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SOFAR’S ILLUSTRATIONS.
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“I HAVE NO CLUE WHAT’S GOING ON HERE” • Apr. ’O8.
That thing off to the left is a streetcar. |
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“RED ROOM” • Apr. ’O8.
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. |
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“CANDLE!?” • Feb. ’O8.
For some strange reason, this was the most frequently requested picture in my old archive. It’s a candle. I think I drew it like three years ago. It ended up being embedded in dozens of forum posts, myspace pages, and there were at least three goth chicks that used the picture in their livejournal signature. It was also top three in a Google Images search for “candle.” I should make a new one. |
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“CENTURY” • Jan. ’O8.
Yep. That’s, uh, a car from the fifties. As if I don’t know exactly what car that is, I just don’t want to appear obsessed with cars, which I am. And, uh, I put a wolf dude in it. Except I gave him horns, and a devil tail, so I guess he’s a demon-wolf. Maybe he has cloven hooves too. His hand doesn’t look very good, mostly because I had to erase it so many times, the paper got kind of raw. Listen, half the time I have no idea what I’m drawing. And when I do the result isn’t interesting enough to post here. |
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“UNTITLED No. ZERO in NORMAN ROMANESQUE” • Dec. ’O7.
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. Half the time I don’t wake up until I’ve covered half the desk. It bothers me when illustrators draw patterns 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. By the way, this is what architecture is supposed to look like. Minimalism is a cop out. It’s not better, it’s easier. Four thousand years refining the art of geometry and proportion, and they take a freaking vacuum cleaner to it and call it the last word in style. Yeah, it’s nothing, we get it. That’s what we had before architecture. Nothing. We’ve spent the last four millennia working on something to fill in the empty spaces. Zero is a number, but not an interesting number. So yeah, uh, 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 really not sure. |
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“TIE” • Dec. ’O7.
Explain yourself. Jesus Christ, this guy’s got claws. That’s weird. |
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“BIT of a TRIP” • Dec. ’O7.
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, that bunch. Nor mohawks. Green. Guess he’s made of animate terra cotta or 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 so I just 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. |
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“VERMILION JONES” • Oct. ’O7.
Lordy lordy, I’m not sure to make of this one. It’s a weird little red man with an absurdly 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 clumsy 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. |
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“THE TERRA-COTTA JUNGLE” • July ’O7.
This took me about three days. I should color it. |
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“BYZANTINE” • June ’O6.
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. |
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“KOOR” • April ’O6.
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. |
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“ATTIC WINDOW” • March ’O6.
I can’t seem to draw a window without breaking it. |
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“DEATHCAB” • March ’O6.
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? |
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“OMNIBUS” • Jan. ’O6.
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 able to find out what it all does |
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“TUDOR COTTAGE” • Nov. ’O5.
This was the first picture I ever colored on the computer, actually the first picture I ever colored at all. |
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