Animator. Director. Artist. Scapegoat.
Drawing stuff like this is so fraught. A few weeks ago someone thought this $100 Copyright Troll was racist, because it looked like a racist’s caricature of a Jew (I argued that if you can’t draw evil trolls because racists use them to represent Jews, then the racists won). Some people will say this is drawing racist too, missing that it’s a satire of racism.
First Hundred Dollar Drawing of 2021! There’s a two-word maximum for these (see rules), but you can certainly limit your commission to one word, or, as in this case, no words at all – just a number.
UPDATE: Now available for purchase here!
I asked Theo Gray to make me this 9.25 x 12″ acrylic peg pad (as opposed to peg bar) so I could do some quickie pencil animations on my glass drawing board, which I use as a cheap light table (see photo above).
Instead of the traditional acme animation pegbar, which requires expensive pre-cut animation paper or/and a $500 hole punch, I wanted 3 round pegs that would line up with a standard inexpensive 3-hole punch. I specified clear acrylic, so I could scan drawings through it, so they’d stay in perfect register.
It works great. It’s small, light, and simple. I punch holes in cheap printer paper and off I go. Here’s a thing I made with it, inspired by Preston Blair:
Clearly this could be better, but it’s the fault of the animator, not the peg pad. I need to practice my hand-drawn animatin’ to improve. Now I can!
We can make more of these peg pads if it looks like there’s enough demand to sell 5 to 10 of them. Would you buy one for $20? If so, we’ll make them and put them on the e-store. What say ye?
In these dark days of Winter, boredom has driven me to craft:
A year or two ago I had a dream about a high-heeled shoe with an eye on the heel, much like the re-creation above. The heel itself was a unicorn horn. I sketched it upon awakening, and while I no longer remember the dream, I remember the drawing. I recently obtained polymer clay, a glue gun, and plastic eyes, to make these:
I didn’t make the shoes themselves; they are dance shoes I bought used for $5 at the local theater’s annual sale a few years ago. The eyes are plastic, which complicated things; the Fimo clay I shaped around them needs to be baked in an oven to harden, but the plastic would melt, so I had to make aluminum foil dummies. Also, they are life-size, which I think is too small. So I ordered some robust oven-safe 20mm glass irises, which finally arrived today, allowing me to make these:
I bought these shoes online, the red ones new, the brown ones used, both made of plastic and very cheap. I’m still developing my eye-making technique, getting closer to what I want. And when I reach my goal, I’ll…what? Look into mass production? I sure don’t want to spend my days hand-making Fimo shoe eyes, but injection-molded ones might be cool. Then people could hot-glue them to their own shoes, and my work would be done.
