As I said at the end of my last sketchbook post, 2012 was sort of the "golden age" of my sketchbook in college. That's mostly because of my figure drawing stuff, which I'll cover in a separate post to keep things compact here, but of course it wouldn't be my sketchbook without a good amount of weird cartoons and bad jokes. (Click on the photos to see them in detail.)
These range from cute to existential to dad joke material... Up at the top there we've got Nacho Libre and "the Lord's chips," as well as Captain Hook trying out an antenna attachment for his hook-hand. I think the "I got one" is some sort of Jesus-y "fishers of men" thing (like most of these, it was drawn during church). If anyone can figure out what the hell that bird in the upper-right is doing, please let me know. I have no idea what I was going for.
This is a collection of visual puns referencing band names. If you want to try and figure them out, I'm putting the answers here in white text that you can highlight, going from left to right and top to bottom: Arcade Fire, Coldplay, Dragon Force, My Chemical Romance, Daft Punk, Flogging Molly, the Aquabats, and Death Cab for Cutie.
The theme here is "extreme sports."
You may have noticed the "Yo-mama-thulhu" drawing a few images back; that spawned a whole collection of Cthulhu cartoons. Evidently at the time I didn't know how to spell Cthulhu. Whoops.
This (as well as the image at the top of this post) is a collection of cubist portraits of church leaders giving talks. I pretty much drew them by following the cubist idea of representing different moments in time concurrently; as they turned their heads or camera angles changed, I just kept drawing what I saw. Some of them look nicer than others, but overall I'm pretty proud of these.
Since I've mentioned church twice now in this post, I should probably reiterate that I was raised religious and attended a private religious university. I am no longer affiliated with that (or any) religion, but it was a big influence in that keep myself awake during church was one of the biggest motivators in becoming consistent with my sketchbook use. In my actual sketchbooks, these drawings are interspersed with notes gleaned from what I heard in church throughout my college experience. They range from still-relevant wisdom to things that now seem silly or even downright creepy to me, and in the context of the direction my life has taken since graduating they offer a fascinating portrait of the cognitive dissonance I wrestled with before leaving my childhood faith. To many of my readers, who are family members or friends I met through church, this may be shocking and will certainly be disappointing, but it is what it is, I suppose. For everyone who's disappointed or unpleasantly surprised, there's someone who has been wondering what took me so long.
Moving on to my portraits, which are the "meat" of this post (visually speaking at least):
There's not much to say about these except that I was clearly doing more drawings and improving drastically. I remember being really self-conscious about a lot of these when I drew them because they didn't really look like the people, but now most of those people are so long gone from my life that I can't even remember which ones don't look right. (I do know that I made some pretty vast improvements in my ability to capture likenesses during this time.)
I'll close out my 2012 portraits with this gem:
And a random couple of bicycles that didn't seem to fit anywhere else:
