Painting cartoons

Good painters don't always equal good cartoonists. Good cartoonists don't always equal good painters. I think it's hard to put those two world into one world where both make sense and even harder for both to be exceptional. Pound is an exception. Todd School, Mark Ryden, Dave Cooper and Robert Williams (Low Brow artists). It takes time to formulate the kind of approach that your cartoon work needs to build its strength and message. I started off essentially painting really closely over Lynch's concepts, but Lynch wasn't a realistic painter. He was a great cartoonist who painted some really awesome paintings in a different kind of non-realistic style. I think Bunk fits into that world. Robert Crumb the same thing. Those are Underground Comix guys. The majority have no real clue to the way painting works, but Pound, Williams and Schorr do in their cartoon paintings. You have to understand the rules and know how to push them and push them some more. Make them you're own. Have the confidence to bend them and don't just rely on simply the Pound-copying method. I think a lot of painters disregard this kind of artwork, but it's unfortunate because I guarantee that the best painter out there can't make a decent GPK if they give them a decade to do so. You have to love cartooning and have loved it since you were a kid. Cartooning is a language. You either speak it or you don't and if you haven't started since you were a kid it's very hard to be good at it now. From what I briefly read yesterday JungHwa didn't know what GPKs were until much later. It's unfortunate. GPKs changed us all. The groundwork is there for all of us if we know what they really are. A piece of them is in our soul. If we understand its satire. Its take on the language of our world and our fears. To understand the references and the underlying history of how they were shaped by playing card games, Looney Tunes (and Surrealism), Mad Magazine, Underground Comix scene and lastly Low Brow Art.(Unfortunately GPKs commercialism is what has retarded their fine art status, but that is another story). To be a cartoonist who let all this push and pull you while including your personal story and adding all these other pivotal artistic moments in an artist's life is what makes your vision unique and is what can make you great at it. If you just like copying a photograph or a picture or a model and not use that creative spark (imagination) then you are just a craftsman. It is fine if you are. You can be pretty successful at it, but you can't teach imagination and you can't teach determination and applying all your skills and all your history into the work you do. It's just too many things going on. You have to be a wielder of magic. That is what it takes to be a good creative cartoon realistic painter.

Cartoon Stuff Part 1

The R. Crumb Coffee Table Art Book was one of the first books I purchased of Robert Crumb sometime in the turn of the century. The other one was "R. Crumb's Carload of Comics.

It didn't really register in my head what the impact of these books would mean to me. As a kid I collected cartoon animal books and drew them quite often. I was into animal books of any kind moreso than superhero books at least in the early parts of my childhood. I loved video games that had animal characters like BattleToads which is obviously inspired by Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. I also had the TMNT video games. The first one being uniquely an 8-bit looking game while the "Arcade" sequel was a badly colored version of the arcade, but your imagination filled the blanks.

I often drew Marvel and DC characters in anthropomorphic versions of themselves. I was into TMNT and made my own board game. It had 100 separate spaces to move across on the board game. It handed out pizzas and Pepsi 2-Litter drinks to the players to avoid losing a turn or dying.

I used to draw with Berol Markers (now Sandford Prismacolor) and Pilot Razor pens that after a decade have created fading purple marks around the images. They are no good! 

I was deeply into cartoons and horror stuff and they always seem to go so well together. I was pretty fascinated by horror movies of the 80's and 90's so the art I was drawing was evident of that focus. Some time in high school I started putting my child art into sketchbooks glued with badly rubber cement and now the art is pretty badly marked around the edges.

I was still heavily looking at comics and sometime in the late 80's=early 90's my mom got my a skateboard, some Batman figures from the new Tim Burton movie and two "graphic novels by the best writers of comics Alan Moore and Frank Miller. The Dark Knight Returns and The Killing Joke. I was so in love with these two books. I still have the original novels today. So it was no coincidence I decided to draw on of the images from TDKR. I can still smell and hear the marker streaking through the poster board (the matte side).

Another book I collected was a series by CFW Enterprises which I'm not sure if they still exist. The did a short run of comic book anthologies every month. The included Robo Warriors, Tales of the Kung-Fu Warriors, Tales of the Ninja Warriors & Shred. The cover is my favorite comic cover of all time. I think it just had this amazing impact not only visually, but because it was one of the first comic book (magazine in this case) that I ordered from the back of a comic. When it arrived in the mail it felt better than Christmas. I didn't know it was Ted McKeever who painted this and I didn't know about Eddy Current until many years later which then became another one of my favorite comic book series. I met Ted McKeever by chance sometime in the 2000's with some friends from work that went to a comic book convention in Ft. Lauderdale. He was great and I showed him my work and have me some advice. Frank Miller, Tec McKeever and Simon Bisley were the most instrumental creators that made me get into doing art as a career. Brom came later and created the kind of paintings I wanted to paint one day. 

I loved this one tale in there called Human Disease. I was so into skateboarding and even did a few comic things of my own, but it rarely went on to more than a page or two. My attention span then and today are the same. I move on to something else before I get really into something. It take a lot of discipline for me to stick with one thing. The only thing I can say I have stuck with are the cartoon kid stuff which I will go into a little later.

I got in contact with the artist Frank Gomez who ended up having a short run on several mainstream publishers, but from what I saw it just didn't have the vibe of the work he did in Shred. A pretty obscure indie book. It only lasted for 8 issues. I think CFW cancelled all their books and strickly worked on actual Ninja and Martial Arts magazines for the martial arts aficionados. You can buy ninja stars and kitana blades and that sort of thing. Not anything I cared for. I just wanted to read comic books that weren't about muscle dudes and porn star looking babes though I did like having the gal posters in my room of "real" women or so I thought at the time. I had that poster of Sandi Korn (Taylor). I think she was a regular guest in the Howard Stern show which I watched a little too much as a kid. Product of my father working late shifts at his job...thank goodness.

So this post was mostly for the R.Crumb books that got me hooked on Crumb for life. I didn't have friends that liked the same stuff growing up. I had a few comic book friends, but they all liked the typical stuff. I found a lot of these special artist I admired by chance or they ended up having a popular book that sold in an art store. This was before the internet where you can find almost anything these days of you search for the right things, but often it's more of a stumbling into something sort of thing.

The R. Crumb Coffee Table Art Book I own is a unique book. It actually is upside-down in a a few pages. I think it's usually called a misprinted book, but for a while I thought a lot of these were misprinted. So far I haven't found any online. If anyone knows of any please let me know.

Here are some pics of them all upside down.

If you are interested in purchasing the book it's available here.

More on Cartoon Stuff soon!

Dennis the Menace x 2

This is the most fascinating example of coincidence in the history of anything creative...well in my opinion on this day anyways.  Dennis the Menace in the US is a classic troublemaker icon which probably inspired the likes of  Calvin & Hobbes and countless other pre-adolescent American boy images.  Well I didn't know some time ago there was a Dennis the Menace in the UK...thanks to the internet.  The wikipedia page on Dennis tells about how both of these comic strips began in March the same year (1951) just 5 days apart.  By sheer coincidence and similar creative waves at around the same time these two separate yet similar characters with the same name came about.  Something like this would be almost impossible to recreate today with the speed of the internet without one being the "copier", but in 1951 it was pretty remarkable.

Dogs, Elizabethan Collars and Music

My dog Bubba is always chewing himself where it becomes this nasty bloody whole in his fur.  I don't know one area in his body he has not thoroughly destroyed.  He has a lot of allergy problems and sometimes he needs to be stopped from further damaging his beautiful shiba inu coat.  I always thought his Elizabethan Collar looked like a lamp shade or looked twistedly like one of those classic RCA dog images.

Basil Gogos Frankenstein Painting

Original photo used to create one of the classic paintings of Frankenstein. One I used as reference to create Creatura 8. The lack of color photography or high expense of it may have influenced the artist to exaggerate the colors even more.  So the question I have in mind is whether it is okay to use a photograph directly if you have full right to?  In this case it is an assignment and the artist is an illustrator.  Basil Gogo's used the image and painted in the way he is best known for.  His palette is unmistakably his own and the mood he has created is almost unapparent in the bland photo reference to the left.

Frankenstein and Dracula Creatura Paintings

I love classic monsters from Hollywood, but who doesn't right?  I started my Creatura series in 2008 with some Garbage Pail Kids images and slowly evolved into monsters.  My Creaturas are images where I combine at least two images together in a painting to make one completely new image yet still having those unique shapes of the original images.  Sometimes it doesn't work and sometimes it does.  It takes a bot of work to make it work in preproduction and during the painting process itself.

Weird Image Inspiration

In this set I have no idea which came first since I don't know who the artist on the right is.  The one on the left is Glen Fabry in one of the paintings done for the comic book Preacher.  I just thought it was particular that an image of a winged demon on top of another figure one resembling the act of sex and the other in the act of sex.  Strange and full of impact and debatable on whether one was inspired by the other.

Images used in Tattoos

Another thing I wondered was the use of images in tattoos.  The manner it is created with actual tracing of lines and copying exact images from well-known images leaves me thinking is it necessarily right and is the artist ever compensated or want to be compensated for the images "forever" etched into people's skin. Two "LD Monster" images have been used as tattoos.  One I had no idea about and the other I was asked to create a tie to the LD Monster image shown here for a fan.  Of course I was excited to see this done and also because he bought a lot of my art in the past.

Garbage Pail Kids Homage

I worked for The Topps Company doing freelance work since 2004 and when I wanted to give some free cards to fans when they asked for autographs I created the "Infect Ted" image based on Page Cage/Tommy Ache from the original cards that came out when I was around 8 years old.  Garbage Pail Kids always inspired me and even after they were gone it was in and around my mind for years and of course once they came out again I was pretty aware of the impact they had made on me.  I have some cards available in this site:  Luis Diaz Artcardswanted

Another Comic Book Adaptation

Once thing that I have been debating has been the issue of images after a person death (I think 75 years after) the image of the artist becomes public domain. I also think that there are some loopholes that gives the family of the artist rights passed that. Here is an image from a well-known image by Frazetta of Edgar Rice Burroughs' John Carter and the Princess of Mars. Here the image is used in another comic book with some changes.

Comic Books & Classic Images

This one is a very common pair and relatively widely accepted form of homage to another artist.  Comic Books seem to do this more frequently than any other print form.  There are hundreds of these.  Sometimes from images that aren't very old or pay homage to an earlier version of similar subject matters. Some images that come to mind are the first appearances of Spider-man, Batman and Superman.  Those are widely copied.  (I don't like the world copy because of the connotation it evinces, but in this case it doesn't seem to disrespect the works of art.)


James O'Barr The Crow Cover 1993 | John William Waterhouse "Circe Indiviosa" 1892

Photograph Inspired by a Painting?

In this set of images I found interesting that although I think they are coincidental it is possible Simon Bisley's painting with the black panther could have inspired the photograph on the right.  I think it could have been difficult to set up a black panther in the same composition so leaning up against a root is a little less challenging.  Once again I don't think it was a direct inspiration, but I think the photographer may have seen Bisley's painting once in his life.

Simon Bisley 1994 | Photograph 2000

Coincidental Compositions?

These images illustrate another part I find fascinating which is of compositions having very similar arrangements.  Here is a set I found that took me sometime to put together.  Although I think it is a coincidence it is debatable that one could have inspired by the other.  In 99% of all cases it's a painting being inspired by a photograph.

Inspired Photography? Art?

Since the Shepard Fairey Hope image is now part of the social consciousness and later the stories about the use of the Obama image directly from a photograph.  I think this illustrates when things can seem wrong or be wrong.  I don't really gravitate toward any of Fairey's images and I'm not one that cares much for the "rebellious" nature of street art.  I do think the problem lies in the fact that Fairey denied ever using the image I think at first anyways.  It became a question of money which ultimately is the problem.  Had it not be for that I think it wouldn't be a big deal that the image was used from a photograph, but the current laws and the possibilities of financial gain from someone else's work (vise versa) is to hard to pass up.

On another note I imagined the famous Obama pose could have been inspired by a John F. Kennedy image I ran across some time ago.

A cover to an art annual caught my eye when it came out because it reminded me of an artwork from another artist. I apologize for not knowing some artists in these posts. Sometimes you see something and it is uncredited and I will try to credit as many artists as I can. I also would like to be clear in the fact that I'm not trying to point out that anyone has done anything wrong. In fact I included a few of my own work as work that I was influenced by or inspired to create a work of art. I think it's part of the artistic development and also an awareness of images that we like so much we used in our own work. Sometimes it seems fine to do after the original artwork was created many many years ago and other times only a few years and now-a-days months or weeks or even days from the original inception.  It is even accepted in this blog called "Covered" which hosts images directly inspired by a comic or magazine cover.  I also want to point out that some of these images are also images that may not have been used as inspiration of a work of art or photograph, but l found similar in compositions. Some can happen altogether by coincidence. I have almost half a million stored images in my database from magazine scanning, my own photography and internet images. I find similar images all the time in my searches.  I am fascinated by it.  I think we like to compare and contrast things as humans and here I am collecting images that have in many ways similarities, but I think because of laws and being in a consumer society we tend to see these as bad because of their supposed lack of "originality". The truth is that we have been doing this since man have been on Earth. Fashion and consumerism thrives on us buying and looking similar. Without that their wouldn't be fashion or malls or magazines, but in the tight "mystical" community of the arts it is widely looked down upon like we are all living on an island and not in this image injected society.  Give me a break!

Here is one of my images inspired by the Coppertone image engraved in everyone's mind since you are a kid especially if you ever visited a store by a beach.  Also a character named Mandy by an artist whose work has been seen in Playboy, Dean Yeagle.  I have a few of his books.  

Inspired Art? 2

As stated in my last post these images are ones that captured my eye as something I remembered seeing.  In some cases the image is a very well known one and other ones it may simple be an image I think is similar in composition yet have nothing else in common and may have never had a direct connection with each other.  I have a pinterest that I started that collects these images.

http://pinterest.com/luisdiazart/similar-compositions-ideas-homages/

Here is an image by Ashley Wood and a photograph of Kate Moss.

Inspired Art?

I like to post things that look similar to each other.  I don't think it's a bad thing to work on things using elements from photos and other images, but I think you should give credit for it.  I think it's natural to work out things you like that you have seen from other artists.  Most artists were inspiredly "heavily" in the start of their careers.  Frazetta inspired hundreds and now probably thousands of artists, but who inspired him?  Of course he looked at and absorbed the artists that came before him like J. Allen St. John and N.C. Wyeth sometimes unknowingly to the artist themselves.  I've seen some artists just plain lie that they never have been inspired by certain artists even though it's so very apparent.  It's important to note some artists have a big ego and in their world they need everyone to revolve around them.  I think that is an immature approach to take, but what can you do?  The other problem is the las that state things about copyright infringement and I think we are living in an era of creative constraint.  In the generations and more ancient times copying or using other images as references was part of the evolution of the artist.  Other younger artist would work in the senior artist's "studio" to learn from.  That is why artist like Michealangelo and Raphael excelled.  Some of Leonardo's paintings are hard to see the difference between one of his pupils and his hand.  In a lot of cases several artist worked together on a piece.  It's important to see that it is important to use other art and photographs, but the evolution of an artist is that they need to go beyond that and those that do are the ones that get remembered.  Of course the importance of that notion is another subject of it's own.  I leave here a couple images I think were inspired by a Brom painting.

A conversation with Joe Jusko on Facebook about Art.

I didn't come into the conversation to carry it so long, but I thought I would share it since I was the only one that felt a certain reaction to the piece more than the quality of craftsmanship.  It is hard to look at any artwork from Jusko today without remembering this moment.  That's why I say to people that artists are human and sometimes can be real jerks.  I was probably a jerk myself.  It is safe to say we are no longer "friends."  If you can't read it click on this link.  Full Res Joe Jusko

"Polyblend Art Show" article by Colleen Dougher

The Art of Thursday

Also here's the website of some of the art works that will be on display this weekend for the Hukilau Annual Tiki Festival.

VIEW

Above is the pencil drawing for the painting, "Tiki Robot Loves Ukulele Girl."

Artwork available through Harold Golen.

"Malice in Wonderland" in Miami New Times

Another set of pictures from the Art Walk the night Malice in Wonderland opened. THis one was taken by Mayren Ocana for Miami New Times. By the way the 1st picture is of my great aunt, Lolo by the guest book. :)

Pictures are HERE.