x.42

acrylic on Fabriano 300 watercolor paper 8" x 10"

Here’s x.42, a new painting for my alien menagerie extracts series of artwork. It’s been a while since I’ve finished one of these; 289 days passed between the completion of x.41 and x.42. Even accounting for how relatively rapidly time seems to pass, that’s a long interval! Between those two paintings I made 108 illustrations for broadcast on the 49th season of 60 MINUTES. That is work which I find challenging, rewarding and sometimes frustrating because of the schedule. While creating alien menagerie pieces aren’t without challenge, I experience a deep sense of serenity, and satisfaction. It’s every day, every moment, I’ve sat aside time to work on art for the love of it, connected as one.

preliminary pencil doodle, and ink rendering of alien x.42.

Boy Blockhead's Big Book of Outer Space Aliens

It was 1993 when I first started kicking around the idea of making some kind of alien-zoo art project. I wasn't really sure what form the project itself should take. I was keen on making some paintings, or maybe even some shadow box constructions. It was the first time I started really thinking about art that was outside of my book cover, illustrator niche. Maybe it's because a couple of my friends had success with their own book projects, that I thought a book proposal of my own was the best way to help this alien menagerie happen. I have to admit though, I didn't have much of a story to tell. Well, I did think that a collection of paintings under the title "Boy Blockheads's Big Book of Outer Space Aliens" might be a way to approach it. Boy Blockhead was a character I would occasionally doodle, and it seemed logical to enlist his aid in hosting my alien menagerie. I had a couple theories about his role in the whole thing; one had him finding a mysterious book of aliens, the other had him traveling in his spaceship documenting the aliens he encountered. A later, more surreal concept is that the box environment each alien is depicted in, is actually the inside of Boy Blockheads noggin. I still like that one.

I was typically painting more than 20 covers a year during this period, so making the time to do more than the occasional sketch was a big problem. I'm sure this is a pretty typical scenario for any busy freelancer too. It's really difficult to carve out time to indulge personal projects, and I was still finding a lot of satisfaction in the cover work as well. Another problem I had though was trying to imagine how "alien menagerie" and the other work I was doing would coexist. Here's a slice of the work I was doing in 1995, and my aliens were coming from a pretty different direction.

Without a solid plan, I would work on the idea every now and then. These are from a sketchbook I started in 1995. The sketchbook itself, is a really handsome, bound book that completely intimidated me. Of the 100 pages, I filled a dozen. I'm sure that available time took it's toll, but i was really afraid of making a bad drawing in that book!  After a couple of these partially filled in sketchbook debacles, I took to drawing my aliens on loose leaf paper and tossed them into a box for future reference. It certainly helped me keep a more steady stream of sketches coming, and eventually I got over my fear of working in a bound sketchbook too.
 

An awful lot of time would pass before I finally got around to painting the first one. Even today, I still run into periods where other work keeps me from my alien menagerie for much longer than I like, but I'm glad I never gave up on them either.

drawing from memory

When I'm working in the world of my alien menagerie, I often draw from nostalgic inspiration in some form or other.

I was recently browsing through some older sketchbooks of aliens, and this particular one caught my eye. When I sketched this, I was working from the memory of a toy I once had.  I wasn't trying to recreate it, so much as see how it might inspire something of my own. It was a rubber finger puppet that I remember getting at checkout in a grocery store when I was five or six.  I had a pretty clear image of how it looked, but I had know idea what it was called or how to find it either. 

In the time that's past since I made that sketch the mystery of it's inspiration was resolved.

It turns out the finger puppet was a RUBBER UGLY.  RUBBER UGLIES were a spin-off of UGLY STICKERS- the rubber monster on the left was based on the sticker pictured at right. Artwork by Norm Saunders.

I wrote about UGLY STICKERS in an earlier post. They were also another memory from childhood that I couldn't quite pin down. The images were vivid, but the name of them…not so much.  

It was the publication of a book of Norm Saunders work, and the additional discovery of a website devoted to him, that connected names with the images I remembered. Two mysteries solved at one time.

~ here's alien menagerie x.30 

acrylic on Arches 300 watercolor paper 8" x 10"

What's in a name? : Uchujin Doumei

I've made a practice of naming pieces within "alien menagerie" in Japanese as well as English, (using the Japanese title within each image).

The Japanese name I gave the overall project is "uchujin doumei"  (宇宙人同盟）which translates to "The League of Outer Space Men"  or maybe "The League of Aliens". I really like how this title translates to English too, in some respects better than "Alien Menagerie", but I also enjoy that the names I'm using aren't direct equivalents. 

Having two titles in this way allow me to express a slightly different interpretation of the project, even if it's obscure.

sketchbook archive

I went through a box of alien menagerie sketches this morning, and pulled out this wierd fella.

sketchbook March 13

I opened up a moleskine sketchbook I haven't doodled in for a few years to work a little more with this bubble headed guy.

sketchbook February 21

A shot from a sketchbook I doodle in.

post-it note alien #2

~ oxide red on 3"X3" post-it.

3 x 3

An entire month has past since my last entry. A lot of other work, (and a spring vacation ) have kept me away from painting anything on the alien menagerie project. Time now to move forward and do more than work in my sketchbooks.

This is a post-tax filing, post-it note art post.

acrylics on 3 x 3 post-it

sketchbook archive 2-18

a simple post, another page from my alien menagerie sketches ~

Sketchbook archive

~ from one of my alien menagerie sketchbooks.

2011

To start off 2011, here are some doodles from the end of 2010. ~ inhabitants of my daydreams

doodles 12-10-2010

getting the ball rolling: pencil sketches

Initially I was stumped by what the setting and dynamic of the winter creature would be. I considered a hibernating character. Perhaps the scene would be in a burrow, or maybe the box could be a freezer. I wasn't happy with the idea of painting a sleeping character though. On the upside, I rather liked the idea that came out of this line of thought, that we'd be viewing the scene through a frosted pane of glass with the center wiped clear.

Eventually I started playing with the idea of a snowman. Simple, obvious, though not 'biological', it served as a fun point of departure and pretty quickly evolved into the character I'm painting for this series. My snowman became white and fluffy, so now I'm working the balance between cute and weird.