Sofar’s Illustrations.

SOFAR’S ILLUSTRATIONS.

Now with a comment system! Go and tell me where it’s at.

For centuries we’ve been staring at bone-white Classical Revival architecture, supposedly modeled after the Roman and Greek temples of old. Something that we’ve forgotten until recently, however, is that the Greeks and Romans didn’t leave their architecture white, nor did they their statues and friezes. Paint doesn’t last too long in the Mediterranean sun, though, and it was a good thousand years after the fall of the Roman empire before the Western world became interested in Classical architecture again. By then we’d forgotten, and most thought the old temples were always white. Some architects in the last few decades of the Revivalist period took advantage of the wondrous new discovery of terra cotta to recreate the colorful cornices of The Roman Empire, but the scourge of modern architecture had already begun to eat away at the national aesthetic, and pretty soon the public had a thorough disdain for anything and everything old.

Terra cotta is a wonderful clay, it’s as strong as iron, completely and totally waterproof, completely and totally fireproof, able to withstand temperatures of one thousand degrees Celsius, can be sculpted into many exciting shapes to better decorate your building, and even be molded by extrusion for easy mass-production of trendy linear-art-deco ornament. It can be glazed in a rainbow of colors that never, ever fade even if left in the sun for a hundred years, it glistens in the rain, and if it rains enough it cleans itself. Terra cotta, of course, is very popular in Seattle and Portland, pretty much every building built here between 1890 and 1940 is covered in terra cotta tile, or occasionally steel-framed buildings have no conventional bricks at all, all the panel walls are made out of terra cotta bricks. Unfortunately like everything awesome, it went out of style, and the workshops that were able to churn out terra-cotta bricks at such little expense closed down, and now we have nothing.

Chrome really isn’t that hard to do. Everyone always just leaves it gray when they draw cars.

This was meant to be a wolf with horns and cloven hooves, but my friends maintain that it is a minotaur. The addition of the nose ring confuses matters further. I say the fur is kind of thick for a cow, but then again I really didn't make any attempt to draw fur beyond drawing little spikes on him.

That thing off to the left is a streetcar.

I left this unfinished like a year ago. It’s inked, I don’t like to ingk things anymore. I made the pattern on the wallpaper by scanning one of my ties.

For some strange reason, this was the most frequently requested picture on my old website, according to the stats. It was being embedded in myspace pages and forum posts and like four goth girls were embedding it in the signatures of their livejournal posts. I disabled hotlink protection for my new website just to see if people would start doing it again.

Yep. That’s a car from the fifties. Upon posting this to Sheezy Art I discovered that car nuts—several of which were watching me—get very upset if you take an artistic liberty with the design of one of their favorite machines. Seriously, like putting the wrong kind of rear window on. No one seemed to upset by the man with the tail, but putting the side trim of the ’60 model on what is for all other intents and purposes a ’59? I mean what kind of fantasy world are you living in.

“Untitled No. Zero in Norman Romanesque.”

The symbolist in me loves bricked-in windows.

I’m not going to lie to you, I have no problem whatsoever drawing the same little thing over and over and over again until I fill the page. It’s meditative.

It bothers me when illustrators draw patters on their subject’s clothes but instead of drawing a pattern that conforms to the shape and folds of the cloth, they just fill in the area with a two-dimensional pattern. So lazy. Cartoonists do it all the time.

So yeah, this is a red coyote dude in a glitzy waistcoat, listening to an ancient radio with a weird green-eyed fox dude, where I’m not really sure.

Explain yourself.

Friggin’ winglin’ bastards takin’ up two seats with their friggin’ wings why don’t they just friggin’ fly if they got those friggin’ big-ass wings I don’t got no wings I gotta take the bus he don’t gotta take the bus.

Anyway, yeah. That’s Koor. (I gave him a name.) Uh, he’s a gargoyle, I guess. You know, like the sort what hang around gothic buildings. Usually no ties and waistcoats, that bunch. Nor mohawks, I’m not sure when the worked its way into the character design. Green. Guess he’s made of animate terra cotta of something. Basalt, maybe.

This is my study in reflection, B.T.W. It didn’t start out that way, but I realized that I drew the bus with an almost hemicylindrical roof, kind of like an airstream trailer, or a stainless-steel cigar tube. I thought there’d be a lot of strange reflections in that kind of environment so I went to town. Of course, airstream trailers don’t have stainless steel on the inside, but whomever designed this weird-ass bus thought that’d look real spiffy. He also thought hardwood floors might lend a touch of class to public transportation.

Lordy lordy, I’m not sure what to make of this one. It’s a weird little red coyote-man with an absuredly long snout, with an affinity for absurdly long cigarette holders, and he’s four-armed. (You could assume he is, I couldn’t think of anything the fourth arm could be doing so I didn’t draw it.) I made up a word for that one, “tetradextrous,” a combination of Greek and Latin unfortunately, but it sounds good.

All this purple and yellow kind of reminds me of the crazy Simpsons color scheme, at least that which was used in the early seasons. Another thing that reminds me of the Simpsons, that bastard has one hell of an overbite.

I should color this.

Man, this was the last picture I did for like a year. Wasn’t so good at drawing curly bits back then. The curly bits are the center of any façade.

Same gargoyle dude in a waistcoat. Still green, not usually the color of granite or basalt or whatever else from which you might carve a gargoyle to festoon your lovely gothic parapet. So I guess he's made of clay or something, and the green is a shiny glaze. Lots of façades are made out of terra cotta. I drew this back before I knew you weren’t supposed to wear a belt with a vest.

This is also the first picture on which I ever used the airbrush tool.

I can’t seem to draw a window without breaking it.

A few years ago, back when the band Death Cab for Cutie was just a local band getting air time only on Seattle’s thoroughly indy KEXP, I read an advertisement for that particular station in The Stranger. The advertisement consisted of a dozen or so visual representations of the names of some of the bands they would play. You may remember back in aught-three there was an influx of very odd band names, especially in Seattle.

Most of the illustrations were fairly easy to grasp, a picture of a girl digging a hole in front of a tombstone to stand for Pretty Girls Make Graves, three pictures of a hand giving a thumbs-up to represent The Yeah Yeah Yeahs, a picture of a mouse sitting on a book entitled Modesty to stand for Modest Mouse, (also just a local band back then,) and a picture of a boy with superimposed images of snakes over his arms to stand for the band These Arms are Snakes.

What bothered me about this advertisement, however, as their choice of visual representation for Deathcab for Cutie. They chose to use just a simple picture of a taxi cab with a skull and crossbones painted on the side. It got the point across, but whenever I heard the name what I always thought of was an old Lincoln hearse painted like a New York taxi cab. And here it is.

It’s rife with symbolism, no?

I drew a bus. It’s electric, how excitingly pre-war. The electric buses in Seattle have a similar mess of random machinery on their rooves (though mine is a little exaggerated) I’ve never been bale to find out what it all does.

This was the first picture I ever colored on the computer, actually the first picture I ever colored at all.