This Is Your Wake-Up Call, Brody. I am a Buddhist!

Yes, this is another portrait. I’m working on some other stuff and might revamp this site, so if I don’t end up deleting this website entirely, I’ll go the opposite direction and make this website totally interesting and fascinating and get back to liquifying your innards.

In the mean time, I’ll post this portrait. The thing that’s interesting to me about this actor is that he never got rid of his surfer dude way of talking, but it doesn’t seem to have hurt his career. I don’t know if surfer dude is an accent, strictly speaking, but surfer dude at least has a cadence to it. In some of his roles, the surfer dude talk worked pretty good. But in others, it’s pretty distracting. Like Arnold, though, his accent doesn’t seem to diminish his star power. In fact, it seems to have worked in his favor.

So, I have to learn the most strategic use of the word dude in my professional activities. Maybe when ask for a raise, I’ll soften my boss by calling her dude. I have to think about that one.

By the way, any guesses about who this is? Nearly everyone I showed it to got it right away. Except one person, but I’m going to save my ego by assuming she’s just a cultural nitwit.

Does This Angle Make Me Look Like An Alien?

I haven’t posted anything lately, and of the entries I have posted, they are all drawings and stuff. So, I think I might end this here website.

In the mean time, this is my first attempt to use pastels. The good thing is that they blend easily. The bad thing is that they make me feel weird, like maybe I need more practice with them. This was actually supposed to be a famous person, but it looks nothing like her, so now it’s not supposed to be a portrait of anyone in particular.

The above portrait is Aishwara Rai. She’s a famous actress and model from India. It’s based on this picture

I did this portrait of Kerry Washington a while ago (back when I was spending more time in airplanes than mere mortals can handle).  I rediscovered it yesterday, and showed it to my wife. She said “that’s pretty good, but you do a lot of portraits of women. Maybe you should do some men to balance it out.” That’s actually not a direct quote. But it’s pretty close. Then she “wait, is that why there was  a page ripped out of my Essence magazine?” And I was in the dog house.

She’s got a good point.  And, I’m going through a faze where I’m totally into doing these portraits.  I’m in the middle of a Chris Rock portrait and one of Lawrence Fishburn. So, I’ll finish those one day and post them. In the mean time, I’m going to look up the Fair Use doctrine and see whether I could get in trouble for posting this image of Kerry Washington from Essence magazine (if anyone knows off hand, please leave a comment and let me know to save me the the effort).

Megan Fox, MENSA president

The story behind this portrait of Megan Fox is that I noticed that Deviant Art has a lot of fan art, and that fan art paintings tend to get a lot of hits (compared to, for example, paintings of your cat, or of you favorite fern). I also heard that Megan Fox is one of the most downloaded images on the internet (although I’m not sure why. Is it her crazy quotes?). So, this is a shallow attempt to get people to look at my art work.

I wrote a couple of weeks ago that I was considering whether I should consider Megan Fox to be a fascinating person, like Jesse Ventura or Larry the Cable Guy.  But she gets hits.

In related news, once I get my Deviant Art profile squared away, I’ll put a big obvious link to in on my homepage. Until then, here’s a link to my deviant art page as it currently exists. I have uploaded some paintings and sketches and stuff, but I haven’t really gotten my account together like I want it.

Anyway, I was drawing my picture, minding my own business,  and the Flight Attendant passed by a few times. I didn’t notice her passing by, since I was deeply engrossed in my drawing.  But she stopped and looked at my picture, which was halfway finished.

“That’s a great drawing,” she said.  I thought that was nice of her to say. I was a bit annoyed because I was deep into the drawing when she interrupted me. You know that feeling you get when you are running with the headphones on, or maybe you’re cooking a great meal, or doing something you enjoy? Time largely loses its meaning, you feel like you are in a higher state of consciousness (airplane pun unintentional), things seem to be coming together. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls it flow. Atheletes call it the zone.

Anyway, I was in the zone, and she interrupted me. But it’s cool, because she was giving me a compliment. So I thanked her.

“That’s really nice,” she continued. This was a bit strange, because I was drawing a dragon, and I didn’t want him to look nice. But whatever. I thanked her again, hoping she’d leave me to try to salvage my ego. But then she dropped the bombshell.

“What is it?”  She asked.  I should have answered her question with a question, which is a great trick I learned by watching Donald Rumsfeld press conferences. 

For example, I could have said: “I haven’t decided yet. What do you think it should be?” Or something similar. Or I could have been mean and sarcastic, with something like “It’s your face!” But I’m not a mean person by nature.

Not able to think of a response that was both polite and clever, I answered her directly:

“A dragon,” I said. She frowned in confusion. I could see she was trying to imagine a dragon in the confused set of lines and scribbles I had put on the page.

“No,” she said, “definitely not a dragon. ” I’m pretty sure I let out a whimper, but if she noticed, she pretended not to.  “But it looks very nice,” she added and walked off. I considered folding the paper away and giving up. But I had another hour left on the flight, so I kept going. I told myself she just wasn’t much of a fantasy fiction fan. Or perhaps she had simply not realized that it wasn’t even halfway finished.  You know:  taking a look too early in the creative process, which is not pretty.

So, I finished it. Here it is. Does it look like a dragon to you?

Give me some Coffee or the Village Gets it!!!