Bikini Girls With Machine Guns

James Ellroy once said (and I'm quoting from memory), "Don't write about what you know. Write about what you like to read." It's good advice, and if I'd followed it when I was younger, this blog post could have been a comic strip.

When I was in junior high school, I loved comic books, and I liked drawing. The classroom was my studio, my binders and the lined paper within a canvas, a Bic ball point pen was my brush, and the various denizens of the Marvel and DC Universe were my inspiration.

For some bizarre reason, I also enjoyed drawing punk rockers with large mohawks. I'd seen a review of the bio-pic "Sid & Nancy" on television, and although I was surrounded by legions of hair metal headbangers, my heart beat in solidarity with the punks. Workingclass London toughs and New York City hoodlums trump Canuckistani Beavis and Butthead everytime.

I was probably more Jean-Michel Basquiat than Leonardo Da Vinci, but what else was a young boy living in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan supposed to do? Certainly not pay attention to the teacher droning on in front of the class.

My parents, who either wanted to encourage their budding Keith Haring, or at the very least get their little brat to stop destroying his school supplies, bought me a sketchbook and some charcoals for Christmas. This had the unintended effect of killing off any desire to be an artist on my part, although I did stop defacing my binders.

Of course, my parents weren't to blame for strangling any artistic sensibilities in the cradle. Their gift opened my eyes: until then I had no idea what a difference the right tools could make. A Bic on a maroon vinyl binder cover just couldn't give me the same results as charcoal on heavy bleached white paper stock. Ironically, it was the very comic books that inspired me to do sketches on any flat surface that put a stake in the heart of any desire I had to draw.

I'd read the letter columns of my favorite comic books (I was a weird kid, and there ain't a lot to do if you're raised to be a devout Catholic in Manitoba) and the advice from editors, writers, and the artists themselves was the same: anyone who wanted to be a pro shouldn't use comic books as their only artistic model

It was good advice...of a sort. I'd agree that if an artist isn't careful, he can end up drawing a lot like Rob Liefield, who has obviously spent a lot of time drawing boobs, boobs, and more boobs:



And not much else. Adam Hughes draws beautiful tits:



But one of the reasons why the tits are so spectacular is that the hands look pretty good too. And hands are a lot harder to draw than a pair of breasts.

Combine it with a general appreciation of the human chest in all its permutations (see the Justice League cover at the top of this post), and it's no wonder that Hughes can make an easy living as a cover artist while Robert Liefield, well, I don't think that Obama would want to hang this in the Oval Office:



Still, as a neophyte just starting out, ray-guns, dinosaurs, and bikini babes with machine guns would have been better practice than using coffee cups and the tree in my backyard. The latter are boring, and even when done fairly well, are never quite as satisfactory to draw, initially anyway, as an alien blob getting ready to chow down on some little green men.

And if the boring sketch of dull everyday objects doesn't pan out, the process quickly becomes one great big cycle of negative reinforcement. By the time I got to university, I'd given up drawing everything, except for the occasional spiral in the margins of my notebook. There were a few coughs and splutters of artistic activity, but by my late twenties any interest I had in putting pencil to paper in a non-verbal capacity had died out.

But the story doesn't quite end there. My muse and I were buying some games for our nephew at a Toys 'r Us, and she suggested that we purchase a copy of The Boy's Guide to Drawing for myself. After one very happy month of drawing aliens from the book almost every day, I've hit a wall on one robot I've been trying to sketch. I can't nail the right perspective on a pair of tank treads that I'm trying to draw.

I'm not ready to throw in the towel just yet. My brother-in-law has some "How to Draw in Perspective" manual that is gathering dust on his bookshelf. I flipped through it a year ago, and thought it looked pretty dry, but it is starting to look a lot more interesting now. How else am I going to learn how to draw the best bikini girls with machine guns this side of Adam Hughes?