Tag Archives: Lauren Bacall

Sketchin’ 86

First off, its great to be back.

The reason I haven’t posted all that much of late is because for the past two weeks I’ve been on vacation in lovely California.  It’s the first time in a VERY long time I’ve had that much free time in a row and I feel rested and refreshed and ready to get back to work.

Before I took off on vacation, I posted my very positive impression of the recently released Annotated Big Sleep, a book which features Raymond Chandler’s classic 1939 novel along with plenty of annotations (natch) offering information on the novel, Los Angeles back in the 1930’s (this information proved fascinating considering the first few days of my vacation were spent in LA), along with other great bits of information regarding the novel (you can read the whole thing here).

Even though I was on vacation, I couldn’t help myself and, inspired by that book, had to take on the famous Humphrey Bogart/Lauren Bacall movie version of that novel.  As much as I like the movie, it doesn’t hold a candle to the Raymond Chandler novel (either the original cut of it, which featured less of Bacall, or the eventual theatrical release… both are available on the DVD).

Having said that, you truly should not only read the novel, but see the film.  They’re both worth taking in!

Sketchin’ 7, 8, and 9

Sorry for the dearth of posts of late but I’ve been away for the past few days (University is starting which means I have to help my daughters move into their new digs).

While I haven’t been able to post quite as much as I want to, I have kept up with my illustrations and here you get three for the price of one, a real bargain!

First up, Lauren Bacall…

I think the piece came out only OK.  As I mentioned before, that’s the way it goes with artwork.  You can think something is working and then it mostly works -or not- but when you’re done, you move along.  Which I did…

Here’s Charles Bronson from The Dirty Dozen, a film that was clearly the inspiration to the comic book The Suicide Squad and, therefore, obviously the movie’s inspiration as well.  Only The Dirty Dozen presented a coherent plot! 😉

When I started this piece, I thought I would abandon it.  It just didn’t look like it was “working” for me.

And then, like magic, it did.

I won’t say this piece is one of my favorites -it feels like it would benefit from color especially given how “simple” it is- but I definately captured the Bronson “look”.

Finally:

Ah, extreme success!

As I also stated before, sometimes you may just miss and sometimes you hit a home run.  Here, with this Christopher Lee Dracula picture, I feel I’ve hit a home run.

The image captures the frenzied, animalistic look of Mr. Lee’s Dracula, easily one of my favorite portrayals of the dark Count.  Love the feathering on this piece.

By the way, if I wasn’t clear about it before, let me do so here: All this was done using an iPad and an Apple Pencil on the Procreate program.  Though it may look like pen and ink, this is all computer images.

Enjoy!