A READER REQUEST: MORE WORM PICTURES

Anonymous asked to see more Worm drawings and here they are. The top one is a sketch that I did and which was beautifully cleaned up by Tuck Tucker. In the film the scene got some nifty animation by Bob Jaques and Kelly Armstrong. The freckles peeling off is an idea I got from Clampett. It makes for a good drawing but it slowed down the action so I had to cut frames.

The big hole in Sally's arm is her armpit. I realized I drew it too high and I meant to change it but there was no time.

Here's (above) another inbetween from Glenn Kennedy's animation of the Worm addressing the audience. The dialogue in this scene is something like "What are you looking at? Look at yourselves why don't you? It is unto yourselves you should be looking!" John K pioneered this kind of over-the-top, Baroque dialogue and I'm always amazed to see how well it integrates with the more normal dialogue in his films.

I don't have more Worm drawings at hand so I'll throw in a model that I did for another project of ghosts who chase people around a haunted mansion in airplanes. Sometimes the planes fly and sometimes they walk.

NEWS BULLETIN: If you haven't heard, YouTube has yielded to a demand by Warners to delete it's copy of "Buckaroo Bugs." I assume that Warners was responding to the use of clips from that film on John K's blog. This is a bad precedent.

The clips made it possible to discuss animation that everyone has just seen. No book could do that. They made possible to talk about animation on a deeper and more intelligent level than has ever been possible before. We need to be able to run these low-res clips! I'm going to write to Warners and I hope everyone reading this will do the same. Warners' addresses can be had at John's blog, "all kinds of stuff."

SOME INTERESTING PICTURES

A few days ago John K took this picture of me, Jack Black and Kyle Gass (Jack & Kyle =Tenacious D.). It's a terrific picture and I'm really glad to have it but I'll never be able to look at it without wincing. I was supposed to reciprocate by taking John's picture with Jack and Kyle and I goofed it. We didn't find out till it was too late to take another one. Sorrrryyyyyyy!

Jack turned out to be a real nice guy and his vocal range is amazing. He has a trained voice. He can speak in what comes off as a natural, conversational manner, and still be heard clearly in the back of the balcony. Every actor should be able to do that.



Here's a caricature John did of of me (above) covered with warts, with dog legs, sitting in a puddle of my own urine. I wonder what Sister Wendy would think of it?

Here's another picture of me (above), also by John. This was the head I used when I put together the yellow composite of John's Eddie pictures that I posted a few weeks ago.

LOOKING AT THE SAME PICTURES IN BLACK AND WHITE

Well, I don't think we nailed this problem last time. I tried Jorge's method of printing the covers in black and white and that helped a lot. Now we see the girl is done entirely in middletones. In B&W her panties almost disappear. The whole middle part of her body appears as one, big, grey haze. It's as if that part of her was an uncluttered area where the eye could rest, a blank area to contrast with the stark angles and colors elsewhere.

In B&W I see that my eye starts the picture by fixing on the guy's face, but the face lacks detail so I allow the wedge of white light to carry my eye down to the girl's thighs. Being a guy I naturally want to linger there but there's no detail to fix my attention. I follow the greater complexity of her upper body to her eyes and they lead straight back to the guy, which is where we started. My eye keeps circling the page.

A commenter last time mentioned that the guy (above) looked like he was lit by colored gels on spot lights. The girl is lit more naturally. Two people that close together still get a different light treatment.

In black and white you can see that a lot of this cover (above) is in middletones. Only the yellow in the titles comes off light. The guy appears to be both underlit and toplit. The girl is only bottomlit. Interesting. They have seperate lighting.

For me this is a warm picture with cool accents though you could argue that the cool threatens to dominate. My eye starts on the girl's face then travels down to her thighs where it gets lured away by the yellow in the bottom title. From there it travels up the guy to his face, which is looking at the girl, which completes a circle. The problem is that the two are looking at each other so intensely that there's a temptation to keep your eyes on the two heads. Spizz was put off by the overt sexuality in this picture but it seems to me that the artist had to give the girl a sexy, detailed body to keep the eye moving.

WHY ARE THESE COLORS SO APPEALING?

Here's a couple of terrific magazine covers. I'm especially interested in the way they're colored. Can any painter out there explain the color schemes to me?

Using my color wheel I see that the girl in the cover above seems to be orange and blue which are complimentary colors. The guy seems to be a double split complimentary with red and violet facing green and yellow. I love how he's a dark silo against white while she's a light area almost totally enclosed by darks.

The cover above seems to be done in analogous colors: from blue-violet all the way around the color wheel to yellow-green. No blues, no pure greens. Once again the guy is a dark silo against light color and the girl is light totally surrounded by dark.

Can anyone who knows more about color than I do add to what I've said here? I know what I've written doesn't begin to describe what's really going on here.

SHOULD SHORT MEN PURSUE TALL WOMEN?

Yes, of course they should! Is a girl likely to accept such a man? No, why should she? There are plenty of tall men to choose from. Is the short man likely to be humiliated in the futile attempt to get a tall woman? Of course! It'll be a horrible experience for him. Should he attempt it anyway, even if the odds are overwhelmingly against him? Of course he should! Let me explain!

Men exist to compete with each other for women. That's the role that nature has given us to play. It's our lot in life to be disappointed, humiliated, frustrated, chased away by other men, and be otherwise miserable in our attempt to get women who are simply not in our league. A man who can make rational calculations about love and then act on them is an alien creature, devoid of human emotion.

I think tragedy is part of life and it's unnatural to go to extremes to try to avoid it. We are made better by the pursuit of the tragic end. The short man will try harder when he goes after the tall woman. He'll learn to dance, he'll try to get a better job, he'll try to cultivate wit and conversation. These will all come in useful later when he's eventually (and inevitably) snubbed by the tall woman and enters the competition for quality short women.

By the way, I'm not short myself but I see the dramas that are being played out on the street and I can't help but form an opinion about them. By trying too hard to avoid humiliation short men deprive themselves of essential, ennobling life experiences.

WHAT DO YOU THINK?

HEADS THAT ARE GRAPHIC STATEMENTS!

It seems very odd to me that some people choose to make a graphic statement out of their head. Even more odd is the fact that some people deliberately choose to make their heads resemble favorite objects or foods. I call your attention to the man above who appears to have modified his upper body and head to resemble a salt shaker.


Here's a guy (above) who's made his head into a mushroom. A mushroom is a friendly, simple and sophisticated food which I guess makes it appealling as a head shape.


This man (above) appears to be paying tribute to the humble, flacid penis.


Here's (above) two feather dusters, one facing down and the other facing up. I kinda like feather dusters too but I don't think I'd want to look like one.

Here (above) is a head modeled on the cap of a Bic pen. People really like these objects. A modern pen cap has no threads and no clickable button like old ballpoints used to. A modern cap is simple and useful and these qualities appear to have attracted admirers who wish they could be pens. It's a real tribute to the product designers (I know bobbed hair goes back to the time before Bic pens but I assert that the bobbed hair enthusiasts of our day do it for a different reason than their predecessors).


The simple egg has it's admirers and imitators. My guess is that the individual above used to dye Easter eggs when he was a kid and it was such a pleasurable experience that he decided to be an Easter egg when he grew up. He's not alone. Lots of people try to be their favorite foods.

A FEW INTERESTING PICTURES

A friend turned me on to this killer WW2 syphilis poster (above). I don't know the artist's name.

Here's a detail (above) of a painting I'm especially fond of, Delacroix's "Orphan in the Graveyard." The girl looks stupid to me but she's portrayed with great nobility as if the artist was saying, "Even a girl like this is a human being and as such she has a divine spark and the potential for greatness."

Here (above) is the whole Delacroix picture. Below is an old drawing by John K where he's trying to out-Woverton Basil Wolverton.