Tag Archives: pen and ink drawing

Art from Mickey’s Digital Obsession

I love the fact that I can so easily turn old pen-and-ink drawings like this doodle into a digital art masterpiece. All I had to do is trace the old drawing on the touchscreen with the digital tools available to me now. My electronic stylus and the free drawing app make re-inking the old drawing like a painting. The brush, line, or effect that you lay on the old drawing takes only a swish of the stylus. And it is so much cleaner and more stylish than the old way of inking a pencil drawing with a ballpoint pen.

Take for instance this digital drawing called “The Skinny Dipper.” It begins as a simple drawing filled with color. And then you can layer details over and under, blend in more colors, shapes, and shadows. It can become much more detailed and realistic. I used a photographic background under it, and then continued to make it an original drawing by painting over both the figure and every detail of the background.

And it didn’t stop there. I gave the boy, or possibly girl, a scuba suit to preserve his or her modesty and allow a deeper dive.

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Pen and Ink

4th Dimension

Simple lines and line-drawn figures can contain the wisdom of the world.  It is a simple faith that can turn one into a cartoonist, a comic book artist, or an illustrator.  It is an almost god-like power.  You can make fools and geeks and little girls with fourth dimensional hoola-hoops come to life.

 

It has been said by some who’ve seen my line drawings, my pen-and-ink cartoons, that I am good at it.  But what do they know?  I’ve shown you in this blog some of the real greats.  Wally Wood and Milt Caniff and Cliff Sterret and George Herriman and Charles Shultz are all better than I am.  But I am at least smart enough to have learned things from them.

Elf on Patrol

Black and white lines and shapes can convey feeling in almost the same way that words can.  You can express feelings of melancholy, fatigue, or joy.  You can create a sense of adventure, or make someone laugh with a clever reversal of expectations.

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So there you have it.  I am not really that good… not a master of the art.  But I know it.  I can appreciate it when I see it.  And there are things I can use it to accomplish.

MickeyX22

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The Centaur

I will post more words another day.  Today, let this picture be worth a thousand words.

Centaur1

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June 16, 2014 · 9:50 pm

Paffooney Wisdom

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Life is like a cartoon car chase in one of Floyd Gottfredson’s  1930’s Mickey Mouse comic strips.  No, really, it is!  You never know what is going to happen in the next frame.  Will the alien space craft scoop up Junior as he flies out of the rumble seat?  Fifty-fifty chance, don’t you think?  Will Crocko Diddly-Dial catch up and eat everybody in the car?  Probably not if it was a G-rated comic strip… and it was. 

The only control we have over life are the reactions we can manage as we go and bad things continue to happen to us.    We are trapped by the cliff and the river, so we jump the car successfully across.  If we are successful, we bounce onto the road on the other side, and Crocko falls into the river.  Of course it is the road to nowhere and the chase only ends when the cartoon of life reaches the last panel.

Okay, so that all sounds very scary, and we must hope that Mickey is merely crazy, and not on to something real in this metaphorical thesis of mayhem.  Yet, there is a way to effectively deal with the car chase.  We need to treat it all as a cartoon, a comic book story, and simply laugh.

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