Winnie-Wookiee-Gingerbread Cookie and Krusty-Chewie-Baby Huey

Chewie Wookies:
PuppyMonkeyBaby Drawing Project #7

Winnie the Pooh
Wookiee from Star Wars
Gingerbread Boy Cookie

and

Krusty the Clown from the Simpsons
Chewbacca from Star Wars
Baby Huey from the 1950's cartoons

Wile E Willy Wall-e

PuppyMonkeyBaby Drawing Project #6

That's Wile E. Coyote from the Warner Bros Road Runner cartoons and Willy Wonka- the 1971 Gene Wilder version of the movie, and WALL-E from the 2008 Pixar movie bearing his name.... if that helps.

Wile E. Coyote looks pretty unhappy. Maybe he thinks I should have done a better job drawing the Wall-e treads on his lower third....maybe he's not happy being one third velvet jacket wearing human and one third trash compacting machine.

Chucky-Bucky-Rubber Ducky

PuppyMonkeyBaby Drawing Project #5

My kids have not seen any of the Chucky movies. I am hoping to keep it that way for as long as possible. They seem rather well informed about who Chucky is nonetheless.

Bucky Barnes, aka "The Winter Soldier," is of course a favorite around here. My older son can provide chapter and verse about what is going to happen in the next Captain America movie, versus what has occurred in the comic books. I am pretty sure he gets this information from Youtube commentators and, ahem, not from the "primary sources."

We don't have any rubber ducks around anymore.  Once upon a time, we certainly did... and then some.  We even had a series of superhero rubber ducks. There is a disturbingly vast number of rubber duck variations out there (Google "novelty rubber ducks," I dare you...or actually don't- since I looked them up a couple days ago, my browser and Amazon are showing me endless images of alternative rubber duckies that I might want to purchase.)

I think the kids liked this one a bit more than say, Coyote Carrie Cassowary.... but not much.

Coyote-Carrie-Cassowary and Budgie-Barney-Barbie

 

Two more watercolors in the PuppyMonkeyBaby inspired series.

I can see that I am going to have to find a way to shoot snapshots of these in a consistent light situation.  I had felt pretty proud of myself for having upgraded to a cell phone camera app that allows me to set the white balance, but clearly this is not enough.  

That's Carrie from the classic 1976 horror movie starring Sissy Spacek as the telekinetic teen who has pig's blood dumped over her head at the prom. There was a 2013 remake so Carrie is not just ancient history. But my sons were still not particularly interested.

I was sorry not to get to draw the Cassowary's head, but I thought the four syllable name needed to go  at the end. And Sissy Spacek's feet were not going to be very recognizable. Cassowaries are apparently known as "The World's Deadliest Bird"- or at least they are in the context of sensational videos on Youtube. (Google "Cassowary Attack" for extra time-wasting entertainment.) 

Wikipedia states that they are shy and usually avoid humans.  That is unless they are being antagonized into trying to disembowel annoying people for the entertainment of internet viewers. So perhaps a Cassowary was an appropriate choice for Carrie's lower half beyond the fact that the two words rhyme.

While I was a '70's child who would watch practically anything horrible broadcast on TV, I had a special dislike for the Flintstones. And as a precociously angry feminist, I always refused to play with Barbies unless I was melting them in a fireplace.  (Only happened once) 

I have, however,  always like budgies and parakeets.

My sons don't have much of a relationship with the Flintstones. They haven't seen the more recent movies or the original show. But if they had the opportunity, I am sure they would watch it at least once if they thought it would really annoy me.

One of my sons did have a romance with Barbies when he was a toddler. (I will refrain from specifying which one to avoid intense domestic strife and additional future therapy bills.)

He really liked the Disney Princess line of Barbies that were on sale at a local pharmacy. They were just about his favorite thing around the time that we were finishing up his toilet training. Thus the princess Barbies became the incentive items for his performance in the bathroom.

For quite a while afterwards, family members would announce their need to visit the bathroom by saying, "I need to go earn a princess."

My sons are unfamiliar with the movie "Carrie" so they were not particularly impressed with my choices in that drawing either.  They of course feel that I should exclusively be drawing characters that they are interested in. 

Coming up next is ChuckyBuckyRubberDucky featuring the killer doll from "Child's Play" and Bucky Barnes aka the Winter Soldier, so perhaps they will be more enthusiastic about that one....

PuppyMonkeyBaby Brethren: Telly-Tony-Shetland Pony and Yogi-Yeti-Plate of Spaghetti

Telly Tony Shetland Pony

 

Yogi Yeti Plate of Spaghetti

PuppyMonkeyBaby Drawing Project:

Recently, the fairly horrifying Mountain Dew PuppyMonkeyBaby ad campaign reminded me of the Exquisite Corpse drawing game in which three people each draw one third of a figure or creature without being able to see the other parts. As a young child, I was quite fond of playing this game with my parents, probably because it involved drawing on what seemed like a more or less even footing with my professional artist parents. And the results were most often humorous and ridiculous.

I started thinking about other potentially ridiculous creatures divided in vertical thirds that have rhyming names ending in the long "E" sound. PuppyBabyMonkey is of course limited to two syllable words, and I considered embracing that parameter as well, but in the end, I decided that I could not always pass up the rhythmic gratification of having two iambs in the last word. (i.e. "Telly Tony Shetland Pony" instead of "Telly Tony Pony")

There are many variables, both linguistic and visual, to consider here while deciding which characters or objects work well stacked together.  As I spend an hour a day riding a bike 9 miles through Manhattan and Brooklyn after dropping off my younger son at school, I have had time to generate a massive list of nouns that range from Dromedary and Cassowary to Houdini and Mussolini....

Yes, I am aware that it is sad that I have spent a lot of time thinking about this.

Mostly I was looking for an organizing principle for a series of drawings. After drawing in markers on napkins more or less daily for over ten years, I was curious if I could manage to draw in and on anything else.

These two are in ink and watercolor on paper. I think it might have been at least 20 years since I have used water color and a brush.

So these could be worse.


And on the specific topics of these two drawings:

Telly Tony Shetland Pony

That's Telly Savalas, bald, lollypop consuming star of the cop show "Kojak" for those of you who were not watching TV in the 70's... And Tony the Tiger from the Frosted Flakes cereal marketing campaign ("They're Great!!") who is enjoying a disturbing bit of resurgence lately thanks to a supposedly unauthorized series of online videos where Tony checks in with the kids from the commercials 30 years ago who are now disturbed or disturbing adults.

And a pony, because who doesn't like a pony?

Yogi Yeti Plate of Spaghetti:

Unsurprisingly, our kids enjoyed the 2010 Yogi Bear movie. I think we saw it about a year ago. It is one of the many kids' movies, that while I viewed it more than once, I can barely remember anything about it besides the fact that the animation was a bit disturbing. Were it not for that movie, however, I am not sure that the kids would know who Yogi Bear is. I have been somewhat remiss in exposing them to classic Hanna Barbera cartoons.

Unlike Yogi and Boo Boo, Yetis come up frequently in our house. They are a staple of the Scooby Doo franchise and appear often in other the other cryptid-filled stories that our sons love.

And spaghetti.... well, it is rare that our kids encounter a plate of simple carbohydrates that they don't like... As long as it does not have too much of a challenging sauce.

On a more formal note, while I wanted the creatures in this series of drawings to be, well, creatures, and not puddles, piles, or foods, I couldn't pass up the sound of "Spaghetti." There are a lot of good nouns with long "e" sounds on the end like Loogie, Uzi, Baloney, Upholstery, Porta-Potty, Potpourri, Jacuzzi, Twinkie...I could go on for a long time. They are tempting, but maybe hard to illustrate.

I am, however, giving some serious thought to Scottie Scotty Porta-Potty

Teacup Pig as Angel with a Kamehameha Shotgun

Not just an imaginary interdimensional porcine mini angel carrying a firearm....

There's potentially a lot to explain here, but rest assured, this picture was a very specific request cooked up by my sons last night. The short version of the story is that this image represents the confluence of multiple things that my sons are thinking about:

They are still very much interested in listening to The Cab's song "Angel with a Shotgun," which is appealing because it is the soundtrack to a fan made "Attack on Titan" video (over 500,00 views with commentary written in Thai) and also evokes Doctor Who's Weeping Angels for them. And of course, there is the repeated reference to a weapon in a catchy song, so that's appealing right there.... (There was a previous "Angel With a Squirt Gun" napkin from 2014 that hashed over these topics if you really think you might want to read more.)

Teacup pigs are a sore topic this week, because, as mentioned in our previous post, we will not be adopting a soon-to-be-immense micromini-pig any time soon...despite our younger son's overwhelming need for one.

This minipig is not only armed with just any shotgun. It is shooting a "Kamehameha Wave."  And what is that? you may wonder.  I had been wondering myself for a while about the yelling of "CAH-ME YAH-ME YAH!!!!" that was going on in our apartment. I have to admit that I might have been remaining intentionally ignorant of the finer points of the Japanese anime TV show "Dragonball Z."  I suppose that I have been fortunate that my sons have never consistently watched it, as I find the histrionic tone very hard to appreciate...or even tune out.

But now we have a Dragonball Z video game and I can remain ignorant no longer.  Apparently heroes of the series are able to gather and shoot energy from their bodies... akin to the "Force Push" or "Force Lightning" in the Star Wars universe, or the "Fus Roh Dah!" of Skyrim. This particular sort of energy blast is named for the Hawaiian Kamehameah line of kings. I am not sure why, and unfortunately, do not have any further time to sort this out.

I will add that I had not made the connection previously between the shouting that my kids were doing and the Hawaiian royalty, because, as I now discover thanks to the magic of the internet, I had been pronouncing "Kamehameha" wrong for decades.

Yet another educational napkin...for me, anyway.

Teacup Animals in Teacup

Size does matter, at least when it comes to pets....

Our younger, sadly pet-deprived younger son suddenly acquired a  deep yearning for a "teacup pig" over the last few days.  Continuing in my maternal role as killjoy and the voice of failed gratification, I pointed out that, like "teacup dogs," pigs that fit in cups are not a real thing. People adopt underfed baby pigs, and in the best case scenario, soon end up living with a 120 lb potbellied pig....or maybe even a 400 lb pig. (Link to Nat'l Geographic article on this topic)

After a lot of arguing and viewing of websites with titles like "6 Reasons Why Teacup Pigs are not Pets" I think my son is still a bit suspicious that I am just spoiling his fun and that micro mini pigs really do exist somewhere.

I will readily admit that I am not interested in having a pet pig, even if it were to stay relatively small and cute. I had some memorable exposure to a pet potbellied pig long ago in Chicago. This unhappy and belligerent pig was living in an office that I visited frequently for meetings and to deliver sculpture projects. The pig's owner was fond of pointing out that pigs are smarter than dogs and cats. I don't disagree, but intelligence is not an appealing characteristic in a pet if the bored animal uses its smarts for malicious retaliation against its boring environment and humans.

But while we were talking about micro animals that don't really exist, I thought we should add some others to the mix. While my sons have expressed interest in baby tigers, bears and dogs, the rhino and elephant were my additions in a attempt to make the situation more cute...or more ridiculous.

Dogs Playing Foosball

Never underestimate the appeal of Foosball....or of dogs.

Our younger son's school is in temporary quarters for the rest of the year, so amenities are rather limited, and the recreation space is a somewhat bare and gloomy basement.

But they do have a Foosball table, and that seems to be more than enough. Whenever I arrive for pickup, there is a large excited group of kids hopping up and down around the Foosball table. We often have to stick around for as long as possible so as not to miss any critical Foosball action.

I drew less kids on this napkin than are usually involved in the game, as I could only put so many dog heads together on short notice. My son was very concerned about which kid was which canine, but as this drawing was based on a concoction of several snapshots, I can't say that I chose the dog breeds based on the individual kids' personalities.

For the sake of full disclosure, and since he asked me repeatedly, my son is the second from the left. He says I made him look fat, but I disagree.

Speaking of the appeal of Foosball and dogs...I had to sit through the preview for "The Underdogs" movie multiple times last year, but now I see that after many reschedulings, its US release has been cancelled... My sons were very positive about the possibility of seeing a movie about Foosball table characters magically come to life in order to play soccer, but I lost patience after repeated viewings of the preview. Wikipedia tells me that this movie set the all time record for the box office opening of an Argentine film, but perhaps the appeal of Foosball was not enough to insure its distribution in the States.

(See a similar napkin from last year, "Cafeteria Dogs" at this link. I was able to be more thoughtful about dog breed choice in that case.)

Garden Warfare 2 Birthday Cake

Agent Orange and the Pirate Zombie from "Plants vs. Zombies 2" on a birthday cake.
And Pirate zombie with strategically placed birthday candle:

Quite remarkably, our older son turned thirteen this week.

In related, remarkable only to me news, I have completed my baking and frosting duties for the foreseeable future.

This is a good thing. After staying up appallingly (and embarrassingly) late to squirt frosting on this cake, and then hosting a dozen adolescents at our apartment for an afternoon festival of video games, whacking with Nerf swords, and rubbing of frosting on various surfaces, I feel like I might have had my eightieth birthday this week....

My son wanted me to make the whole cake into an iphone and the image a selfie. While I thought that a lovely concept, I did not manage to pull it off. He did not announce his choice of characters until 8 pm last night, so he is very lucky that he got anything beyond white frosting and the "Happy 13" text.

StormTrooper and Terminator "Just Dancing"

Maybe they are just dancing...

In a rare moment of napkin interest recently, the napkin recipients' father, also known as my spouse, suggested that there was a lack of Stormtrooper meets Terminator imagery out there in pop culture. After a brief google search, I can report that this does indeed seem to be the case. There are a few "Who would win?" sort of discussions and one video mash-up of Arnold vs. a Stormtrooper, but this does seem to be a slightly underexplored combination out there in internet land.

As the Storm Troopers in the Star Wars movies are always so terribly inept, it did not seem like a very fair contest to me, so I tried to come up with some other activity the two characters could share besides combat.

Last evening the boys and I were having one of our frequent and unproductive "how can you get more exercise while still playing video games for every possible waking moment of the day?" conversations, during which my older son resorted to proposing that we try "Just Dance" on the Xbox One. I suspect that he was just strategically humoring his mother's obsession with health and exercise and was not really serious. I think this because he then immediately pointed out that "Just Dance" was not really a good idea because the game would require buying a Kinect which would then spy on us in our living room.  (There's a whole other amusing topic!) I notice today when I looked "Just Dance" up for this post that this game can be playing with a just smart phone....

But, unfortunately, I am still in favor of not playing video games all day and instead exercising away from the Xbox.

While I was thinking about dancing games last night, however, I drew the trooper and T-800 "busting some moves." Since that phrase, according to Wiktionary,  is presently mostly outdated and now can mean anything from flatulence to seduction to attack, perhaps their ambiguous postures are just as well.....

Or maybe it's just my poor drawing....

Sloth Sith Holding Double Lightsaber

Speed matters not.

Star Wars and sloths continue to be hot topics at our house.
Really.

Our younger son is still working on his Sloth report at school. And last weekend we saw the vastly overpriced, but very gratifying for the kids, "Star Wars and the Power of Costume: The Exhibition" at the Times Square Discovery Center.

I had failed to draw a sloth holding a lightsaber on a previous napkin, so I had to remedy that oversight soon.

This was a late night slap-dash effort, done mostly with those nice toxic Xylene markers. I have tried to shift over to alcohol based markers as they are refillable and less of a health hazard.  But there are certain effects that are exclusive to the more solvent-y xylene markers... and that lovely intense purple does not seem to be available in the less toxic brands. I also have a nostalgic fondness for stinky art markers from watching (and smelling) my father use them for product design illustrations back in my early childhood. Or maybe I just like toxic materials. I spent almost two decades casting sculpture in polyester resin. Since becoming a parent, I have really made an effort to not wallow in solvents quite so often.  But this has absolutely nothing to do with Sloths or Star Wars.

Internet memes involving sloths seem to have peaked back in 2013, but they are definitely still around, including the truly awful "rape sloth" (I am not going to include a link to that one since my older son reads this blog: Hi Honey! please skip googling that one!) There is also the "astronaut sloth,"  and the more recent and unfortunately named "Slittens."

Another widely distributed internet sloth meme conveys the statement that sloths often fall out of trees because they mistake their own arms for tree branches.  While I do not have any firsthand information to contribute to this topic, it appears that the source of the sloth ineptitude rumor is actually just one comment in the satirical writing of Douglas Adams.

So....don't believe everything you see online: Sloths don't make rape threats or fall from trees because they cannot distinguish their own limbs from branches.

Sadly, nor do they wield double lightsabers.

BabyPuppyMonkey with RobotTigerChick

BabyPuppyMonkey and RobotTigerChick:

Okay, so maybe BabyPuppyMonkey is not more horrifying than PuppyMonkeyBaby after all.

I've done some more thinking about the triple hybrid genre suggested by the PuppyMonkeyBaby commercial. I think there needs to be a human, or at least human-like aspect, and the component nouns should all end in the long "e" sound. I spent a lot of time today baking and frosting cupcakes for my elder son's upcoming birthday, so I had too much time to consider this.

These rules do unfortunately result in the exclusion of the RobotTigerChick. In that case, we were just thinking of things that were cute or cool.

But there are lots of possibilities with ponies, Corgis, bumblebees, Yetis, duckies, guppies, combined with retirees, grannies, abductees, yuppies, jockeys or amputees...maybe with some shrubbery, pastry or Humvees mixed in.

The kids are not particularly impressed by this train of thought. They did, however, enjoy eating the extra cupcakes.

Onward Aoshima and PuppyMonkeyBaby

Awesome things combined with rather disturbing results.

"Onward Aoshima" was of course a favorite moment for my sons in the Gravity Falls canon.
Our younger son is still beginning several sentences a day with the words, "I can't believe Gravity Falls is really over...."

The boys did not watch the Super Bowl and thus missed the PuppyMonkeyBaby ad.  But somehow I could not restrain myself from showing them the commercial. It reminded me so much of the annoying qualities of Pokemon characters where all they can say is their own name, over and over and over again.

We are thinking of some other tripartite cute and supposedly "awesome" characters... RobotTigerChick comes to mind.  I like the dysfunctionally horrible possibilities.

PuppyMonkeyBaby is pretty creepy, but when you imagine BabyPuppyMonkey, you can see that it could be even worse. But my younger son was sorry that I had not drawn Aoshima in his more extreme four armed, rainbow spewing form, so perhaps awfulness is in the eye of the beholder

Presidential Bros Smash

 Belatedly for Presidents Day:
(It's still "Presidents Week," right?)

I asked the kids to name as many Presidents as they could to generate the cast of characters above.  (They also mentioned John Quincy Adams, but I did not manage to work him in.)

The composition is of course based on the Super Smash Bros Wii U case image.  I say "of course" for those who spend a lot of time looking at Nintendo game cases strewn on the floor in front of the TV.

My kids wanted me to draw the Presidents all playing in a Super Smash game. I told them it was unlikely that I was capable of pulling that off. I can barely watch a Super Smash Game without wanting to have a seizure, let alone play, or draw it.

Some of the choices here were obvious: Lincoln is in Link's spot, Taft is in for Kirby, Teddy Roosevelt for Donkey Kong, JFK for Princess Peach...

Or perhaps not. Maybe it makes no sense at all.

Puppy Bouquet

A very belated happy Valentine's Day image for my younger son:

Valentine's Day went mostly unacknowledged at our house over the weekend. Our younger son exchanged cards in the classroom and indulged in a school-condoned sugar orgy way back on Thursday the 11th. By the time we got to Sunday the 14th, both kids had terrible colds, and we were all fairly unmotivated.

I had started this drawing before the weekend, but was too busy doling out hot tea, Kleenex, sympathy and Tylenol to finish it until today.

Puppies are pretty much the thing our younger loves the most. Due to his father's allergies and his mother's caregiving fatigue, his love is still unrequited so far.

And I had to add insult to injury by telling him that if we ever do manage to get a dog, it is unlikely to be a puppy. Having only marginally survived the infancy of two humans in our house, I don't think I could sign on to superintend to babyhood of a dog.

But, as he pointed out in his 9 year old wisdom, "Puppies are basically just small dogs!"
So here we have a great many very small dogs.

(This image was based on the Thinkgeek "Plush Puppy Bouquet")

Puppy Pugpool

My sons want to see the Deadpool movie that opened yesterday almost as much as they want a puppy.

Sad to say, this napkin is the best I can do for the moment.

There is a "Dogpool" and a "Pandapool" among others in the rather extensive "Deadpool Corps" in the Marvel universe. But no image comes up when one googles for "Pugpool"...well, nothing beyond a pool for pugs anyway.  The web abhors a vacuum- particularly one that could be filled with a puppy wearing a superhero costume.

We had an extensive series of super dogs in mostly DC outfits back in 2013 when our younger son was suffering from more acute feelings of pet deprivation. You can see some of those napkins at this link. Or more exhaustively (63 napkins and counting) at this link

Baby Sloth Not Holding a Double Light Saber

 

Couldn't we all improve our appearance with a double bladed laser sword?

Our younger son has been writing a paper on Sloths this week. 

He has not shared much Sloth information with me beyond the observation that baby Sloths are really cute.

He looked at this napkin today and said, "I thought for a moment that he was holding a double lightsaber. That would have been much better."

Yes, a lightsaber would have improved the image immeasurably, I don't know how I possibly could have missed such an obvious improvement last night. I considered trying to change the boring blue pole to a glowing weapon this morning, but while I probably could have pulled off the saber itself, the effect of the light on the Sloth fur would have been pretty much impossible to manage.

And... you know...I didn't want to compromise my "artistic integrity."

Ha. 

Maybe I will draw a baby sloth with a double light saber tomorrow.... if I am not too busy drawing something artistically important like a Pug puppy in a Deadpool costume.

(I originally thought the Sloth should be upside down, but inversion seemed to compromise cuteness...maybe.)

Deadpool with Waddles from Gravity Falls

Two characters that our kids would like to see more of this month.

The final episode of the much beloved Disney series, Gravity Falls, "Weirdmageddon Part 3" is coming up on February 15th,  and of course, the Deadpool movie is going to be released later this week on February 12th. Fortunately, Gravity Falls is not rated R, so we should be able to watch that at least.

As previously mentioned here, we won't be seeing Deadpool for quite a while. We do own several Deadpool comic books that probably should not be in the hands of minors, but my threshold for potentially offensive materials in print form is much higher.

The kids felt quite strongly that Waddles the pig should have been dressed in a Deadpool suit on this napkin. (Pigpool... or Waddlespool?) They are big fans of the Deadpool animals like Pandapool that appear in "Deadpool Kills Deadpool"....and speaking of inappropriate materials: that book is emblazoned with "Parental Advisory: Not for Kids" right on the cover.

I just did not think I was up to stuffing Waddles into a Deadpool suit last night. And selfishly, I wanted to draw the pink and red combination of the two characters.

Perhaps more Deadpool Corps tomorrow.... I noticed while googling that there is plenty of imagery for "Dogpool" and "Pandapool," but nothing comes up for "Pigpool":

An unfulfilled online constituency.