Game Day Saturday in the South

There are holidays that MUST be acknowledged.  Christmas, Thanksgiving, Arbor Day.  (Seriously, you don't like Arbor Day?  Quit breathing.  That air belongs to the people who care about Arbor Day!)

But here in the South there is a day that combines the excitement of all of those with the summer gluttony of eating wings and for some, drinking copious amounts of beer.

This...

Other parts of the country may celebrate it as much as we do, but I am not from those places.  I am from the South and this is what I know.  Happy Game Day, boys!

Twister Toon

Just thought this was interesting...

I am having fun looking through all the websites with facts on them.  If I do this long enough I will be a bar trivia GOD!

Fact Toons!

I told you I'm going to be more positive with my Tuesday Toonsdays and I meant it.

But first a re-introduction.  I am the Paintmonkey.  This is me...

...pretty much.

So as the helmsman of this venture, I introduce to you:

This Week In History With The Paintmonkey!!!  I will choose a day of the upcoming week and find a fact that I want to illustrate and present it to you.  I will also make cameos.

I chose this week's date because I just really wanted to draw Babe Ruth's tubby self smacking a home-run.  (Seriously, my sketch of this had the ol' Babe looking like Chris Farley was playing him in the movie.)   HOWEVER...just 42 years after that momentous feat, the Paintmonkey's little brother was born!  Coincidence?!?!  Well..of course.  But still, it leads into me telling my little brother happy birthday!  (See what I did there?)

Enjoy knowledge!  Brain stuff is fun.

Paintmonkey Podcasting!

The day is here!  The Paintmonkey is now in the realm of internet podcast lore!  I told you a couple of weeks ago about the Jack Davis event I attended.  This is the last part of that evening.

After the art opening Robby and I headed over to the restaurant where our friend from school, Jeff,  was at a trivia contest.  It was being hosted by fellow geek, Scott.  Scott is actually a talk radio personality.  He has a good voice for it as evidenced by the fact that he is the main guy in just about every radio commercial in the greater Brunswick area.  More on this later.

The podcast is called Dinner 4 Geeks.  I've discussed them before but this was the first time I had gotten to meet the other three.  We met Ryan at the Jack Davis event.  He had to run by his office before the podcast and when he got there we found out why.  Ryan makes his own action figures.  As a gift to Robby and I, he had made us a zombie head and one of the chilled monkey brain entrees from "Temple of Doom"!

Pretty sweet, huh?  I can swap out the head of a Han Solo Kenner figure and make him an extra on "The Walking Dead"!

So then we started the podcast.  You can either download it at iTunes or listen to it here on Libsyn.  Ours is Episode 31.  I apologize if I babble a bit.  I didn't actually find out what the homework was until right before the recording but I stand by my statement (for the most part) that I can find something amazing about any of the artists put forth.  And I did.  Even Ryan's really obscure ones.

But here are the gifts I gave them.

For Scott (who I still can't believe could tell what year this outfit was from)...

For Ryan...

 
For Ron...

And finally, for Jeff...

Again, it was a fantastic evening, and I had a ball.  Now through all of this, I knew Robby and I were pinko liberals walking into a hotbed of conservatism.  Ron is (or used to be) the head of the local GOP and Scott's DJing gig is on...*shudder*...FOX!  I listened to his show that morning and I actually quite enjoyed it.  I don't agree with everything he was saying but I did think he was quite reasonable.  (He thought it was funny that I said that.)  Even our friend Jeff is pretty much on the right hand side of the political spectrum.  Ryan is...well, I'm not sure about Ryan.  Ryan just...is.

But this got me thinking.  We are all going to disagree about things.  But if we shun the other side we will never find common ground.  We will never truly understand what the other side thinks.  We all need to talk about the stuff that makes us the same.  I had a wonderful time discussing artists and pop culture and geek matters with these guys.  And not once did they hiss at me or call me some derogatory term for liberal.  Maybe the way to healing the country is through Geekdom.  And that night we found that one thing that can bring us together as a nation.

Rob Liefeld is just awful .

It's Tuesday...Again!?!?!

Seriously...wasn't it just Tuesday last week?  Anyways, this week's Tuesday Toonsday is another from my "Creatures I Have Seen" line.  I know it's a been a little negative (most stories from the world o' retail are.)  So in an effort to be better, I am working on something new and positive for next week.  That's not to say negative won't slip back in.  Far from it.  I still find horrible things funny so in they will go.  But I will TRY to be more positive.

This week's entry:

Now I am not saying that single dads who go out with their kids are awful.  I know many single dads who are incredible parents and love their children very much.  I am pointing and laughing at the ones who pay NO attention to their offspring and then throw a credit card at them in order to maintain the familial "love".

BONUS!
I am throwing in the mountain lion mascot I've been working with.  I did this sketch a while back.

And then I finished it up as this...

Worked out okay...

Jekyll Toonsday

This continues my coastal Georgia adventures and carries it into this week's Tuesday Toonsday.

On Saturday, I decided I would drive over to Jekyll Island and see if I remembered anything from when I was a kid.  I did not.  A lot more "resort-ey" than I remembered.  Oh well.  However, this was my main takeaway of the island...

Sorry it's not in color.  Next week I will be back to normal "tooning" schedule.

St. Simons Island Trip (cont...)

There actually was much more to the evening AFTER the Jack Davis event.  Robby and I were guest "geeks" on a podcast I have mentioned here before called Dinner 4 Geeks.  We had a ball doing it but it deserves it's own blog post so I will get to that later.  I think the episode will air somewhere around August 18th.

The next day, the art gallery was having a slide presentation about Jack Davis which I tried to RSVP to, but I did it too late.  I went over just on the off chance I could sneak in but at worst I got to see the Jack Davis drawings again in a much less crowded atmosphere.  Again...if you have the chance to ever see his work in person, just go.  His sense of humor is contagious and you can NOT leave without a smile on your face.

HOWEVER...I had waited too long so the presentation was full.  But I did get to see Mr. Davis again.  So I looked around a little more and then headed out to paint.

I literally just walked across the parking lot to the St. Simons Island lighthouse area and set up my little rig.  I got my little portable folding chair and set up my paints.

I actually had my first people come up and see what I was doing.  It wasn't nearly as weird or uncomfortable as I thought it would be.

So I got this one done and I wanted to paint a little more.  So I started wandering around the area.  There was a nice road scene that had live oaks forming an interlacing canopy which I really liked.  However, I kind of had to sit in the road and then the mosquitoes showed up.  Nope.

Back to the pier in front of the lighthouse.  There was a cluster of trees and there was this one beautiful REALLY old live oak off by itself.

I was fighting this one originally.  I drew it out in pencil and then started the watercolors.  It wasn't working.  It irritated me to the point that I just grabbed an ink pen and started scribbling over it.  And then magically it got better.  Once that happened, I put more watercolor on and it felt much better to me.

I was really pleased at how well my little painting rig worked and it was pretty light to carry around and I felt comfortable working on it.  I look forward to doing more.

Heroes and Friends* Revisited

*Now that Randy Travis is safely out of the hospital, I can use his line without fear of seeming insensitive.

This past week I went down to Saint Simon's Island.  A fellow alumni of Young Harris who lives in the Brunswick area had let me know about a retrospective being put on by the Glynn County Art Association.  The artist: why, none other than St. Simon's resident Mr. Jack Davis!  (Who, as you may recall...I am semi-obsessed with.)

Now unfortunately, my wife couldn't make it down on this trip.  I was forced to doing my secretive "meal drawings" alone.

I thought he was praying over his little continental breakfast for what seemed like a REALLY long time...just head down and not moving.  Then I noticed his phone behind the cup of juice.

Since the wife couldn't go, I had an extra ticket to the art opening and the accompanying panel discussion.  But I knew another of my fellow YHC alumna lives just north of the island in Savannah.  Robby was more than happy to take me up on the offer and Thursday night he headed down.  If you want to read some good stuff, be sure to check out Robby's blog Ramblings From the Tide.  He and his wife are both excellent writers.

Once Robby arrived, we headed over to the panel discussion.  Mr. Davis and his family were in attendance as well as many locals who obviously thought the world of him.

The panel was moderated by Nick Meglin, who used to be a writer and editor of MAD magazine.  Great stories and hugely entertaining, Mr. Meglin was actually interviewed with Robby beforehand by a local television station/internet pornographer/we're not really sure what they were.  If we get our hands on the footage I will be sure to post it.  It was really great.

The other two people on the panel were Mr. Jack Pittman, former president of the southeastern chapter of the National Cartoonists Society...

...and Mr. Tom Richmond, who is a current artist at MAD and is the new caricature hired gun now.  He is also extremely wiggly...

.

...and so he ended up looking like Nicolas Cage in my sketchbook.  (He does NOT look like Nicolas Cage.)

They all talked about Jack's influence and what he meant to each of them personally.  At the end of the discussion, Mr. Pittman presented a beautifully bound art notebook filled with cartoons from many of today's comic artists expressing their appreciation for Jack Davis.  The cover had an image of a self portrait that Jack had done, and they ran it through a 3-D printer to make a plaque for the cover.  Very cool.

We walked back across the street to the Glynn County Art Association.  I highly recommend if you have the chance to go see this exhibit.  Jack Davis drawings are amazing in print.  In person, they defy description.  Just go.  Thank me later.

Robby and I went up to Jack and his grand-daughter was kind of wrangling him and keeping the flow going.  She asked me if I had something I wanted him to sign and I replied "no actually...I have a gift".  I gave him a copy of one of my Bulldog calendars that I had written "thank you" on and signed.  He smiled warmly and seemed genuinely excited as he looked at it.  When everyone refers to him as a "true southern gentleman"...THAT is what they are talking about.  I will carry the image of Jack Davis smiling at my drawing for a VERY long time.

At the end of the evening, Robby got an old Bulldog clipping he had signed and we got our picture made with the man himself.  It was a wonderful evening.

...and it wasn't quite over yet.  More on that tomorrow.