It was called: And now for something almost completely different…

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I have shown you some Photoshop stuff, some tikis, and some written stuff…

But, Arthur, you may well be thinking to yourself, you said that you do all kinds of art, and we have yet to see any supporting evidence of this astounding claim!

Hey, I said I do every kind of art… (which may be a slight exaggeration)… I did not say I am good at all of them…

So let’s go back to basics and talk about drawing. This goes back to my earliest artistic roots, back when I used to doodle in class when I was but a wee lad. Obviously we all used to doodle in class. During the early years this is part of the curriculum! But some of us just couldn’t let it go. We never put the crayons down… (This is the first warning sign that you may be an artist!!!)…

Drawing and sketching are the most basic forms of art. It is also the springboard that many other forms of art…uh…spring from. Paintings start from sketches as do most statues, and presumably most works of architecture as well. There is just something magical about being able to look at an object or a living thing and then capture its image, its essence, on paper. Even the cavemen who painted on cave walls sensed the magic in this. What is even more magical is to be able to bring to life things you can only imagine in your mind.

From coloring books and stick figures, I slowly gravitated to fantasy art…

When I was 13 or 14, I began my career as a voracious reader, and I read a lot of fantasy and sci-fi. So a lot of my early art involved heroes with swords or ray-guns. I really loved the Conan the Barbarian books and comics, so I spent a lot of time drawing that steely eyed Cimmerian. We will dig deeper into my fixation with Conan later, because I used most of the pictures for other things, but for now it is enough to say that my lizard-fighting heroes gradually developed…(that is not a muscle pun)… but now that you mention it, muscles, faces, heck, most of the human body is not easy to draw without lots of practice… (If you will forgive me for saying so, women’s breasts are quite challenging, whether covered or not… so rather than drawing boobs all day, I mostly just ignored them…[artistically speaking])…

Houston, we have a problem…

I went out to the garage to dig through my bottomless drawers… (which isn’t nearly as sexy as it sounds)… I knew I had lots of stuff stashed around, but I had no idea of the scale of the task at hand. Scanning even most of this pile of output while simultaneously putting together a coherent storyline, is not going to be a one or two-day job. Please bear with me, and I will do the best I can to entertain you.

As we watch my slow progress at acquiring some level of artistic skill, please bear in mind that I have no formal art training. I am entirely self-taught, so even if my art sucks, it has the merit of being completely original…

I used to do little one-page comics to amuse my friends…

I know, I know, it’s a little gory and not very good, but you have to begin somewhere…

It is all about building slowly towards the next level…

You learn from each step…

Remember, when it comes to art, doodling is practicing…

Just add complexity to the mix as you go…

It wasn’t all war and bloodshed, I was very political at an early age…

Or at least I had a sense of the unfairness of life, and the fact that politicians should never be trusted… (or allowed to run for office)…

OK, I may have been a little cynical even then…

If you scroll back down to my Mr. Potato Head picture, and the pirate and samurai pics, you can see how my ability to draw, even a little, was very important, even though it didn’t help me as much as I would have liked… But teaching yourself to draw is a vital step on the road to artistic expression. In the computer age, you can cheat, use shortcuts, and make art without knowing any of the basics. I am not telling you how to live, but this would be wrong… As an example, let’s take Steven Tyler, lead singer for Aerosmith… Does anyone think it’s strange that a guy who spent years with his band playing small clubs for crap pay so he could hone and refine his art, is now a judge on American Idol, a show that teaches young people that you just show up and sing a song or two, get a record deal and become a freekin’ idol??? Anyway…

The point is, that through perseverance and practice you learn your craft and you learn about yourself and you are one with what you are trying to say as an artist. No matter how good or bad you are, you are expressing yourself, you are letting a little bit of yourself out to say something about how you feel.

I was in Rome with my youngest brother, Sid, and I started a quick sketch of the coliseum… this was back in the early 80′s… When I got home, I decided to finish the picture as I imagined the coliseum would have looked back when it was still being used. The picture is too big to scan completely. It is folded and faded, and not all that good. But I have it hanging in the garage…(where, for some reason, my wife insists I hang any of my art that I feel I need to)… and when I look at it, I remember that trip, and Rome, and I say to myself, ‘that is way better than a photograph in an album that I never look at’. And I did it all by myself.

So let out the inner you with some old-school pencil and ink drawing…

Or let out the outer you, if you want…

(Notice that I did not draw my nipple… because I was afraid to try… and fear is what holds us back)…