patokon blog

Lee Van Cleef as Tony Romano in 'Kansas City Confidential', a film noir piece about a perfect crime and a patsy who tracks down the gang that set him up.  Riveting story and some great performances by some legendary bad-asses. Worth a watch.  It's available on archive.org and easily findable on YouTube as it is firmly within the public domain. 

I finally saw this groundbreaking Swedish exploitation revenge film starring cult fan favorite Christina Lindberg. Not the most amazing actress, but even so she has such presence. You just can't take your eyes off her. 

I decided to continue to practice crosshatching and I thought I photos by photographer Edward S. Curtis might be excellent thanks to the balance of light and dark and clear gradations in his works. The moment I saw the photo of Big Head (his name, original found here: http://m.theatlantic.com/infocus/2013/04/native-americans-portraits-from-a-century-ago/100489/) I knew that he would be the perfect practice subject. I did a very quick layout with blue-pencil, added a few shading guides, and then jumped right in with a Tachikawa Finepoint System 0.1 and 0.4. I put emphasis on trying out techniques rather than slavish attention to detail. Even though I'm working on developing a more cartoonish style and don't intend to focus on realism, it was definitely an excellent way to practice drawing uniform lines and applying different combinations of patterns. I realize now that in some areas, I should have left the horizontal lines alone without crossing them with verticals. I'm goin...

My favorite Tarantino line of all time delivered by Michael Madsen as Mr. Blonde in Reservoir Dogs. 

Watching Dead in Tombstone starring Danny Trejo, I was inspired to focus on this drawing more than the movie. Still, I'm glad Señor Trejo gets to be the star these days. 

"Search" Drawn for Illustration Friday . Finally filled another page in my larger moleskine sketchbook. Was so busy doing this piece, I almost forgot to upload Tomoko 's artwork to the Hexenringe webcomic .

I've retouched an old piece for Illustration Friday not realizing Reflect was last week's theme. Oh well. On reflecting: I spent way too much time reflecting and not enough time doing when I was much younger, but I have to admit that the experience hasn't been a total loss. Experience is still experience even if it's in your head and I'm a lot more prepared to be an active artist, husband, and dad than I ever was before. If you're going to spend a lot of time being haunted by your demons, might as well get chummy with them. Running away from them doesn't do you or those around you any favors. And who knows... they might be AWESOME!