so be it.  I'd include an in-depth description of who these little spuds are, but to be honest, I haven't the foggiest.  In fact, I can go so far as to say that I don't carrot all.

Let an umbrella be your umbrella

By the way (for those who arrived late), my lovely wife is now setting her thoughts on the subjects of frugality and ecological responsibility adrift upon the breezes of the interwebs at ecofrugality.blogspot.com.  Check it out if you get a chance.  It's far more interesting than this stuff.

Komodo Bunny

Another hybrid, drawn at the New Jersey Folk Project spring festival:

Improbable hybrids

A couple of new drawings.  Drawn for a contest over at DeviantArt.

The premise is that they are the products of genetic engineering gone wrong, the first a monstrous cross between Homos sapiens and Aquila chrysaetos, the second a more innocuous cross between two organisms whose names I can't recall at the moment.  Perhaps a polar bear and a Vidalia onion.

It is actually an interesting exercise to imagine what a hybrid between two or more distinct species might look like.  It's very difficult to avoid drawing chimeras.

How about that?

When Daniel asked me to draw this, I never dreamed that the editors of the journal could be whimsical enough to put it on the cover. But then again, what do I know?

The Drawing of the Three

Anyone who's never played an MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game - how's that for a mouthful?) probably won't appreciate this drawing very much. Anyone who has will likely recognize the holy trinity of DPS, tank, and healer - a necessity in fantasy worlds where exploration and adventure invariably end up taking a back seat to game mechanics and the acquisition of stuff.

On occasion, I try to rationalize this trio of healer, tank, and DPS (damage per second, if you care) by drawing a parallel between it and the classic villain combo of brains, brawn, and gun (Vizzini, Fezzik, and Inigo Montoya from The Princess Bride are a good example), but after some contemplation, the reasoning always breaks down. It's just that I have so much difficulty trying to figure out where the brains are....

The Grim Peeper

Parallel Evolution

In my regular perambulations about the Web, I often dwell on various sites devoted to upcoming movies.  I'm watching fewer movies these days (especially in theaters - waaay too expensive) than I have at any other time in my life (barring infancy, I suppose), but I just can't seem to stay away from reviews and trailers and all the other goodies that the movie studios put out in an attempt to distract us from our Internet long enough that we might wander into a theater and give them money.

Today, I ran across a poster for a movie called "The Tale of Desperaux."  I'd seen the trailer a little while back when we made our annual trip to the local cinema (to see "Wall-E") and had liked it pretty well - the movie looked cute and it had been the only trailer they'd shown that hadn't made me want to crawl under my seat and retch.  But I did a double-take when I saw the poster.  Here's why:

On the left is a picture I drew in March of 2000.  You can find it here along with comments left by various viewers going back over eight years.  On the right is the aforementioned movie poster.  Interesting, eh?  

And here's another one that I discovered a few years ago:

On the left is a sketch I made of a kobold, drawn in either early 2000 or late 1999.  It's been posted online here since early 2000 also (along with this companion piece, which is actually explicitly identified as a kobold in its description).  On the right is a picture of a kobold from the game World of Warcraft, which was announced in late 2001 and was not released until late 2004 (which was when I first saw it).

Ever get that feeling someone's been rummaging around in your brain?

No one has, of course.  These are coincidences, the results of a few people (out of the over six billion on this planet) having similar ideas and writing them down.  With both of these drawings, the "creative process" I used was fairly straightforward.  If you want to draw a picture of a tiny warrior, you give him a little sword to show that he's a warrior and a great big helmet to show that he's tiny (and to give the whole thing a humorous tinge).  If you want to draw a picture of a kobold as a sort of a faerie/goblin miner (as kobolds are in some German folklore), you give him a mining pick and a candle (it's dark underground).  If you want to make it a little more interesting, you sit the lit candle on top of his head so he has both his hands free to mine.

In both cases, even if the odds are a billion-to-one of someone else having the same idea and drawing a picture of it, the odds are pretty good that at least a couple folks have done it.

But it's still pretty eerie when it happens.

Gnome Redux

He's not nearly as pretty in profile, is he?

The Gnome

Here's a (relatively) recent drawing that is only now making its way online:

In one of the later Harry Potter books, an unfortunate garden gnome is captured by some of the Weasley children and transformed into a very grumpy Christmas tree ornament.  This was a request from a friend of mine and the first drawing I've done in pencil in a rather long time.  

And so it begins....

Well crud.  Now I have a blog.

Can't say that I ever really wanted a blog, though I'm sure that if you'd offered me one when I was a child (long ago in the days before flying cars and subcutaneous answering machines), I'm sure that I would have wanted one desperately, believing a blog to be some sort of exotic creature along the lines of a dragon or hedgehog....

But now I know better.

And yet here I am.

My old website is going to be disappearing soon, so I'm going to be trying out alternative content publishing methods, i.e., finding different places to put stuff like this:

The idea is that I'll be putting new stuff here along with whatever earthshaking opinions or observations I can't keep to myself. 

Older drawings I'll be moving HERE.

And, as always, a lot of my good stuff can be found HERE.

If you should happen to stumble upon this page, let me know what you think.  Constructive criticism and commentary are always welcome.