300 sketchbook update

Another page of 15 minute sketched heads, colored in Photoshop. Sure, it takes time away from the minicomic, but I have to keep sharp. These are more topical than the ones I've done in the past, which were mostly drawn from pages of the LA Weekly.

Chris Christie (Gov-NJ), Anthony Weiner (Rep-NY), Louis CK

Comedians I Like: Fall Sketchbook Dump

So I'm mostly moved into the new place in L.A. and have been able to make some time to colorize some of the sketches I've done over the last month. Apologies for the lack of polish with some of these and varying degrees of commitment to a caricature-y style. 

First up is Greg Fitzsimmons. I haven't seen him live yet, but I've been listening to his podcast lately. He's been behind the scenes of many TV shows over the years and has a very sharp act.

Earlier this year my wife and I saw Bill Burr destroy at the Brea Improv.  He is one of my all-time favorites, and I have been meaning to do a drawing of him for some time now.

Dave Attell is a standup legend, and I had the pleasure of seeing him on a weeknight at the New York Comedy Cellar a few years ago. I was right up front and he did some back and forth with me, which felt surreal. His recent appearance on the "Blue episode" of Marc Maron's WTF podcast had me nearly crying with laughter.

I never miss Marc Maron's WTF Podcast, which features long interviews with the best comedians working today. He's a true original, and digs much deeper into his personal life than most comics, providing material which is very raw and fearless. I did an assortment of drawings for him, one of which came out looking a bit like Steven Spielberg:

Update 12/31/10: Me with Marc Maron after his set last night at The Comedy Store:

Now onto two looser sketches. The two on the left are Joe Rogan, from when I saw him perform at the House of Blues this summer in San Diego. The show started late, and at least four people got kicked out for disorderly conduct, but he handled it like a pro. Joe hosts his own podcast and first gained fame from the underrated TV show "Newsradio" before he watched people do things like eat maggot-ridden cheese and punch each other in the face.

To the right is Kevin Pollak, is an actor-comedian you'd recognize from The Usual Suspects. Like many other comedians in this post, he hosts an excellent online video podcast/chat show. His recent hour special is titled "The Littlest Suspect."

Marc Maron recently interviewed comedienne Kristen Schaal on the WTF Podcast, which inspired me to sketch her and her co-author Rich Blomquist (a Daily Show writer). They have a book out now.

And lastly, Mike Dawson and Donny Misraje, who both work on the Adam Carolla Show, which I did another illustration for here.

Comics I Like: Sarah Silverman

Although I haven't seen her live, I've known Sarah Silverman's work since the early 90s when I first started loving stand-up comedy. She's huge now, and has carved out a very memorable niche for herself. This caricature still falls short for me in terms of finding a good harmony between exaggerated and realistic, but it was good practice nonetheless. In some ways I think the original drawing flows better than the final Photoshopped piece, though:

Comics I Like: Doug Stanhope

When I was first lent a Doug Stanhope CD, he was described to me as a comic with "good bar stories." It's no wonder: his delivery style is profane and crude, and he loves questioning societal conventions from the ground up. Many of his filthy and hilarious stories are from his time traveling out on the road. I was able to see him, inebriated and shaggy-haired, at a packed dive bar in Ocean Beach a few years back and his rants absolutely slayed. If you like blue comedy, he's one of the best out there.

For the caricature, I decided to make him a sunburnt, annoyed hitchhiker alone on an Arizona highway, complete with a cigarette and a beer, and wearing the "Libertarian" baseball jersey he wore for a special he put on in New York when he ran for president in 2008.

Here he is delivering the famous "Aristocrats" joke for Penn Jilette and Paul Provenza's movie (NSFW!):

As a guest on the excellent Charlie Brooker's "Screenwipe":

Comics I Like: Adam Carolla

I distinctly remember the first time I encountered the comedic stylings of Adam Carolla. My friend Carlton and I were doing homework together at his house, and he had MTV's "LoveLine" on. I had never seen it before and wasn't paying much attention at first, but he kept distracting me by making me laugh from his wiseass remarks and eventually I just put my books aside and enjoyed the show. Since that show, I've seen or heard Carolla for probably hundreds of hours on television, radio, film, and now his podcast with partners-in-crime "Bald Bryan" Bishop and Teresa Strasser. For the drawing I kept the style a little less cartoony than normal and colored the scanned drawings in Photoshop. I used the smudge tool to help soften up the rough graphite lines and help smooth out the tone variations in the skin.

9/19 update: I did another pass on this picture to punch it up a bit, added a text border with all the in-jokes I could fit, then printed out some copies and gave them to the Ace Man himself when I saw him over the weekend at a live show in North Hollywood. Here's the new version:

Here's a shot of the two of us after the show (I wore my Red Dead shirt because I wanted to speak with him about the game (He's mentioned it every so often over the last few months on his podcast:

More Sketchbook Excerpts from ComiCon

Sat through more panels today, including:

Hawaii Five-0 & The Walking Dead TV series. They're going to be taking their time on each episode for TWD, and Kirkman and Frank Darabont said that they wanted to throw surprises the viewer's way, even if they'd read the comic books before. There was a scene with Grimes hiding in a tank in downtown Atlanta that wasn't in the books, so I'm curious to see what else they'll put in.

I also attended the one for "Neighbors From Hell," which Patton Oswalt was a part of. I introduced myself to him after it ended and he was very nice, saying he liked my caricature of him, which he had seen from the Facebook post I sent him. We took a picture together, but the angle is looking straight up my nose.

Next were Jill Thompson's watercolor class and Scott McCloud/James Sturm's panel which discussed comic book theory and educating people on how to create cartoons.

Then there was the Drew Struzan panel, which I was really looking forward to. He was joined by two filmmakers that are putting together a documentary about him, 20 minutes of which they screened for the crowd. Frank Darabont, who was interviewed in the documentary, was also in attendance. Struzan seemed very surprised at the standing ovation and overall attention he received, mentioning a few times that most of his life was spent alone in his studio and he doesn't get much contact with his fans. He looks like he could be the kinder, artsy brother of Clint Eastwood:

Then came the Archer panel, which was hysterical, and not just because they showed the next full episode. The cast were all there (including Aisha Tyler, but I wasn't able to get a good angle on her, so I didn't get a drawing in): 

Struzan and Archer panel members:

After the Con my wife and I went to see Patton Oswalt's show at the House of Blues, which featured Brian Posehn, Paul Scheer/Scott Aukerman, and was hosted/opened by Kyle Kinane. After the show I bumped into Kinane and James Adomian of Last Comic Standing fame (whom I also did a little caricature of recently) and took a picture, this time far away from my nose:

Sketchbook: 7/13/10

This morning I remembered to bring my sketchbook with me when I gave blood. Unfortunately the magazines in the waiting room were nearly all Good Housekeeping and didn't have much in terms of celebrity faces. The left three women on this page were in the room with me, and the rest were in the magazine:

Cont'd, with some IRL people on the right side of the bottom page:

Later on I did a pass on all the remaining Last Comic Standing contestants in the simple caricature style I've been developing. Still not stylized enough for my taste. (Ref):

Comics I Like: Brian Posehn, Seth Rogen, and Aziz Ansari

More caricature sketches with digital coloring in Photoshop. Brian Posehn is one of the "Comedians of Comedy" and went on to appear in movies and recently had a role on the Sarah Silverman Program. He's also a big metal head. The first time I remember seeing him was on the hilarious "Titannica" sketch on "Mr. Show":

I've since seen him live in San Diego, and he had a great set.

Posehn Ref.

10/25/10 Update: Here's me with Posehn and his fellow Mr. Show alum Scott Aukerman after they presented The Blob at the Silent Movie Theater:

Seth Rogen and Aziz Ansari are probably the funniest guys of their generation. Rogen popped onto my radar back when "Freaks and Geeks" first aired, and Aziz's $#!++iest Boombox Blast first let me know he was someone to keep an eye on.

This scene from the movie Observe and Report (language NSFW) has them facing off by exchanging the same insult back and forth. Their body language and energy levels contrast nicely, and I wanted to make it seem like Rogen is saying the first part of the insult on his side of the image in an angry way while Aziz is finishing it on the right side of the image almost silently (watch the video link to see what I mean).

         
Ok, that's enough links and swearing for now. It's hard to turn off the caricaturing part of my brain now that I've tapped into it, so I'll be posting more in the future.

Comics I Like: Patton Oswalt

I like a good number of comics, but if you were to ask me my overall favorite, I'd have to go with Patton Oswalt. I remember when his 222 album had just come out and it seemed like no one knew who he was. No matter who I shared his album with; however, they were instant fans of his crazy characters and uniquely-worded rants. Now he's a famous actor whose voice starred in the Pixar classic Ratatouille and the disturbing but fascinating Big Fan, which I watched for the first time last night.

In Big Fan, Oswalt plays a New York Giants fan from Staten Island who accidentally disqualifies his favorite player from playing. Torn between standing up for himself or his team, his character's life is turned upside-down. You never know just how far he's been pushed by the humiliating circumstances in his life, and Oswalt plays the character with a mix of enthusiastic, pathetic, and even a bit deranged. I loved the movie, and it reminded me why I'm such a "big fan" of Oswalt himself.

As for the piece, I decided to keep with the caricature style that I've been developing this week. I've been tending to over-render the original sketch, which ends up hampering the digital coloring process a bit. Here's a photo of the original drawing (the scanner on my printer is acting up yet again, so I had to use my camera to get it into the computer):

I decided the sketch was too stretched, so I squashed him down a bit to the final proportion and painted the rest in Photoshop. Caricatures are never flattering, and I wanted to push this rendition of him in a disturbing direction, to mimic the character Oswalt plays in the movie:

Reference for Patton in Big Fan.

Comics I Like: Todd Barry

Todd Barry is my wife's favorite comic, and is one of my favorite comics as well. In addition to seeing him open for Louis CK at the Spreckles Theater a few years ago, my wife and I both saw him at the Casbah (underneath the San Diego airport's flight path) a few years ago, and he did a great set that kept us in stitches. Being die-hard fans, my wife and I called out "joke requests" once he was done with his regular set, and he was kind enough to honor them all. I felt a little self-conscious doing this, but we met up with him after the set, and he sounded more glad that he had such big fans rather than annoyed at us, and he posed for a picture. When I went to New York for a motion capture shoot for Rockstar in 2007, I popped into Raffifi's (before it went out of business) in Manhattan, and Todd was one of the comics I recognized there. I introduced myself and shook his hand--he was very nice. He can be a very subtle comic whose facial expression often hovers around what I interpret as "are you really that stupid?" Hopefully this reproduction captured this thought. Judge for yourself:

The work in progress, pre-computer. I only used an 8B pencil on this one, as I did the Louis CK and Myq Kaplan pieces. The soft lead makes it easy to move around the page and not have to stress as much about making an effort for the lines to show up.

Comics I Like: Louis CK and Myq Kaplan

Did a couple sketches and brought them into Photoshop to paint. For some reason I like the look of keeping the sketch in there on Multiply with a slightly lighter opacity. The downside is the somewhat muddy/gritty look that appears where there is a lot of shading.

Louis CK. His new show "Louie" premiered this week on FX and it reminded me of how much his sense of comedy rules. I saw him absolutely destroy at San Diego's Spreckles Theater a few years ago. Even though someone backed into my car in the parking lot right before the show, his act made me forget about it. A lot of his act revolves around his physical appearance sliding out of control, so I chose the scene in his doctor's office to reproduce:

Myq Kaplan. He's my choice to win this year's "Last Comic Standing." I'd never heard of him before a couple weeks ago, but his material really hits home for me. Maybe because I also don't eat meat? I dunno. Hopefully I'll be able to see him live soon. (Update: this piece now seen on Myq's site!)

 

I love doing portraits, I love comedians, and I need more drawing and digital painting practice, so expect a bunch more comedian pieces in the near future.