In early 2013, my amazing musician/artist/brother Chuck bought me a sketchbook. I wasn’t quite sure what I was going to do with it. Drawing always took a backseat to my music and I was ready to change that, so I made a promise to myself to make at least one quick doodle a day in the book to get back into the drawing groove again. To make sure I made good on that promise, I decided to post one drawing a day on my then-new Instagram profile with zero followers.
Punny #1: “Trunk Show”, April 14 2013
I put a few rules in place to make things interesting:
- No tracing allowed
- Pens and/or markers only
- If I made a mistake, too bad – make the best of it.
As you’ll see, I didn’t start off with puns. I would just put the marker or pen to paper and see what happened. About a week or so later, my first punny “Trunk Show” was born while sitting at LOBO in Brooklyn (RIP 5th Ave location) sipping one of their kickass margaritas. Slowly but surely, the list of pun ideas kept growing, and I moved to a 100% punny format.
My quick 5-minute doodles soon evolved into detailed hour-long sessions, and drawing became my favorite therapeutic way to end the day. It still is! No computers or crappy evening news… just markers, pencils (I let them in sometime back in 2015), blenders, and paper. I’m well past the 2,400 mark at the time I’m typing this and the list just keeps on growing. (Yes, I’ve thought about making a book. And yes, it will happen)
To celebrate 7 years of pun, I made this video over the weekend showing all 2,400+ existing punnies in chronological order. I tried setting the speed at a ridiculously fast rate of 1 second per drawing, and it was 40 minutes long! I ramped the speed up 1000%, making it nearly impossible to make sense of most of them, but here’s a fun thing to try while watching: Randomly hit the pause button and see which one you land on. Here’s to the next 2,400, thanks to everyone for joining in on the pun!
Music: “Cottonhead”, part of a collection of goofy synth/guitar music I started making back in Brooklyn – see Planet Ekim on the Musics page for more
