I’m at over 600 daily Instagram drawings at the time of this post. Dang! When I was a dozen or so drawings in I was wondering not if but how I was going to make it to 100, and when I did make it to 100 I made a commemorative blawg entry (located here) that outlined how the whole thang started. The original goal was 1 drawing a day for a year and then I’d get on with life. When I hit the 1 year mark I quit for a few days and started to feel like there was a hole in my daily routine. After about a week of that nonsense I started up again and haven’t quit since. These punnies have become little encrypted diary entries in a way. When I see many of them I remember what mood I was in, what time it was, what the weather was like, and other random life junk like that.
It’s fun to look at the old drawings and see how things have evolved. For example, have a looksie at “Car-B-Que”. I think this was a few weeks into the daily drawing challenge in early 2013 and the pun theme was just beginning to emerge. If I did that one now I’d definitely put a lot more love into it (I’d take maybe 20 minutes instead of 5). I only used 1 thicker marker back then and have since found that using 3 or 4 different sized marker tips really makes a difference. When I’d stumble upon a super fine pin-sized tip marker in Mr. Lundgren’s high school art class I would wonder why in the heck someone would need such a thing. Now I know! I do the main lines with an 03, shading is usually 005, and all of the titles are done with the B (brush) marker.
Rule numero uno with these has always been NO PENCILS ALLOWED. Freehand all the way! I love drawing with pencil but for some reason it feels like cheating with these particular drawings. It turns out that doing over 600 freehand marker drawings improves one’s freehand skills significantly. Some stuff might look a little off in some (or a lot?) of my doodles.. when a line doesn’t go as expected there’s no erasing. I have to make it work, or in more drastic cases start over which really sucks – especially if I’m almost done and suddenly catch myself thinking “oops!” Those “oops!” lines happen a lot. Thankfully I’ve gotten a lot better at blending them in. Those imperfections add a weird little charm to the punnies, methinks. It’s very similar to playing guitar in that regard. If you make a sour note don’t go kicking your can all over the place. Just try to follow it with other notes that make it sound like it was intentional.
I’ve received a lot of great punny suggestions from people while I’ve been doing this. A LOT! Please keep ’em coming, they’re all really cool and I add them all to my ever-growing R.A.D. list. “RAD” means it’s a toadilly rad list of rad ideas from rad peeps and stands for “Requests and Dedications”. I haven’t tackled any of them yet because I’m pushing myself to see how many I can think of from the festering abyss of puns that lives within. Once that well runs dry I know that the R.A.D. list will be there waiting for me. I’ve come very close to using it a few times lately but then another pun manages to poop its way out of thin air, usually triggered by some random thing somebody says on TV, and another drawing and day go by. Rinse/lather/repeat. Thanks for your patience, RAD-ers. As I’ve told everyone on it I will give credit to the idea donors on their respective drawings when that time comes! The other thing I hear a lot is “You should turn these into a book!” Heck yeah I should. A book will most certainly happen in the hopefully not-too-distant future.
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I’ve been wanting to do a video of a drawing from start to finish for a while now and yesterday I finally got a wild hair up my arse to do it. “Ten gallon hat” took 12 minutes from start to finish, I sped it up into a 2:25 video. I think this was the first time I’ve ever drawn one-gallon jugs of milk. Fascinating, I know. Those were kinda fun to do. I’d just drawn “Bed Pan” and consumed an ungodly amount of coffee so my hands were really jittery for this, especially by the time I wrote the title on it (hence doing a second lap over it to clean it up a bit, it was pretty sloppy). Certainly not the first time that’s happened… it all worked out in the end though.
Without further ado, here is the making of Ten gallon hat:
