mababang langit

...took about ten minutes from start to finish, was created under audience pressure, and all began with "draw me a scorpion, papa!": "a scorpion has a big head, sharp jaws, lots of legs and lots of eyes." "and a tail!" "and a tail with a stinger." "yes!" "it catches things like grasshoppers in its pincers and stings them with its tail." "then what?" "then the grasshopper dies, and the scorpion eats it." "draw me an ant!" "okay..." "the ant is trying to take the grasshopper away from the scorpion! who do you think will win?" "the ant!" "the scorpion!" "you're both wrong!" "the grasshopper escapes in the middle of the fight!" THE END POSTSCRIPT: a sequel to this story exists, involving the scorpion and a cockroach; it was, however, deemed unpublishable due to extremely graphic ickyness.

i have never touched a slot machine.

while visiting cherry's parents last sunday my niece xya may (pronounced zaya --and her initials are xyz. how cool is that?) saw me cramming a few project sketches at the dinner table. i showed her my brush pen, which she promptly borrowed, and she quite impressed me with these: a little smudgy, but still way better than anything i could do when i was in second grade. as is often the case, though, her parents didn't seem terribly interested in the fact that their child could draw (mine weren't either). xya may asked me to teach her to draw, but the best i could do was point her to the library. i forgot it was the beginning of summer vacation.

someone on the contest boards asked me to draw a sample cartoon panel in a stick figure kind of style-- the results at left. (the joke ain't mine, i read on boingboing or something) drawing like this was more fun than i expected, though. it's a lot about getting at essences--saying the most with least--presenting a situation and making it interesting at the same time, using the minimum number of strokes. it's lazy cartooning, and lazy is so my style! now how do you convince a newspape to print this sort of thing...

i get almost all of my work off the internet these days, via freelance job sites where schmucks like me bid to work on paid projects. it's kinda like ebay, only the bids tend to go in the other direction. and once in a while you get projects that are... well... fun. to look at. and naturally we get some of these, too:

not based, by the way, on jojoy .

something that could be, might be, used for a youth sports banner. i'm not sure what to do about this blog. it certainly isn't an online portfolio. i'd like to make it more than a repository for rejected pieces, doodles and illustration friday entries. i've considered making it a kind of drawn journal, but that seems too narcissistic even for me. when it try to write stuff, i'd rather post pictures. when i'm posting pictures, it feels like there's so much i should rather write about. "my freelancer's life" hee hee

no, really. it's a sample sketch i did for a children's coloring book where they take famous paintings and... uh, turn them into coloring books.

in the philippines, some people rub themselves with oil to split in half and grow wings. what happens to the lower half is a constant source of comic inspiration.

for a church get-together (not my church)-- the one on top's for adults, the one below's for the kids. and this one's an ambigram for an IT website, n3rdism.com:

a freak unseasonable storm knocked out the power last night, and i realized we were short on candles. so you know what i did? i took a bunch of gift handmade candles and lit them . i tore off the paper ribbons and handicraft-y jute wrapping and i set those suckers on fire. they burned real nice. we should take a match to every useless thing people give us because they can't think of anything else to give. it's very gratifying. there's a bunch of ceramic figurines in a box somewhere around here...

rejected design for a golf club mailer.

a trial sketch of a "pirate with a long tongue".