(f)art

I finally found a shop in Annandale that sells those Monami brand but-pen (brush pens). I tend to think of these pens as calligraphy brushes for children. Real masters don't use these for their art, but novices like yours truly-- who aren't working in a traditional vein, anyway-- don't mind playing with them.

Inspired by Bill Watterson's revelation that he drew Calvin and Hobbes on Strathmore Bristol board with "a small sable brush," I tried making some drawings on my own Bristol board, but quickly realized that that wouldn't work: Monami ink, whatever its chemical composition, isn't suited for Bristol, which is a textured paper that encourages ink to bleed horizontally, turning a clean vertical or diagonal stroke into something that looks a bit like a centipede.

So I switched to a more modest drawing paper from my Caliber Drawing Pad, and immediately enjoyed better results, which are displayed for you below. Sorry if I seem to be on a tiger/rabbit kick (and have been on one for years), but I can't help thinking that these are characters that are trying to tell me that they want to be in a story (I tried writing a story a few years back, but never got beyond the first chapter). So I guess I'm going to keep on drawing them in various scenarios until I figure out what that story is supposed to be.

Along with the three renderings of Tiger and Rabbit below, I've drawn a character that I haven't drawn since my undergrad days: Super Herman, whom my buddy Mike will remember. A foot tall and as strong as Superman, Super Herman was the buddy of The Protector, Mike's own version of Superman. I remember some adults looking at my old Super Herman drawings and saying, "Oh, that's Kilroy!" I was in elementary school at the time (Super Herman was invented when I was a fourth- or fifth-grader), so my response was, "Who's Kilroy?" If you don't know who Kilroy is, see here. Super Herman appears first in the lineup below.

I've drawn my usual scenario, in which Tiger is scaring Rabbit, but that image is the last of the three tiger/rabbit scenes. I've also branched out and done two silly studies-- one in which Rabbit looks delighted to see Tiger, thus changing the emotional tenor of their encounter, and one in which both are looking deadly serious while smoking pipes-- a reference to a Korean version of "once upon a time": "Long ago, when tigers smoked pipes..." Somewhere in my pile of possessions is one of my favorite scrolls, which depicts this scene in more traditionally Korean style: Tiger and Rabbit are just hanging out, smoking long pipes.

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