Weekly Drawing Challenge: Hands

It’s been a while since I’ve done the Weekly Drawing Challenge. I missed last week’s, for example, which was “Blue”, but in case any of you felt cheated, here you go:

There are some drawing challenges that even I can’t mess up.

I’m not doing the Photo Challenge, but I am posting this one photo, which is relevant in as much as there are hands in the picture:

Janie is in the Irish Times.

For my drawing I have a real-life model to, well, hand. I have placed my left hand on the sketchbook, it is stone-still, as any good model should be, and is also naked, again as any good model should be.

And this is what I’ve come up with:

It does look a bit as if someone has blown up a surgical glove, but it’s not too bad.

So all would be fine, if the challenge was “Hand”. Unfortunately, though, it’s plural, so my left and right hands have had to switch roles. The right is now the model, the left is now the artist, and this is the result:

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Now we know how God created Norway.

Weekly Drawing Challenge: Sun

This week’s challenge is hardly worthy of the name. Even I, with all the drawing ability of a broken magnet, can draw the sun:

Yes, it is the sun, and no, it’s not a World War 11 sea-mine.

The sun, of course, features in a number of  songs. For example, there is The Sun Has Got His Hat On:

There is Lucky Old Sun:

And the Beatles’ Abbey Road has not one, but two sun-songs – Sun King:

and Here Comes The Sun:

Ok, I have to admit that last one looks more like road-kill.

Anyway, I’ve decided to do something slightly different. In tribute (kind of) to the most famous newspaper in Ireland and in the UK, a Rupert Murdoch owned publication notorious for its sensationalism and catchy headlines, I offer this picture:

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I call it Lying In The Sun.

Weekly Drawing Challenge: Journey

I just couldn’t do it to her again.

I was so tempted just to put in this drawing:

tell you all that the picture represents The Proclaimers and let you fill in the blanks yourselves, but poor Laughykate has been here almost since the beginning of this blog, and this would have been about the fifth time I’d have stuck the song I Will Walk Five Hundred Miles in her head for the day, and I just couldn’t bring myself to do it.

So ignore everything above, though what’s to come is almost worse. For my drawing I will need the evil Fu Manchu:

and the mad helicopter-pilot from the A-Team:

Put them together and you get one of the worst jokes in the history of the universe:

It’s Murdock On The Orient Express.

Weekly Drawing Challenge: Two Subjects

This week WordPress show this picture:

Image via WordPress (obviously)

They tell us that there are actually two subjects – the dog and the cup – and challenge us to produce something similar.

This strikes me as a little bit like cheating. It would be like Michaelangelo asking to be paid double for The Creation of Adam because it has both Adam and God in it, or Botticelli charging separately for each boob in The Birth of Venus.

Still, they’ve asked for two subjects, so here I go:

My two subjects are French and Geography.

Weekly Drawing Challenge: Arranged

This challenge is illustrated by WordPress with a bowl of oranges,  and there can be no doubt that the words “arrangement” and “fruit” go together like the words “porridge” and “yuck” (I don’t know why I always get get so much stick from my readers when I disparage porridge (actually, they should call it disporridge), it is the world’s only grey food).

Anyway, while I disagree with his views on aural dismemberment there is little doubt that VanGogh was a better artist than I am, so if a bowl of fruit was good enough for him then it’s good enough for me.

So entirely from memory (by this I mean that I do not have a bowl of fruit in front of me, I’m not implying that fruit is a distant memory, I take my .5 a day like everyone else), here is my attempt:

I feel that some explanation is needed so I’ve done a chart, rather like the one the Beatles had to do to explain who everyone on the front cover of Sgt Pepper was.

So, A is for apple, and B for banana. C is for orange (a source of Vitamin C) and from there on logic goes out the window.

D is for pineapple, put in before I realised just how hard it is to draw a pineapple.

E is French bread, because Hollywood tells us that any collection of food will contain French bread.

F is a tomato, because Pomologists say that it is a fruit and not a vegetable. They are of course wrong, but God love them, they spend their lives staring at melons, not euphemistically either, so I haven’t the heart to point that out to them.

G is a kumquat. I have no idea what one looks like, but it is a funny word, like aardvark, so I have drawn an aardvark instead, although I’ve no real idea what one of them looks like either.

H is a pig’s head. You’ll need somewhere to put the apple.

Finally, I is a tin of prunes (I may call my autobiography that), because the whole thing looks a bit tightly jammed, and the prunes may help ease this.

So, I’ve drawn a bowl of fruit. As far as I know, in art classes the next topic is to draw nudes.

Can’t wait.

Weekly Drawing Challenge: Indulge

I’m a week behind with this challenge. I could (so I will) use work as an excuse, but in fact I couldn’t really think of anything.

I could have gone for this:

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But I realise that to at least one of my readers this is not an indulgence, but the very top of the food pyramid, so I’m not going to, though as least it give the excuse to buy a packet of Maltesers, which then of course had to be eaten, lest they go stale.

This is what I have settled on:

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Now you have to remember that this is me that you’re dealing with. In Tinman’s drawing world if it looks like a duck and is the colour of a duck, then it’s probably Sydney Opera House.

So although I know that you are wondering why I have drawn Lionel Richie (and I have to admit that the resemblance is uncanny) you have to remember that the one thing you can sure of is that this is not a picture of Lionel Richie.

If it’s he you’re looking for, then you’ve come to the wrong place.

No, it’s a woman wearing a mud-pack, with a slice of cucumber upon each eye.

Let’s be honest, it is not the fairer sex at their most fair. Men whose ultimate fantasy involves women mud-wrestling recoil in horror if the same mud is applied to a woman’s face, with a vegetable garnish.

What happens to the cucumber afterwards? Please tell me that you don’t eat it.

Weekly Drawing Challenge: Down

The picture shown to illustrate this week’s Photo Challenge was one taken downwards at a pair of feet, so I think they are talking about the opposite to “up”. Going down (sorry) this route might have led to a picture of a hole

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or  perhaps a banana skin:

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But as in the old joke, or “that hoary old chestnut”

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as such jokes are often called, here is another meaning to the word:

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Q. How do you get down off an elephant?

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A. You don’t, you get down off a duck.

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Ok, you can’t actually get down from a plastic bath-duck but I don’t have a real duck in the room with me at the moment. And the elephant in the room is that I don’t have an elephant in the room either, which is why my effort looks like a pig wearing a snorkel.

But I’m not going to get down (even sorrier) about it. I won’t be like the horse in the even older joke who walks into a bar and the barman says “Why the long face?”

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B’dum tish.

Weekly Drawing Challenge : Regret

As Tilly Bud said when this week’s challenge was announced “I know what you’re regretting now…”

And she wasn’t wrong. My heart sank like a stone

when I saw the topic.

Still, it wouldn’t be a Challenge if it wasn’t a challenge, so here we go …

This (and I have to admit I’m quite astonished at how uncrap this drawing is)  is a man regretting forgetting to buy his wife a Valentine Card:

I must point out that the above picture is in no way a reflection of life in the Tinhouse. We do not have a dog.

This is a little more esoteric:

It’s a drawing of Napoleon in the snow, regretting invading Russia in wintertime instead of summer.

And finally I offer you all this:

This may look remarkably similar to the drawing above, but it is totally different.

It’s a picture of Edith Piaf, and she isn’t in it, because she ne regrets rien.

Weekly Drawing Challenge: Ready

I was on the bus when I got the idea of meeting the above challenge by drawing the collection of pencils and markers that I have assembled for this task, all sitting beside patiently beside my computer ready for action. This is what they look like:

I knew that I had exactly the colour red that I would need for the mug. I knew that I had the colours for each of the markers because, well, I had the markers.

I was aware that as I worked there would always be one marker missing from the mug and that I would never remember where exactly to replace it, so that what I was drawing would keep changing. I knew that I would feel as if I were trying to catch a cloud and pin it down.

This caused me to wonder how artists used to paint those battle-scene paintings that take up whole walls in art galleries. They must have painted awfully fast.

I was ready for all of those challenges, though. And genuinely it was only when I sat down in front of the mug that the really big problem occurred to me.

In only my second venture into art I would have to draw Betty Boop.

I doubt that DaVinci painted the Mona Lisa on his second day at the job. I’m say he worked up to her via landscapes, sunflowers and the traditional bowl of fruit. I’m sure that before Warhol painted his Campbells Soup can he practised on tins of dog food, cans of Spam (same thing, really) and pots of Pot Noodle.

But as a mere novice I had to take on one of the most famous women of all time. Not only that (and this is a phrase that I never thought I would ever find myself writing) I would have to take on her bosom.

Anyway, this is my attempt:

You’ll notice that I didn’t bother colouring in the mug. When you have a true superstar in your picture who cares about the background.

Membership Badge

Those of you who read the stuff on the sidebar down the right-hand side of this blog, perhaps on the basis that it’s more interesting than the content to its left, will notice that WordPress have produced a new badge reading “I’m Part of Postaday 2012″, with whichI have replaced the 2011 version. I’ve done this somewhat shamefacedly, since this is Day 36 of 2012 and this post, which I hadn’t even written at the time I did it, will only be my 24th, but I’m hoping its presence will help prevent laziness and encourage me to write more.

To counter the embarrassment of using a Badge I’m not yet really entitled to I’ve also decided to use one to which I most definitely am, so I have spent enormous amounts of today creating the Badge below:

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Now I just have to remember how to get it onto the sidebar.

(Ok, ignore the last sentence….)