BLOOD COUNT #2

Here's number 2. I added gray to this one to separate some things. It looked cleaner and easier to decipher than having a black table. I know the obvious solution would be to do it in color, but I like black and white comics sometimes.
Click to enlarge.

I don't know if it's true or not, but I read left-handed people prefer to work in black and white rather than color. I don't remember all the science behind it but at the time I read it, it seemed like they did some thorough research. I'm left handed and I can say I do enjoy black and white, but I don't know if it's my favorite.

BLOOD COUNT #1

Here's the 1st comic strip (of 2 completed so far) featuring a new character called Blood Count. (Get it? Wakka wakka!) My goal will be for him to die at the end of each comic strip, but I'm open to the idea of him living as long as he's miserable.

I couldn't decide whether to call him Blood Count or Vlad the Imp. I liked both equally. The only reason I went with "Blood Count" was so the next comic strip (coming Tomorrow) would work. Below is the exact same comic strip with a different title.

WEIRD OLD PUSH-DOWN TOYS

I like these things. I guess they came from gumball machines. They seem 60s-ish if I had to guess. They have springs inside so you can compress them. When compressed, little smart-aleck messages pop out of their heads.
"NEVER"
"DOWN WITH EVERYTHING"
The last guy just says the same thing as the 1st guy.

STRANGE PLAQUE

Here's a weird plaque given to me by my friend. It's a made of fake wood about an inch thick. Neither of us could figure it out. He said it was in his mom's attic. It's very nicely done and all but- - WHY?! Who would make this? The strangest part to me is the fact that is has a hole in the back so it can be hung on the wall. I can't imagine an appropriate time or place where this would be good on someone's wall.

Also it's manufactured from a mold, so there are more than one of these things on the Earth. If anyone knows please inform me. Although it's done very skillfully in a classic style it's almost frightening as it is. Look at their cold dead faces, especially that main guy's. Since there are 3 of them, they look like they're from kind of secretive ancient underworld organization. It's like a scene out of a horror movie. What's most disturbing to me is knowing that baby's gonna be dead soon, since tugging on one arm and one leg probably isn't gonna fix his colic. Even face down it probably won't fix it.

Maybe it's just a single piece of a bigger set? Maybe there were a big series of pictures showing the treatment of colic through the ages? Now that would explain everything, and THAT would definitely look good on a wall!

For the record, Yes, it's been on my wall. It lasted about as long as it took for my wife to see it and shame me into removing it.

BIBO CLOCK

If you look in novelty catalogs like Archie McPhee you already know what this is. If not, it's a Bibo clock. Bibo is a weird little elf guy who has problems. I want to like him but since he wakes me up in the morning I hate his guts.

When the alarm goes off, he chants out non-English weirdness and the light in his forehead blinks. I thought since he was made in Japan he was speaking Japanese, but I played it for a lady who speaks Japanese and she couldn't make heads or tails out of his jibber-jabber. You can see him in action on Youtube.

Side view. If you think that looks like his butt is sticking out...

...You would be right! What's the deal with that?! If you were an elf and you were going to wear an outfit, wouldn't the butt be the ONLY thing you'd really need to cover in the back? Why even bother? It would be like having shoes with no soles.
There. Now I'm not the only one who had to look at it.

CHRISTMAS! CHRISTMAS! CHRISTMAS!!

I felt cheated out of my Halloween this year. Before Halloween was even here the stores were already selling Christmas stuff. Thanksgiving isn't even here yet for crap's sake!! As I get older I am starting to dread Christmas. It took me a long time to be able to admit it to myself because as a kid it was the greatest day ever. As a kid the gifts poured in, as an adult I get a pair of socks.

In honor of Christmas I am submitting this festive red and green drawing. Print it full scale on card stock, cut it out and put it together! Fill it with red jellybeans or Advils or something. I made pills out of wooden dowels and painted them red. Merry Christmas!
CLICK TO ENLARGE

2 OLD PICTURES, 1 NEW

Here in my city we used to have a thing called Ohio River Arts Festival where painters, carvers, musicians, etc could set up booths and pretty big crowds would come to see. I was 18 or 19 here in this picture. I'm not sure why they quit having these shows; they seemed to be really popular. I remember a lot of people asking how I would go about carving a chicken. I was being serious when I said "cut off everything that's not a chicken" but I later learned that's a joke answer carvers like to say. I was being completely sincere when I said it.


This was an advertisement to draw businesses into the city. I was about 20 in this picture. Some people have commented on my luxurious eyebrows during this time period. Nice huh? I still have thick eyebrows but now they aren't as noticeable due to the graying factor.


This photo shows my sweet wife Mei with the current fatter, balder, grumpier and sloppier me.

THIS IS WHAT I'M WAITING TO SEE

AND ONE MORE THING QUESTOR-RELATED

This kind of goes with that last post, sort of. Here's a video of Questor making demands on the Earth. I used a free program called Audacity to create the sounds.

For the heck of it, here's a black and white version with old film scratches.

I know it would have been a more effective video if Questor wasn't just lounging on the couch in my living room, but I'm too lazy to walk over to the door and go outside. The door is AALLLLLL the way over there, and I'm over here.

If you watch this video and say "Hey, that doesn't make any sense!" don't think you're missing something. It really doesn't make any sense. I just wanted to test out the robot voice and see if it sounded roboty and looked right with a video of Questor moving his lips. The background noise is supposed to make it sound like he's on a different planet. I should go out to some rocky area with no trees, like a strip mine.

MINI-QUESTOR PROJECT PART 11

It's alive! It's alive! It's alive! mwa-ha-HA! The dowel in his head slid into the body but the hole was a bit loose. I squeezed out some of that Gorilla Glue onto some paper and rolled the neck dowel in it until there was a thin film around the circumference of the dowel, and let it puff up and dry. It formed a pseudo O-ring and gave the neck a friction fit. DONE!

For no reason, here are some random photos of the big and little Questor brothers.

Here is mini-Questor crawling out of his UFO.







And Happy Halloween! In spite of what they say about Christmas, I say Halloween is the most wonderful time of the year. You don't have to drive around in the miserable cold and icy snow going from store to store looking for gifts and worrying if they will like what you got them, or if you forgot someone, and never getting there because someone slid in the ice and crashed into your car and now you're standing out in the sleet waiting for the cops to come, and blah blah blah and so on and so forth!!!

You just sit around and eat candy and watch monster movies. That's the best night ever.

MINI-QUESTOR PROJECT PART 10

These are the final steps in the Mini-Questor project.

I painted his back details to match the colors of the original larger version.


I painted his front details. It's not very clear in this picture, but also I glued wires in the holes on his chest.


While that stuff dried I got some wire and bent it to match his antenna.


On the top of the antenna, I made a little ball and painted it yellow. The ball is made by rolling up some 2-part epoxy putty like the kind Billy Mays was always hawking on tv. Then I pushed it onto the wire before it cured. You have about 5 minutes and then it becomes as hard as a rock.


He's soooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo close to being finished now.


I used Gorilla Glue to glue the bubblegum machine container to his neck ring. Be careful with this stuff. The container says it expands 3 - 4 times its original size and they ain't kiddin! A tiny drop the size of a sesame seed expands to the size of junebug! If I didn't know better I'd swear it was the same thing as that spray foam insulation stuff. I just held it together by hand until the glue dried. It took about 10 minutes. When you are holding something tightly 10 minutes seems more like 30.


After that dried, I drilled a little hole in his helmet and into his brain for the antenna to attach. I didn't have a small drill bit the size of the skinny wire, so I put another straight piece of that same wire into the drill and used it to drill the hole. Then I used that Gorilla Glue again to mount the antenna onto the brain and the bubble.


Tomorrow after he's good and dry I'll put his head on his body and be done with him. YAY!

MINI-QUESTOR PROJECT PART 9

Two things happened today.

1. He got a white undercoat:


2. He got painted silver from head to toe.


I don't usually mess with an undercoat, but silver paint is a weird thing. It's very watery. It's almost like water with little metallic flakes mixed in. Without an undercoat, the silver paint seems to absorb into wood as many times as I care to brush it on. The white provides a barrier. Even with the white undercoat, it took 3 coats of silver before it looked evenly coated.

Tomorrow I'll do the detailing.

MINI-QUESTOR PROJECT PART 8

Painting-muscle engage!

His brain is a big ball of electronics. To simulate that I used gesso, which is a really thick acrylic, to make dots or bumps all over his head. I made an extra large bump for his nose. After that dried I painted it black.


After the black undercoat dried, I put random dots of random colors of paint all over his head. His nose was the innards of an earphone speaker. That, the eyes and mouth were the only things I actually had to do a good job on. The rest was just sloppy dots.

MINI-QUESTOR PROJECT PART 7

Robot construction continues.

His arms were glued into his body. Also I drilled some holes in his chest for wires to be attached.


His hips were glued into his body.


His head is temporarily resting in place to check the fit. I can't glue his helmet bubble to the neck ring until I paint his head. After his head is painted I'll give him an antenna.


After seeing him put together I noticed his arms were too long. I considered just leaving it but every time I looked at it, I couldn't NOT notice it. They were supposed to stop at the bottoms of his knees but they went down in a gorilla fashion almost to his feet. In this pic you can't tell so much because his elbows are bent. When they are straight he nearly drags his knuckles.


I cut his forearms in half and removed a chunk so they were the right size. Then I drilled a toothpick-sized hole in each of the 2 halves and glued them back together with a shortened toothpick.


Ahh... That's better.

MINI-QUESTOR PROJECT PART 6

Howdy! This is part-6 of a Who-Knows-How-Many-Parts series where I am making a miniature robot to match a larger version called Questor. This robot will have joints in his arms and legs so I can animate him in a film. Either animate him or control him like a marionette. Also his head will need to turn.

This picture shows the jetpack for his back. It's not easy to carve a piece this small without fileting my fingers. When it happens it's usually due to my laziness. If I wanted to go to all the trouble I could glue newspaper to a board and let that dry, then put a dot of glue on this jetpack and glue it to the newspaper and then let that dry, and then carve it on the board, and then pop the carving off the newspaper board and sand off the glue, but who wants to do all that?! It's quicker to just hold on to it and try to aim away from your hand when you carve into it. Usually it works okay. It only takes a few accidents to learn not to aim a sharp blade at yourself.

One time I was reaching for a chisel and I didn't see another chisel in the way, and cut my ring finger on the side, a little above where a ring would go. It cut a nerve and half of my finger stayed numb for 10 or more years. I didn't notice the feeling coming back into it month by month, but year by year I could tell it was getting better. Now it's fine.

Here's a front view of mini-Questor's chest. Besides the boat, everything is made from drilling holes and gluing in dowels. Even though the real version has gears on his chest I think it's small enough no one will notice if I don't put teeth on these dowels.

Back view. It's not exactly the same, but with paint I think it'll be okay.

Speaking of paint, he's almost ready it. I need to glue his hips and arms into his body and that's about it. Oh, he will also need an antenna. And then THAT'S about it.

MINI-QUESTOR PROJECT PART 5

It's a lazy Sunday afternoon; therefore I shall be lazy. All I have is this gizmo for his chest. On the big version I used a toy boat. Since I can't buy a toy boat this scale I had to make it out of wood.

I also glued the caps onto his hips so his legs stay on. No glue touched the leg, just the cap, so they can rotate freely.


I sanded a flat spot on his chest (see above pic) so this flat-backed boat would glue down firmly. In this picture you can also see I trimmed the excess from the hip pins so they are flush with the caps.
Yikes! Look at my scuffed up living room furniture! At this point it seems silly to try to protect it with a mat or newspaper. The reason I've been working on it in the living room is so I can watch old monster movies on tv while I tinker.

MINI-QUESTOR PROJECT PART 4

My robot child is in about the 4th trimester of his conceivement. Normally trimesters don't last this long but he's problem child.

I drew a hand on a chunk of wood and cut it out on the bandsaw. The hands were thin enough I only had to cut 1 hand and then slice it on edge to make 2 hands. Also I epoxied the arms into the shoulder pieces. This photo shows the hands before I smoothed them up with chisels and sand paper.

There's a hole in each side of the body. That's where the shoulders will be glued in place. The free-spinning larger ring (see last post) will be the only part that gets glued into the body. The hole is deep enough so the cap on the end won't touch anything and the arm will rotate.

I went ahead and glued his shoulder plates onto his body so I could see if I needed to do any adjusting on the arms before there were glued in.

Now his feet are glued on and I glued pins in his knees, so his legs are complete.

This is a hip/leg dry fit. You can see the pins in the hips are extra long. After I glue the caps on I will trim off the excess. It's better to have too much than not enough. It's finally starting to look like something now.

Tomorrow I'll work on his robotic chest gizmos.

MINI-QUESTOR PROJECT PART 3

This is part 3 of my mini robot-building surgery. I'm making a miniature version of THIS larger robot I built earlier.

The head is a wooden bead. The large version has lots of electronics all over it, but I don't want to attempt all of that at this scale. I'll let the paint simulate that stuff. I mostly just need a round shape with protruding eyes and mouth. The eyes are smaller beads. I drilled shallow holes so the eye beads would sit 1/2-way deep and glued them in place. I had to make a mouth because I couldn't think of anything else to use. It's nice when there's some found piece of plastic you can take off another object, and I do that when I can, but this particular project isn't lending itself very well to things like that.

Here's a layout of the pieces I have so far. The large original robot has upside-down banana split dishes for feet. I carved fluting around the edges of these wooden feet to match the larger version.

To make elbows I did these 3 things in this order:

1. I wrapped some wire around a nail to make a toothpick-sized loop.

2. I drilled a toothpick-sized hole through the edge of a dowel, toward the end.

3. I cut a slot perpendicular to the hole using a bandsaw (very carefully.)

These are the shoulder joints. These were the most worrisome pieces so far. I drilled holes in the ends of 2 dowels, and cut them at 45 degrees on the opposite ends. The 45 degree mitered ends were glued together to make this bend.

There are 2 different sizes of wooden rings here. I am sliding the larger ring on first and it will spin freely without glue. The 2nd smaller ring will be slid on and glued so it captures the larger free-spinning ring and keeps it from falling off.

Now I cut off the excess pin. Notice the hacked up desk I'm working on? Oops. It WAS new. My wife's not too happy about that since it's a piece of furniture in out living room.

What I have now are the finished shoulder joints. the larger ring will allow the arm to rotate forward and backward.

Tomorrow I'll get to the arms and hands. Be here! Same robot time, same robot channel.

MINI-QUESTOR PROJECT PART 2

Day 2 of the mini-Questor project:

These are the legs. I made them with an X-Acto knife, a drill, and various diameter dowels. If you are careful and don't get in a hurry you can slice out a sliver at a time without breaking anything.

This is the hip piece. It will be glued into the body, and the legs will attach to it. I made it by VEEERRRRRRY carefully drilling into the center of the horizontal dowel and gluing a vertical dowel in it. Also I drilled into the ends and put smaller dowels in those holes.

The black plastic piece is from a car air freshener I bought at the dollar store. It was shaped like a roulette wheel. I only needed the middle part. It will be used as the Saturn ring around mini-Questor's neck. The dowel piece is his neck. I had to drill a hole in the the end and glue in a smaller dowel to match the hole diameter in the plastic piece.

The neck dowel slides into the plastic ring like this:

I notched out a groove in the plastic ring so it and the bubblegum machine container will fit together.

Those small donut-like pieces are caps to hold the legs onto the hips. They are pieces of dowels with holes in their centers.

More tomorrow

MINI-QUESTOR PROJECT PART 1

As a part of a larger movie project I'd like to do, I need a scaled-down version of my Questor robot. He needs to fit inside the UFO I made a while back. Also he needs to be articulated so he can move around and do things.

To start, I got a small bubblegum prize container for the helmet. I scaled photos of the Questor robot so when I printed it, the helmet was the same size as the bubblegum prize container.

The main base to which all things connect on this mini robot will be his chest, so that's what I started with. I carved a piece of mahogany to match the size of my printed Questor pic.

Next I carved some shoulder pieces going off the print for the right scale. I scooped out the insides with that round U-shaped chisel you see in the photo.


To firmly attach the shoulder pieces to the body, the connecting contours need to tightly match each other. The best sanding block I could use to match the body contour is the body itself. I wrapped a piece of sand paper around the body, and then . . .

. . . Holding the sand paper in place, I sanded the joining edge of the shoulder pieces until they snugged up against the body.

After removing the sand paper the shoulder pieces match up very nicely.

That's it for Day 1. Robot creation continues tomorrow.

UPSCALE HIGH-QUALITY FILM

Here's a film for the most refined and discerningly cultured tastes. Theater-lovers be warned, when you watch it, your emotions will surely bubble over. You will experience joy, fear, sadness, and possibly tears. Men, don't let your ladies see you cry. Ladies, grab a tissue and get cozy. Prepare to be mesmerized. I doubt anything has ever tugged on your heartstrings like this will.

I just recently dug this out of a forgotten drawer. I'm pretty sure I was in grade school when I made it. I hope.

MIDNIGHT CRUISE

I worked on this a while back, at the same time I did this one, but it's been backgroundless until now. Happy Halloween.
I wondered if it was too colorful to be spooky so I tried it in sepia tone.

And also in black and white.
Of the three I think I like the sepia tone version the best. I guess. It mostly depends on what it would be used for. If I were wanting it to look like an old movie poster, the color version would be out for sure.

I think the sepia and black and white versions might need a little tweaking so the monster's head isn't as close to the background color. The implied shape is there, but a little shadowing at the edge of the forehead would be a good idea.

CHILDREN'S STORY ILLUSTRATION

This was an illustration for some kid's book by River Bend Publishing (or something like that.) I made it about 15 years ago. According to the deal I was supposed to get a copy of the book but never did. I'm finding out that's standard practice when there's nothing in it for them to send a copy.

The drawing is a cutaway view of a farm house with a big family doing whatever they're doing. I like to think this house has been through an earthquake or a tornado, and the roof was destroyed, but the dad was so lazy he just left it.

HIPPYCAT ALBUM COVER

I like drawing faces like these with both eyes on one side of the head. It would never work in 3 dimensions, but for some reason as a 2D picture, brains accept it. There's not really a band named HippyCat. I just did it for fun and maybe to stick in my portfolio. Now if there really is a gang of musicians out there who want to call themselves HippyCat and they need an album cover which says Time For To Kill, I will sell this image cheap!

FATHER TEACHES KID

This kid learns patience, how save money, and spew/aim techniques.

HALLOWEEN CHARACTERS AND OTHER STUFF

Some more 60s style doodles.

SMUDGE

When you draw over black ink with a green highlighter marker, the tip gets all dirty. Sometimes if I care enough about it, I'll wipe the highlighter tip on some paper to clean it off. This particular green wipe-off smudge looked almost like it could be something. I added doodads to the smudge, and TADA! An illustration not much better than a smudge. Oh well.

HALLOWEEN FOR DOGS

My dog hates anything on her head. Weird huh? After I put it on her she moped and acted insulted and embarrassed, like it was an apparatus designed to humiliate. When I looked away, only for a moment, it was torn to tiny pieces. I at least got a few photos of it before it was gone.

GRAFFITI GENIUS

I don't much care for the new graffiti-art craze everyone is into right now. Any time I pick up an art magazine it's full of photos of graffiti which is now considered art. In my opinion most of it is awful. THIS, on the other hand, I love.

He put periods after each "HA" which, in my opinion, lessens the power of each HA. This graffiti tells a story too. Some guy was hurt by some gal, and now the gal is having who-knows-what-kind-of-trouble, and the guy is so ecstatic about it, he forgets to check his spelling. More than anything else he wants her to know she is worse off without him. For him to still be checking up on her and learning the news of her latest trouble means he still secretly cares for her. I suspect he'd probably take her back if she was willing. I wonder if he had tears in his eyes when he wrote this.

OVERWEIGHT SATURATION POINT

Once my stomach becomes large enough, I won't be able to reach my food. This is my diet technique. I will eat until I can't reach anything else. They when I can't eat anymore, weight loss will occur.

HALLOWEEN COLORING CONTEST

No, I'm not running a contest myself, but a few years back they had one at my job for the workers' kids. I was asked to make a drawing for the kids to color, and it needed to pertain to the United Way. Originally the hand was severed with visible bones and muscle, but that version was considered tasteless by the big dogs, so this is what my final version looked like.

If you aren't familiar with the United Way, the original logo is in the lower right hand corner of this drawing. It's sideways but you can get the basic idea.

PHOTOS

Your guess is as good as mine


imitation RoboCop

EYE HEART U

Nobody ever gets this joke but I feel like it's worthy of showing. Maybe if I redrew it the meaning would be more clear. It's supposed to say "Eye Heart U." Does it work?

HALLOWEEN MONSTERS

1960s-style monsters like you'd find on cereal boxes and stuff like that. I used the vampire on Drac-U-Snax a while back. Notice how his teeth point up or down from picture to picture for no apparent reason. I guess I like him better with the upward teeth.

MY MEDICINE CABINET

Happy Halloween

HALLOWEEN HANDS

Spooky fingers

BAT PENDANT

Happy Halloween month!


I dug an envelope out of the trash and cut out half a bat shape at the folded edge, so when I opened the paper fold I had the whole bat. I used some wire to make chain loops to hang it. I found a necklace chain in a parking lot a few years ago so I used it too. The only thing I actually bought was a package of fake red jewels of various sizes.


The bat shape was traced onto a thin piece of Butternut. Butternut is very soft; nearing the realm of Balsa wood, but not quite. That made it really quick to carve.

The way to carve a bat is simple: cut off everything that's not a bat, and then the bat will be all that's left. That bat was always in this wood; I just removed the parts he was encased in.

One thing about carving soft wood: You have to have razor-sharp chisels and knives or the blade will tear through the wood rather than cut it, leaving a crummy rough surface.


I painted it all black first, and then dry-brushed it with silver paint, and glued on the fake jewels and it was mostly done. I put an eye screw into his head, and made 2 links with wire, and VOILA!


Carving wood is not much different than carving clay. The only thing you need to watch is grain direction. As long as you go with the grain you will never have splits or tear-outs. There's really only one direction that will give you fits.


I think of grain direction as pages in an open book. If I were to rake my fingernail along the edge of the pages in a downward direction, the pages would remain as they are. If I did the same thing in an upward direction all the pages would separate and split apart.


If you are unsure of the grain direction, carve a little bit and see if it begins to split. If not, keep going! If it does start to split, stop and go the other way.

CD DISK ILLUSTRATION

A friend of mine made an album and needed something to put on the cd. This is what I made for him.

DEAD SPIDER-MAN

Since Spider-Man is all spidery on the inside, when he finally dies it will probably look like this.

BEAT CATS

ELEPHANT RIDE

Here are some more pictures from Thailand. My nephew Gary and I got to go on an elephant ride. We walked to a dock and the elephant came up beside and waited for us to hop on. The seat was a little creaky and rickety for my tastes but it hadn't killed anyone yet (that I saw while I was there.) The entire seat contraption was held down by a single skinny rope which wrapped under the elephant's front legs.



A driver got on with us. He instructed us to scoot to one side so the seat was better balanced and wouldn't fall off. Gulp. I tried to act calm about what he just told me, but it was slightly unsettling. After we headed out into the jungle area, the driver hopped off and was gone! He let us go on our own.

Watch your step.

It's a strange feeling to be up on top of a massive animal with no way to steer or stop. The elephant strolled anywhere it felt like going. It walked down into a gully to eat some leaves and I thought we were gonna fall off, but the rope held. We stayed as balanced as possible so the seat never rolled around under the elephant's belly dropping us out into the trampling zone.


The elephant was as nice as you could hope for and I did enjoy it.

LOST TREASURES OF THE GOODWILL

Most of the time it's a wash when I go to the Goodwill, but it's on the way home from work so I go ahead and stop in. Sometimes I get lucky and find stuff like this for 25 cents. It was broken but when I unscrewed it I saw there was just a disconnected gizmo. I put it back where it was supposed to be, and loaded batteries and it worked again.

He walks, turns his head back and forth, his arms move and he lights up all over. There's a little rolling picture of a space scene in his chest, and he speaks and makes laserblast noises. He says "I am a Super-Fighter. Drop it! Don't move!"
Pretty good for a quarter.

Watch the video:

THE SMALL MEDIUM LARGE GANG

This is a team of little bean-like characters. When a situation arises they assess it and decide whether the situation would be best handled by Small, Medium, or Large, and then that one handles it.

If there's a hole one of them needs to fit into, and it's very small, then the little one does it.

If they need weight to hold something down, then the big one does it.

There's probably never a situation in which only the Medium guy would be best to handle it, but that might be funny. Maybe he's troubled mentally by feelings of inadequacy and worthlessness because of it.

In a story like this you would assume in the end, some major catastrophe would come up meaning death for everyone, and ONLY the Medium guy could handle it, thus proving to himself he is worthy.

I think in my story though, I'd rather have that situation come up and he attempts to take care of it, but he realizes he's TOO medium-sized to do any good. Then everyone dies. If he were either just a tad bigger, or smaller, he could have had success.

After this happens the Medium guy is so distraught he decides to kill himself. He tries to chop his head off by standing under spinning airplane blades but he's too short to reach. He tries to jump out a window and he's too big to fit through. He tries to use a gun but he's too little to lift it. He finds out he has too much body mass for the bottle of poison he drank to kill him. His neck is too small for a noose. His head is too big to fit into an electrical socket. etc...

Then he decides to give up on the suicide and go ahead and live. As he decides this a bundle of newspapers is thrown from a truck, hitting him in the back of the neck and killing him. The headline on the newspapers says GUY NEEDED TO STEER ROCKET AND SAVE THE PLANET! MEDIUM-SIZED GUY REQUIRED.

If it were a comic book it would probably only last one issue.

THE INDESTRUCTIBLE HLUK

Yes, that's "Hluk," pronounced hhhhhhLUHHK! It's a little difficult to say but if you start by hacking up a wad of phlegm, you are halfway there.

MANIPULATIN' PHOTOS

My friend was having a zombie-themed food drive, so I manipulated this old poster into something more appropriate for the event. They wanted it to have a blank box so they could hand write different info as needed.

HERE'S THE ALTERED PICTURE

HERE'S THE ORIGINAL

YAAA!

I made up a riddle:
HOW DOES AN IDIOT WASH HIS HAIR?


Answer:
ACTUALLY I CAN'T TELL YOU THE ANSWER, BUT IF YOU REALLY WANT TO KNOW, IT SHOULD BE WRITTEN ON THE INNER THE RIM OF YOUR TOILET BOWL.



My clean city.

BULL ON BASS

A lady wrote a story about farm animals who play music. This was an unused design.

DORK BOY

I found this buried in a pile of drawings. I don't know what it means but it looks like it was important.

THE CREATURE COMES BACK

MEAN PRANK IDEA #2:

Here's another time-waster, slap-in-the-face movie prank designed to punish the viewer and use up 1 1/2 hours of his/her life.

In this movie, The screen will be black at first, then the white-letter credits will start, along with droning spooky music. The credits should have the works: producer, director, writer, production designer, casting director, director of photography,costuming, special effects, voice coach, etc....

Then this title card will slam onto the screen with a standard horror movie musical sting:

As the title card fades out, it fades back into a stationary shot of a boring, plain old door.

A creature just kind of strolls up and says , "See ya" and walks through the door and shuts it behind him.

Then the actual prank begins. A long and miserable 1 1/2 hours pass while the camera doesn't budge from the door and nothing ever happens. I guess there WOULD be one thing happening: the drone of a slow, unnerving and moody musical score.

Then at the end of the movie, after 1 1/2 horrible hours have passed, the door opens and the creature comes back in and says, "I'm back."

Then the picture fades to black and this pops up.

Then the credits roll.

Again, as with the prank idea in the last post, the goal would be to see if someone was willing to sit through the entire movie waiting for something to happen. I suspect at the 3 minute mark most people would grab their remotes and either skip to the end, or fling them at the tv screen in disgust.

I have a friend who sells old out-of-print movies at flea markets. He says even though people have never heard of a movie they will buy it based on the box cover. If this had a worthy dvd box cover I guess it would sell as well as anything else.

CEMETERY OF THE DEAD

I thought of a mean prank:

Make a movie called "Cemetery of the Dead." Film a cemetery for 1 1/2 hours with a stationary camera, and add a spooky soundtrack. The film should be in black and white. Other than maybe trees rustling or birds flying through, nothing happens for the entire 1 1/2 hours since they're dead. At the end of the movie fade to black and roll the credits, which are the names of the people on all the tombstones.

I wonder how long someone would watch until they realize nothing is ever gonna happen since it's a cemetery of the dead.

Here's an example title card with spooky letters.

Here's one with more traditional 60s style letters.

Now that I've given away my prank idea I won't be able to trick the 4 people who read my blog.

THAILAND'S UNGLAMOROUS CIGARETTES

A while back I got to take a trip to Thailand. One of the things most memorable to me was the was they made cigarettes out to be shameful, filthy and evil. On tv, any time someone was smoking in a movie, the cigarette was blurred out. When I went to the store I noticed the packaging.


Instead of having fancy logos and glamorous camels and cowboys on the packages, they had pictures of cancer victims. I snapped these quick and blurry photos before the store clerk told me no pictures allowed.

On each package was a picture of something like a rotted tongue, a man on a breathing machine, a man with no chin, an arm with sores all over it (??), exposed throat guts, etc... All of it was nauseating to look at. Not a pretty or cool image in the whole load.
The word VOGUE seems so out of place.

BI_CLOPS ROUGH SKETCH

Before I do a painting, I like to work out the colors ahead of time. I didn't do this in the beginning and my success rate was about 50/50. When things turned out good it was accidental. Even though it seems like double the work, it saves me lots of headaches and frustrations in the future.

This is a rough pencil sketch I scanned and quickly colored in a photo-manipulatin' program. These colors are all on different layers so I can alter the HUE, SATURATION, and BRIGHTNESS with the slider tools until find a set of colors I'm happy with.


I guess most people may already know this, but if anyone doesn't:

HUE = which color. Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, or purple?
SATURATION = the range between gray-scale and full color
BRIGHTNESS = how dark or light

When I have each color on a separate layer, I can start by making everything the same color. Or I don't have to. It doesn't really matter which color I start with since they all get manipulated anyway. With those 3 sliders you can get literally any color in the world.

When I do the actual painting I know my paints won't be able to exactly immitate the glowingly radiant brightness of computer monitor colors, but it gets me going in the right direction. It takes out all the guess work and mistake cover-upping.

You can rarely go wrong by intentionally altering colors in an unnatural way to achieve a color scheme. Even though skin isn't purple in real life it looks better being purple for this particular color scheme. There's some deeper color scheme info HERE.

THE DEAD GHOST

Cover for a book I will make if I get some free time. It shouldn't take much more work. Since this ghost is dead nothing ever happens.

LARDY LOUIS

My goal was to make something disgusting. After I finished I asked myself why my goal is never to make something I can sell. Why? Because it's fun!

24K GOLD PIG NECKLACE

I saw this in a jewelry store in Hong Kong. Has there ever been anything more worthy of being cast in 24K gold? We've only got just so much gold on the Earth and then it'll all be used up. Stop wasting it on boring old wedding rings! Use it for worthy unusual stuff like this! Just look at it. It is a stunningly beautiful large mama pig with several suckling pigs dangling off her by means of solid gold chain links. What woman would not want this around her neck at some highfalutin dinner party? I wanted to get it for Mei but it was several thousands of dollars. She'd have to sleep in it to get our money's worth.

Sadly I didn't get it. I do have this photo of it though. When I think about it, all I'd ever do with the real one is look at it. I can look at a photo of it just the same.

SEWERCIDE

This hippo is literally going to crap his brains out.

DRAFTING ILLUSTRATION

I forgot what this was for exactly but someone needed it for a presentation they were doing. There were 3 drawings showing the phases of drafting through the years. The 1st was a monk using weird old medieval tools, like stretching strings and plum-bobs to get straight lines. The 2nd was this drawing of a guy using a T-square and triangles, and the 3rd was a guy using the computer.

FISH-EATING BEAR EATING FISH

I can post a step-by-step of this one later. I'm not real happy with the grass but I don't know if anyone will be looking at the grass (Although who can avoid it now that I've mentioned it.)

After I finished this painting I used a watered down amber color and brushed over the entire thing. That makes it look antique, and unifies all the colors. I've only done this trick a few times, but it improved the results of each painting I've tried it on.

If you try this wash-trick be sure to allow your original painting to dry over night first. That way if you don't like the results of amber wash, you can lightly wipe off just that layer with a damp paper towel and you won't affect the actual painting underneath.

CONNECT-THE-DOTS PUZZLE FOR TODDLERS

I realize connect-the-dots puzzles are for kids, and realize that means they shouldn't be overly complicated, BUT as a kid I remember being extremely frustrated when I'd get one with no mystery to it. Afterwards I was left with a feeling of no accomplishment, and wondering if there was some deeper mystery I wasn't seeing.

SWEET and SOUR and BOOM

I invented a new weapon. Instead of a BOOMERANG, it's a called a BOMBERANG. You have to throw it and run, because when it comes back it will explode at it's point of origin. Maybe a box of bomberangs could be "accidentally" lost in enemy territory. I can think of 10 or 12 uses right off the bat. If someone is catching up to you in an important bicycle race, FLING! If you are driving on the road and notice an annoying tailgator, FLING! Approaching bear? FLING!

Well, maybe I can't think of 10 or 12 uses, but that's just right off the bat.

MAKE A UFO

If you've been following this blog you may recall me mentioning I wanted to make a movie. I want to make a retro 50s-style movie with corny robots and laser pistols and UFOs and stuff like that. This is another prop I needed to complete this project.
Photo simulation of this UFO zooming over New York City

I started out with a Christmas ornament bubble you can buy at a craft store for about $3. I kept one half as it was, and sliced the inner ring off the other half using a bandsaw. I'll glue that ring down onto the UFO to serve as a holder for the bubble dome on the top of the UFO. By doing this the dome can be removable.


I bought some plastic plates at Target in the dollar section. This particular plate came in a set of 2 for $1, which made me happy seeing as how I needed 2. I spent a lot of weeks looking around in the stores for a plate with a convex shape, and it's more difficult to find than you would think. Most plates have a reversing curve in them which works great when you want to eat off them, but it's totally wrong for UFO builders. It's pretty rude of them to only build plates for their own selfish needs.

I traced off the bubble so I knew how much space I had, and cut a hole through the plate smaller than the mark I made to leave myself some room to glue.

The wooden piece is to hold the bubble ring, and the large hole is for the alien to sit, and the smaller hole is for the ON/OFF switch. I roughed up the 2 connecting surfaces and epoxied the wooden piece onto the plate.


I used Krylon Fusion silver paint to paint the plates. Fusion paint bonds with plastic. Other paints will eventually crack and flake off. Might as well make it to last. I masked off the bubble ring so it would still be clear. Later I will screw it together and the screws will be visible, so I painted them too since they were black. In this photo they are sticking into a piece of cardboard to hold them upright.


This disk is the inner ring which goes between the upper and lower plates. It's just barely larger than the diameter of the plates. It's made of MDF scrap I found at work.I could have used wood instead but MDF paints up slicker with no grains showing through. I drilled 10 large evenly spaced access holes around the edge of the disk. Then IN the edge, I drilled small holes for LED lights to pass through. The little holes connect to the larger access holes in the surface.

I painted the edge silver and the middle black since it would show. There is a threaded bolt hammered into the center. This will be used to screw the alien in place. Originally it was centered but later I realized the alien needs to sit back off-center in the cockpit bubble so I filled in that hole and put in a new one. In the LED holes I put little LED holders I got at Radio Shack. At first I was going to just glue the LEDs in place but this is better in case I need to replace lights in the future. The little pieces of wood glued onto the top make a battery pocket.


With the smallest brush I had (and still not quite small enough) I painted various buttons and dials on the dashboard. The large red button in the center (see arrow) is an actual working button. It will turn on the LEDs. This button stays on until it's pushed a 2nd time to turn it off. The throttle sticks and levers are made with sewing pins and toothpicks.


I twisted wires onto 10 green LEDs to lengthen them. It looks like a big rat's nest of wires but that's just because I was sloppy. I connected one hunk of wires to the switch in the dashboard, and the other hunk to the battery. All the LEDs were poked into the holes in the MDF disk. Then I screwed the upper plate onto the disk.


I used large tacks for the feet. I didn't want the UFO to sit directly on the painted plate and get scuffed up. I made small pre-bored blocks of wood and glued them to the inside of the plate to help hold the tacks in place.


Almost done! I screwed the bottom plate in place, and TA-DA! It's done, and it works! YEEHA! To turn it on you open the bubble dome and click the red button on the dashboard, and then put the bubble dome back in place. In the last picture you can see I added little fake buttons to even out the screw spacing around the edge. Later I'll be making a little alien to drive it. The alien will be a scale version of my Questor robot.

THE COOLEST INCENSE BURNER IN THE WORLD

This was one of the coolest things I found in China. His feet are hinged so he opens up. You put an incense cone in the little opening, and close it back up. There's a tiny chimney hole going up through his head so the smoke comes out his mouth.



ACTION!

The music came from www.incompetech.com. That Incompetech guy records music and gives it away for free. I don't know what's wrong with him! He has tons of soundtrack style music separated into mood catagories, like Action, Aggresive, Eerie, Intense, Humor, Epic, Calm, Love, etc... It's great if you want to put little (or big) videos together.

DANCY McGEE

This started as a curvy squiggle on a piece of paper, and then became the centerline for a twisty figure. I colored it on the computer and eventually made a fake album cover for him. After I got the album cover finished I halfway think it would be better if I removed him from it, leaving just the words with the rocket and the moon.

PIZZA SHOP MASCOT

Would you buy pizza from this man?

HIGH SCHOOL ILLUSTRATION part 3

This was drawn when I was about 17 years old. It represents the child of the characters in the last 2 posts.

Way before DVDs or even VHS tapes were used in classrooms, we had films and film strips. Films were fun, but film strips were never any good. I remember every once in a while our art teacher would make us watch art film strips. He assigned one kid to turn on the tape cassette player, and another kid to turn the knob on the film strip projector each time the tape would go BEEP!

A lot of the film strips we had to watch were about modern art. The narrator would talk about the history and beauty of the particular image we were looking at, and usually it was an indiscernible blob or paint splatter. The narrator would go into endless detail about the subtle lines and brilliant tones of each piece.

One of the girls in the class could mock the sound of the BEEP tone on the tape cassette. She would use her high-pitched vocal chords to go "BEEP" and then projector kid, thinking it was authentic, would obediently advance to the next frame. It was very humorous to us at the time.

She did it about 3 times so the pictures got pretty mixed up. The weirdest part about it was any picture on the screen worked as well as any other when you heard the descriptions. It didn't matter what we were looking at when a brown scratchy smear was supposed to represent the civil war. If the brown smear was blue or red it still made just as much sense to us.

HIGH SCHOOL ILLUSTRATION part 2

This was another drawing from high school art class days. She is the lovely wife of the guy in the last post. Tomorrow I will reveal the drawing I did of their child.


These drawings bring back a lot of art class fire memories. One day I was trying to light the torch to melt some silver so I could cast jewelry.

This torch had one gas hose and one air hose. I never could remember which one I was supposed to turn on 1st, but I knew the order was really important. I figured I'd try one way and if that didn't work I'd do it the other way. Looking back on it all, it seems extremely risky to hand a torch over to an unsupervised kid. I didn't even have any safety goggles.

There were 2 or 3 torch work stations lined up against the windows. The windows were covered by large 3'x4' industrial plastic-coated canvas curtains. I remember turning on the gas and grabing one of those spark-maker things. I tried and tried to get a spark to come out of that thing but it was old and worn out. Meanwhile the gas was freely flowing out of the torch nozzle. I found another sparker tool and squeezed it, and CHA-WHOOOOMBA!!!

I created a blue fireball which hung in the air for a very long time. It seems like it should have just flashed and been over within a moment, but it hung around. It floated up slowly about the speed of a helium balloon. At this point I decided it would be wise to shut off the gas.

I remember the fire ball flattened out into a vertical sheet of blue flame and clung to the curtain like static. The blue flame wasn't burning into the curtain; it was clinging to every inch of it, so there was a large curtain of blue fire on the wall of the classroom. I along with several other kids in the classroom sat and stared at it. It was such a strange and hypnotizing sight to see. No one talked or did anything, we just calmly watched it.

Then starting at the bottom the fire fizzled out, and then the fizzle-out slowly traveled up the curtain like a wick burning out, and finally last upper strip of flame made a FOOMP-sound and it was all gone.

There was a sort of smoky char on the curtain but it wasn't too bad. I don't think my teacher ever knew about it.

HIGH SCHOOL ILLUSTRATION

I don't remember what the assignment was, but I'm betting the teacher was probably not wanting to have to look at this. Art teachers would always stand up in the front of the class and say stuff, and no one would ever listen. Everyone just drew what they wanted regardless of the assignment.


In this particular class I remember the teacher was very easy-going. He pretty much let us do whatever we got an inkling to do. He had jewelry making tools, clay, paint, wood, you name it, and he gave us free reign with it all. Even though it sounds as if he was a hands-off teacher, I learned more in his class than I ever learned in Geometry. He would just kind of hang around, give us quick answers if we had questions. Things like: "When you light the torch - turn on the gas 1st, light it, and THEN turn on the air." Stuff like that. "When you acid-etch something, try not to get it in your eyes." That sort of thing.

One day I was carving a log in this secluded little side room connected to the main art room. My buddy Mike was in there too. Then the teacher came in the room with what looked like a hair dryer and said, "This is a heat gun. It will go up to 700 degrees. You can use it to dry out the center of your log. If you don't get the moisture out the log will crack and split."

When he handed it to me, he added, "BUT! Be careful and keep it moving. DO NOT hold it in one spot for very long or it will start a fire."

Then he left.

He gave a fire-making tool to 2 high school kids. What was he thinking? Didn't he understand how kid-brains worked? We immediately turned it on and aimed it at one spot until our hands got tired. I remember saying, "He's a liar! It doesn't make fire!"

We tore little pieces of paper and stuffed them into the bark of the log, and blew the heat gun at them. After 3 or 4 minutes we saw little glowing flickers in the paper. That was the secret! We needed kindling to get this log burning! We added more paper and kept the gun trained right on it. Eventually POOF! All our efforts had paid off bountifully! We had a reasonably big fire going! I remember feeling almost proud, like the feeling I got when I won at Connect Four or Checkers. Mike was very happy about it too, and he nurtured and babied the fire so it didn't go out.

We didn't realize how much smoke we'd generated until the teacher barged back into the room, and yelled, "What did you do?!"

He ran out only for a moment and and then flew back in with a container of water and flung it onto my log. He even cursed us, which was a big shocking thing for a teacher to do back in high school.

I played innocent and asked, "Why did you throw water on it? I thought you said we needed to get the water OUT of it."

He never punished us, but he did give us the dirtiest look I can ever remember receiving from him.

MUGGY McMUGGINS

Doodling with a brush pen, and letting it be the boss. I wouldn't normally draw hair like this but that's what seemed to come out of the pen so I let it happen. This was done years ago with a really fat brush pen. I can't find those pens anymore and I liked them a lot. With light pressure I could get very thin lines, but it also had the ability to do extra fat lines as well. Now the only brush pens I can find are thin. My friend Brad keeps suggesting I try the real thing. I think I will when all the ink runs out of the pens I'm currently using.

BABA SIMBO

A while back my friend Vinny said he had a name for a super-hero but didn't have any plans as to what he'd look like or what his powers were. When I heard the name I got this mental image of him: a tumbling wrestler-type of guy with mysterious mental powers.

WHAT'S WRONG WITH ME?

Sometimes my friend Bob and I go to Sci-Fi/Horror conventions. They usually have lots of old movies on DVD you can't get in the stores. Also they have lots of famous people you can talk to. I was looking through pictures and I noticed something I thought was funny.

Here I am with the very lovely movie star Adrienne Barbeau. Look at my face. Who died?

And now here I am with the disturbingly deformed Michael Berryman. I'm almost embarrassed of my gleefully giddy and joyous expression.

These 2 pictures tell me something about myself.

INCHWORM CRANK TOY

As the crank is turned, a lovesick boy inchworm chases a frightened pretty girl inchworm around in circles. It took me several months to figure out how to make it work. I have pages of notes and ideas involving all sorts of methods. Each time I'd think I had it all figured out, I'd realize some aspect of it would only work in a world of cartoon physics, or if we had a such thing as the 4th dimension so 2 things could occupy the same space.

I looked through lots of books about gears and mechanical movements, and I learned about the Geneva Wheel. That's the secret to everything! I guess it was invented by Swiss clock makers to have intermittent movements instead of a constant and steady motion mocking the movement of the crank.

A Geneva Wheel consists of 2 wheels actually. One has notches in it, and the other has a pin to fit into the notches. As the PIN wheel turns it slides into a notch in the notched wheel. It turns just enough to align the next notch up into the path of the pin, so as it comes back around it repeats all over. You can put as many notches in as you wish... as long as you get them in the right place.

Here's a picture of the various pieces before I put it all together. Depending on the task of the piece, some needed to be plywood for strength. Normally I don't like the look of plywood but when there's danger of fragile parts crumbling there's nothing better wood-wise.

Here's a side view of the inner workings of it all. After I got this thing built, almost immediately after I glued in the last piece, I thought of a way to make the box half as tall. The more streamlined I can get it, the better. I guess my next one will be better. I've also thought of a way to not have that big circular opening in the top of the box.

ACTION!

PUKEY PALS ADVERTISEMENT

Here's an advertisement I worked up.
ENLARGE IMAGE

If you want a set, send me a message! My email is in the image above. OR here's another easy way to snag a set.

Also, per request, here is a size comparison next to a wiener dog.

WILDMAN OF WOOKAWOO

I was going for a paper sculpture look with this drawing. These kinds of illustrations are pretty fun to make. They require no shading or outlines, and all the shapes are made with lines and circles. After it was finished I added a drop shadow. THIS guy was made in the same fashion.

PUKEY PALS CARDS ARE COMING

Today the Pukey Pals cards files were taken to the print shop. If everything goes as planned I should be in business in a day or two. I printed 20 sets to cover my pre-order customers and some extra, and I can have new sets printed as they are ordered. If you are an awesomely cool person and you want everyone to know it, message me here on my blog or you can email me at keithwseifert dot com.

I saw some mockups today and they looked sharp and colorful. Even the fake dirt looks nice and pretty! Both sides of the cardstock are coated so they're shiny on front and back.

You can see all the cards below in this blog, but you don't get to see the back poster puzzle image! That's my special gift to those who are choking up the moola! I think the secret back image will make your life more happy. If there are any meaning-of-life mysteries you've been curious about, all will be answered when the secret image is revealled to you.

Valentine's Day!

Mother's Day!

Wedding Anniversary!

Pukey Pals cards would make wonderful gifts! Imagine the look of joyous love your mother would get on her face if she opened her very own set of these cards! She would forget all her other kids and you will become her favorite!

(Artificial simulation of what a set of Pukey Pals cards might look like sitting on your shelf)


The price ends up being $12 a set. CHEAP!

DO IT!! DO IT!! DO IT!!

Even though you don't need a reason, here's a subliminal message to make you want to own these cards:

Bnh - Bnh - Bnh

hon CVu uof HGrb honLZGrt
hOn HvAG uo m!ll ot honL omu

(If you aren't naturally dyslexic or strabismic you can use an upside down mirror to reveal this message. Hold a mirror tilted face down, OVER the red letters, and look up into mirror at the them . . . AND THEN OBEY!)

SLOPPY FRANKENDOODLE

I'm not likely to ever get a tattoo because I can't think of a single image I'd never get tired of seeing. I can think of lots of images I'd enjoy for a month or so, maybe even a year, but after that I'd be ready for it to be gone.
This is probably the only image that would never get old to me.

If I needed a tattoo in order to keep my job or something like that, I guess a 1 foot tall Frankenstein monster head would look good on my belly. I'm only thinking about this because the guys at work are all talking about tattoos they want to get.

One guy asked me to draw a snake tattoo for him. His wife's name is Sandy, and he wanted the snake to be saying "SSSSSSSSSANDY."

Sandy probably felt really honored at having a snake hiss out her name. I asked what he'd ever do if Sandy divorced him and without even a second's hesitation he said he'd have it changed to "SSSSSSSSSANDY IS A SSSSSSSSNAKE."

It impressed me he had it so planned out.

FLIPPITY-FLAPPITY FLOO

Another brush pen drawing which has no meaning or purpose for existing other than it was fun to do. I like his gums.

HEAD-CHOPPER CRANK TOY IDEA

I have an idea for a wooden crank toy. It will consist of a knife-weilding head-hunter standing over a victim who is lying on the ground. It would all be carved from wood and be roughly 7" tall.

With the turn of a crank, the head-hunter will draw his knife-arm back and then give it a good whack into the neck of his victim. After that the head-hunter's other hand will raise the victim's head up off his neck and lower it back down. This action will repeat as many times as the crank is turned. Great toy for kids!

This is the process I go through before I build anything. I don't start cutting pieces of wood until I'm fairly certain it will work and be worth the time. If you look at the drawings in order you can see the evolution of the idea. I think it's actually doable in the last drawing.

I'm happiest with this version because it's the simplest. The more moving gizmos you get away from, the better off you'll be. Each new gear and cog and axle is one more thing to give you fits. I needed one horizontal rotating motion for the knife arm, and one vertical motion for the lifting arm. This version of the idea does both motions with only 3 doohickies: A crank-powered axle, a triangle cam, and an off-center cam.

FOR THE KNIFE ARM:
2 pins on the main axle will knock a triangular cam back and forth.

FOR THE LIFTING ARM:
An off-center cam will raise and lower a little wheel attached to the head-hunter's elbow.

I am angry at how simple the answer turned out to be. It may not look like that big of a deal, but it took me days and hours to figure it out. Next time I need those movements though, I'll be ready.

If you are interested in this kind of stuff, you ought to get a book called 507 MECHANICAL MOVEMENTS by Henry T. Brown.

Here's an online copy of the book, so if you're a cheapskate you don't even have to buy it!

http://www.scribd.com/doc/441240/Five-hundred-and-seven-mechanical-movements

Any motion you need, this book will show you how to make it happen.

SOURPUSS

More brush pen. It's fun to start a drawing with no plan and see what comes out. The nice thing about monster faces is they don't need to be symmetrical or sensible.

BLUBBER MUZZLE

Brush pen! The harder you push, the fatter the line gets. They're expensive though. I think I paid $3 or $4 dollars for the last one. If I have big areas of black, I will fill those in with a cheap chisel-tip Sharpie to conserve my expensive brush pen.

Also I found out it's a good idea to store your brush pens brush-tip-down so the ink stays down toward the brush. Otherwise the brush tip will dry out and there will still be ink up in the top of it where it doesn't do you any good.

THE HEADLESS IRON HORSEMAN

I was doodling a guy on a motorcycle and got too close to the edge of the paper, and realized I didn't have enough room for his head. After saying "DANGIT!" it occurred to me he didn't really need a head after all.

SICKLY ALIEN and RUSSELL

I was thinking about doing a painting of a farmer nursing an alien back to health, with a crashed UFO outside the window. This is a reference photo I took. The farmer is portrayed by my friend Russell.

I've known Russell since high school. I remember when I would ride in his little Dodge Omni, I had to get in the back because his passenger side seat was being used as to hold a 10-gallon bucket of tobacco spit. It was at least 6" deep with brown sludgy spit, and every time he hit a bump it would slosh around. He had it seat-belted in like a precious baby. While he drove, he would periodically lean over and spit into the bucket. I was always kind of worried we would have some huge wreck and it would splash all over. My plan was to hide behind his chair if I had to duck, but I don't guess it would have helped much.

BRAINS...

Here in my city, people eat brains. That's not a joke. Even my grandmother used to eat brains. It's apparently only happening in my city. I figured it was nation-wide, but I'm finding out my city it just weird. If you are reading this and your city eats brains too, let me know. Otherwise I will just figure you don't eat them.
This is an actual photo taken at the annual Fall Festival here in my city of Evansville, Indiana.

DACHSHUND WITH A HUMAN BRAIN

Meet Lucy. She was born in 1997. When I 1st got her, I could fit her into my shirt pocket and bring her to work with me. I've learned a lot about dog brains since I've had her. Besides being good loyal buddies when you are lonely, they are also really smart. When you have an indoor dog, you naturally talk to it all day long as if it were a human. I didn't realize it at 1st but she was listening to me and understanding my words.

Sometimes I didn't intend on teaching her a word and she just picked it up. Other words I deliberately taught her. It seems like Lucy will learn a word over the course of 4 or 5 days, if I say it repeatedly.

Some people say dogs don't know what words you are speaking, they only recognize the inflection or tone. I don't think that's true. I can say the same word any variety of ways and she will still respond to it.

The way I teach her is fairly simple. When she gets it right I praise her and load her up with dog treats. The 1st couple times I will move her myself so she knows what I'm wanting. After about maybe 10 times, she'll begin doing it herself.


This was a word she picked up herself. When I would let her outside, she would get in front of me so I couldn't open the door. I'd say "back" and motion her away with my foot. After a while she knew what "back" meant, and could walk backwards by herself.


She knows what "eat" means. I guess most dogs know that.


When I would watch tv, she'd lie down beside me. In the Summer, her warm body would make my leg hot, so I'd say "other side" and move her myself. She picked up that phrase and started doing it herself.


I think most dogs know "get in your bed." I just like it how she uses her feet and nose to open the door.


This isn't really a trick she learned. I just thought it was funny.


I taught her this trick intentionally. When she was a puppy, any time there was a bump or a strange noise I would act scared and say "Security!" She learned it but then once she started barking she wouldn't stop. Later I taught her "Safe!" I acted calm and relaxed so she would do the same.



I taught her "Shake my hand" and Mei taught her "Other hand." Once you get Lucy going she continues it on her own. I guess she figures it will result in Beggin' Strips.


This is my favorite. If you act like you shoot her with a gun, she will drop over and play dead. First Mei shoots her and then I do. Girls can't make a gun shot sounds! Mei goes "peeyaa!"


Teaching tools.

THE NAZI WHO COULDN'T COUNT

STACKED MEAT

My wife Mei is always trying to get me to try new kinds of meats like sea-cucumbers and snails. As far as I'm concerned the only meats worth eating are chicken, pork, and beef. Why anyone wants to eat the exotic stuff like alligator or frog is beyond me.

Here's a drawing of the 3 most delicious meats in the world.

PUKEY PALS UPDATE

A standard trading card is 2 1/2" X 3 1/2". The cards I made weren't standard size and I worried that might be a problem for printing, so I spent 2 nights resizing them. I know that's something I should have looked into before I started, but I didn't really intend on doing more than 1 or 2 in the beginning. Resizing wasn't too terribly difficult since the backgrounds were just single-tone colors. The new taller format made some of the images slightly less compatible in the alloted space, while it made others fit better. All in all, it helped more than hurt.

I won't post the back side poster image. That way the people who decide to order their own sets will have something new to be surprised about. (Even though just owning a set - surprise or not - would be reward enough!) Why, I think having one's very own set would be like experiencing 5 birthday parties all at the same time! Yes, I can not imagine a more wonderful thing. Oh, to be coveted and envied like that. WOW!

I was also thinking I should cut the leather tongues out of my old shoes and include them in the sets to represent the horrible cardboardy gum included in the old trading card wax packs. I don't know what they made that "gum" out of, but it's not made of Earthy materials, that's for sure!

At a fleamarket I bought an old wax pack called Odd Rods from the 70s and it still had the gum in it. When I opened it, I was not surprised to find the stick of "gum" in it's original state, shape-wise and color-wise. I bet it even tasted the same. Even though it was 30 years old, It looked like it was new off the grocery store shelf.

I'm teasing about including shoe tongues. (Unless someone really wants it! I can see how that would be very tempting.)

WOODEN LOCKBLADE KNIFE

This was made from maple and walnut. The locking mechanism really works. It's a handy letter opener. The spring is a strip of wood flexed to keep the button arm tight against the blade. Oak is a very good wood for the spring. Other woods seem to eventually take the shape they are flexed into, and then the knife blade will not snap into position as tightly.

PAIN(T)

I need to start using an easel. Sometimes after I've been drawing or painting for any length of time, my neck will cramp up and not stop hurting for a month or more. It's not an exaggeration to say it feels like someone hit me in the center of the neck bone with a hammer. I've been making a conscious effort not to crane my neck over my work like a vulture, but I forget over and over. It's the kind of thing that just slowly occurs without my knowlege.

Those are 44 cent Apple Barrel paints from Walmart.

An easel helps the neck, but not the arms. When I hold my arms out with no support under my elbow, after a while my hand will get shaky. You may say, "Keith, that means you need to lift weights and strengthen your arm muscles."

I say it's because my arm muscles are just so massively huge and bulky and weighty, so it's a lot of work for me to lift them. It's logic!

A lady at work puts a tennis ball on the end of a 3 ft. stick, and uses that as a support to rest her elbow on when she paints. The tennis ball is there so the end of the stick won't scratch the painting. She just holds the stick in her other hand and locks it against her body.

CHICKEN FEET

Is it a severed baby's hand? No! It's a delicious chicken foot! These are very popular in China. I saw them all over, at just about every restaurant we went to. I refused to eat one, or even touch one for that matter, and the only way they could get me to taste it was to trick me.

Be sure to click and enlarge this picture to see all the disgusting detail.

One particular day when I wasn't suspecting anything, they gave me a battered, deep-fried thing all clumped together into an indistinguishable shape. When I asked what it was, they said "chicken" and they stayed calm and low-key to avoid bringing attention to it.

I nibbled at it and found it was mostly skin and not too much meat. They kept watching me as I nibbled at it which made me distrustful. Sometimes they would giggle too. Eventually I ate enough of it away to see little white human-like knuckles and I knew instantly I'd been duped. Then everyone laughed at me. The end.

PUKEY PALS: Check List and Rick R. Mortis

Here's a check list for all the cards...


...and the last straggler card. Now I'd like to do a large illustration with more detail than these cards allow me for a puzzle on the backs of the cards.

PUKEY PALS: Lester Leper

I wonder if it's possible to use leprosy to rot off unwanted stomach fat. It would be great if they could contain it into one area, and then kill it off when it had done its job.

PUKEY PALS: Barney the Boney Fatso

He's the skinniest obese guy ever!

PUKEY PALS: Flipperstein and Deady Bear

I'm reusing an earlier idea, Flipperstein. I redrew him prettier with more wrinkles and shadows. I wrote the title and card number twice so it worked either way. That was extra work so I should get paid double! Double nothin'! I'll know if they cheat me because double-nothing weighs more.

I wondered if maybe it would have been better to show his stuffings pouring out instead of red blood. In the end I felt the stuffings weren't pukey enough.

PUKEY PALS: Potty Mouth and Sweet Matilda

Brad suggested a monster with a mouth like a urinal. Ta-Da!

I imagine if I had to stand near Sweet Matilda, I'd hear deep, guttural mouth-breathing, even when she wasn't winded or tired.

PUKEY PALS: Ebola and Fiend

It's funny to me to think a guy with only minutes to live would go ahead and go bowling anyway.


This drawing started out as a mean baby and I was very happy with it. I was curious how he'd look with a hat and fang and since I was using a pencil I figured after I found out, I'd erase it all since I already considered him to be finished. Then the ears got pointy and he grew a mustache. Eventually he wasn't a baby anymore.

It was now time to erase the paraphernalia, but the eraser was ALLLLLL the way on the other end of the pencil. I figured it was too much trouble to change him back, so laziness won out. Laziness decided he would no longer be a baby.

PUKEY PALS: Halfy and Kissy

PUKEY PALS: D. D. Dean and the McSneakies

For those who are just now seeing this disgusting mess, I'm inspired by Nutty Mads and Weird-Ohs and that sort of stuff from the 60s. My goal is to make a 55 card set. When I get them all done, I'd like to have them printed hopefully with a big poster-sized puzzle on their back faces.

PUKEY PALS: Terrence and Snooty

PUKEY PALS: puking and a pachyderm

I almost feel like I cheated on this one. It didn't take as much time or ink.

PUKEY PALS: Snobbery and Putting on Hairs

The more of these I make, the less proud I become of myself.


Finally! A non-gross one!