Hey internet. I’m actually drawing something in my lap as I type this, I’m so busy finishing up something that should have been done yesterday, but I wanted to pass along a couple of these images from sketchbooks past.
The school at which I teach (Toronto Cartoonists Workshop) is having a faculty show in a few weeks, and it’s been suggested I put together a sketchbook for the event, since I’m one of the few guys on earth who doesn’t have one available at conventions.
Wife insists we do this, I concede, and much scanning is planned. So I’m posting a very small sample from just the first scanned book out of the twenty or thirty sketchbooks I have in my studio. This will take time, in between my other gigs, to sort out anything worth looking in this vast wasteland of nude/figure studies and odd doodles, but I’m told someone might want to look at some of these pages, so I present a few of them before they get collected up in the book. We’re just at the start of the winnowing process, so I have no idea whether or not any of these pages will make the final cut.
The Dredded Sketchbook begins.
From the nineties, when DC had the rights to Judge Dredd – I was working on a Dredd pitch right around the time the series ended. The script was written, or at least plotted, but it got stopped before any art was done. Dredd figures abound in sketchbook pages of this period, either because I was thinking about him a lot, or because I was hoping to draw the script I was writing, I honestly can’t remember. All my 90’s sketchbooks have Dredd pages in them somewhere.
Saw a guy wearing this on the history channel and HAD to sketch it before it left my head. Back in the crusades, apparently, knights would wear candles on their helmets in crown formation, so they could raid the heathen locals at night, and because it was scary as fuck. It’s not so much the sketch that pleases me about this doodle, but the idea that occurred to me as I was drawing it; it looked like a halo, and perhaps that was the actual purpose all along?
The typical thought stream of a sketchbook page. I’m doing a warm up figure drawing and I see something on the history channel about hand paintings on the outside of caves being a universal image found all over the world, and I start to wonder if it began with bloody hand prints, made by early hunters, and almost without asking it to, my hand draws a sketch of a caveman killing the bunny. Let’s hope there are no psychiatrists looking in at the blog today.
Speaking of cave-men.
Met this guy in an elevator at a Star Trek convention in Niagara Falls, sketched this in my book as soon as I sat down in the hotel room. There was something about the crazy Klingon eyes and the double chin that made it all magical to me.
Last year for Christmas, my wife asked me to do a drawing of Batman for a neighbourhood kid as a present. I treated the gig like any professional job and did three sketches of the idea for approval from an editor in my sketchbook. (I think my wife stepped into the role). My editor picked the Batman in the rain one, but I’ve really come to LOVE that dropping cape shot, I think because Batman’s mask is an almost perfect ying/yang balance of black and white in simple shapes.
Here’s the rainy shot in its final form, by the way.
So very Christmas-y.
Ty the Guy OUT!
Here now, your sketchbook BONUS moment:
Nudes and Judge Dredds. It was bound to happen.
Ty Templeton's ART LAND!! 