YET MORE CARICATURES

I just found some more caricatures! Here's one of me by Lenard Robinson. Not bad, eh?

This (above) isn't a caricature but I want to include it anyway. It was a gift from Katie Rice! It was meant to be a fridge magnet but it looked so good on black paper that I hung it on my black bulletin board instead.

Oops! I just noticed that the legs bowed when I took the picture. they're supposed to be straight. 

Here's my kid when he was a toddler, drawn by John K.  John was fascinated by the size of little kids' heads.

Finally, here's a doodle I made of John for an old Theory Corner blog post. Haw! I can't remember why I gave him surfer hair.

RANDOM EDDIE DRAWINGS

 What the heck was this sketch (above) for? Was it for this Theory Corner site? I only remember that I started to copy Tee Hee's Kate Hepburn then changed my mind and drew it the way I like to draw women.

I made her a mystery woman..."Madam X."

Above, Ghengis's horse remembers the good old days before he and his master split up. 

These sketches (above) were for Disney's "Nightmare Ned." In this dream Ned lives in a dollhouse and invites his tormentors, The Evil Twins, in for a cup of tea.

Yikes! Looking like it's been stepped on several times, here's (above) more panels from the Ghengis storyboard.

EDDIE DRAWINGS

Here's part of a doodle script I did for a film that was never made. We were between shows at Spumco and John allowed me to write this while we were were waiting for the next thing.

Doodling is a great way to do a script for first-time, try-out characters because you quickly find out whether the characters work visually. In this case the girl character worked fine, but the guy didn't.

VIDEO GAME IDEAS

Above, a Theory Corner exclusive. It's an idea sketch for a Spumco laxative commercial, never made. 

Although this was done on another studio's paper, I think this (above) was part of a test for a freelance storyboard spot on a Warners show. I didn't get the job; maybe because I worked too rough. Anyway it shows Bugs playing baseball in drag, stealing a base from Elmer.

That's an arm pinch, not a nipple pinch!

Maybe I ran afoul of the paperless office concept. I should have used a Cintiq. I was just daunted by the $2,000 price tag. I figured I'd get the job first then buy the hardware, but things don't work that way. Yikes! An expensive lesson.

More trees for the video game. I love drawing trees.

Above, for the video game, a dude throws his gang sign.

How did finger signs ever get popular? Who was the first one to do that?

A LONG KISS

Sorrreeeee!!!!! Another cheater post from the past! I am just soooo doggone busy! Don't worry, I probably won't have to do this again after today. Anyway, as long as these drawings are up I can't help but make a fresh comment on them.

These are were just fooling around doodles. It struck me as interesting that when you kiss a girl you can't see how she's reacting. I mean, she could be reading a book over your shoulder and you'd never know it. If your eyes were closed she could put a piece of liver against your lips and you'd go wild with smooching it. Boy, you really have to trust that the person you're kissing is into it just as much as you are.

I did a whole bunch of kissing poses that day. If I ever find the others I'll put them up.

GIRL WATCHING (COMPLETE VERSION)

Last night I had dinner at Steve's and the conversation turned to beautiful women we'd seen at restaurants. It happened that two seasoned girl watchers were in attendance, and they generously agreed to share their knowledge with the table.

What follows is an explanation of the code they use to discreetly communicate with each other when a beautiful woman enters the room. Sorry the doodles are hard to read: they were done with a fine point Bic pen.  Maybe enlarging them will help.

BTW: Sorry the drawings got so sloppy. I rushed them so I could get some sleep. 

Also BTW: Many thanks to the men who shared their secret code with us. 

ITALIAN INSULT GESTURES

A few months ago I wanted to try doing pencil tests on Flash so I thought I'd do a little YouTube film of Italian insult gestures. It never came about. I had so much trouble getting the program to work that I finally walked away from it and did something else. Now I have a trial download of Digicell Flipbook, and the tiny film seems try-able again....except....

...except I just looked over my incomplete notes for the gestures and I can't remember how some of them worked, or what some of them meant.

This drawing (above) for example. What does it mean? It fell out of my notes, and I have no idea what I was thinking when I drew it. It's something I used to see in high school. Sometimes it provoked laughter, once a fight. But why? What does it mean?


And what is this (above)?


I forget what the top finger-pinch (above) means...my guess is that it says, "You mean less than dust to me!"

The bottom drawing (above) is one of the oldest and best insults: you simply turn your back on the other person. They're not worthy of your front.

Once the back is turned (above) the insulter has the option of intensifying the insult with a butt shake...


...maybe followed up with a tooth flick.


Some insult gestures (above) are so strong that to use them is to make an enemy for life. I have no idea what the above gestures mean, but I suspect that a mother's virtue is being questioned here.


All these little finger gestures...what do they mean? They look pretty nasty.



Whatever it is, it can't be good.


This one (above) had me puzzled, but I figured it out while posting it. It's the first of two drawings (the second one must be missing) showing a man about to do a pushing away gesture, as if to say, "Your existence is an offense to me! Go away! Just GO AWAY!"

What makes this special is the extreme anticipation to the push (above). It's not just a simple prelude to a push, it's a statement of obliteration. The pusher is so disgusted by the other person that he chooses suicide if necessary to avoid having to look at such a fool for a moment more.

I wanted to end the film on a cheerful note, maybe with a quick little story demonstrating some of the most common romantic gestures. I haven't found all the doodles yet, but I remember how it started:

A boy is sitting with his friends when a beautiful girl walks by. He does a startle response (above), then pushes his friends aside, maybe upturning the table, and he runs ahead of her and introduces himself. The boy puts on a good show but, since she gets hit on 50 times a day, the girl gives him a bored look and keeps on walking.

The boy runs to catch up. After trying everything, he pulls out his big gun...the thing that never fails...his most irresistibly charming gesture. He symbolically plucks off the girl's cheek, retrieves it and kiss it...kisses every finger of her cheek (!?)...then blows it back to her.


The poor boy! The girl is unaffected. She just walks on. The boy, outraged and broken-hearted, shakes the kiss from his hand, does a "Heck with you!" gesture, and returns to his friends, who are doubled over laughing.

As the speaker says in this video (above), Italy is fast losing it's gestural heritage. What a pity! I read that it used to be most intense in Naples, which was a noisy city where everybody hated everybody. The gestures were a way to argue between balconies when the clatter from the streets made spoken insults unworkable.

This video (above) is completely off topic. I found it when I was searching for gesture videos on youTube. It's only a minute long. See what you think.

CARTOON ACTING

Well, I gave the talk on cartoon acting at Woodbury on Saturday night, and it turned out great. I made a few gaffs, and had some lapses of taste that appalled the audience,  but taken all in all it was a fun night.

The Chief Presenter, discussion leader, and Master of Ceremonies was Steve Worth. Steve put up some great acting scenes that were so intense that I found myself lost in thought right up to the minute I was supposed to speak. 

The clip immediately preceding me had to do with a tearful, poverty-stricken mother who was about to throw herself and her baby into the river. It turned out to be the best introduction imaginable! The audience was so happy to be relieved of their anxiety about the poor mother that they laughed at just about everything I said, whether it deserved it or not....the perfect set-up for a talk about comedic acting!

After the show I met Margaret Kerry, the actress and dancer who did the live action reference for Tinkerbell in Disney's 50's version of "Peter Pan." She did the voices for Spinner and Paddlefoot in "Clutch Cargo," and even worked for Hal Roach on "The Little Rascals." Margaret was super nice and still beautiful, a delight to talk to.



The earlier part of the day was pretty interesting, too. Lester Hunt, the philosophy professor and author from Wisconsin, and who comments on Theory Corner every time the subject is philosophy or aesthetics, treated me to pizza at Lido's! 

Boy, Lester and I have a lot in common! We agree about so many different things that I was actually relieved when we found something to disagree about. Lester likes Thoreau and I don't. The problem is that he's right about so much else that it's making me wonder if I misjudged Thoreau. I'm really not looking forward to it, but I'm determined to spot read through "Walden" some time in the near future.



After lunch we drove up to Ayn Rand's old house at 10,000 Tampa, which is not far from where I live. Other famous residents of the area were Barbara Stanwick and Marlena Dietrich. We took pictures of ourselves at Nobel Middle School, which is at her old address, and we cruised around the mini-mansions above the area because a commenter to this site once said that the true location of her house was  slightly North of the school. 

Back to acting, I think I'll put all my theories of that type into a xerox-pamphlet that I'll sell on this site. Don't worry, it won't cost much. I just want to be able to call myself an author.