This Monster Mania drawing is part of a series within the series that I call “Monster Buddies.” Several Monster Mania drawings feature two monsters. Sometimes a monster needs a buddy.
I'm a serious artist that draws silly things. I draw vomit and snot and warts and pimples and poo. I’m amused by the idea of spending untold hours painstakingly drawing anthropomorphic turd creatures and other ridiculous things. I could drip paint like Jackson Pollock or cut paper like Kara Walker or paint portraits like Alice Neel, but instead of doing any of those things, I choose to draw an angry turd monster fighting a horde of vicious corn kernels. I draw silly things because it is fun to draw silly things. Creating art should be a joyous experience.
I have a strict set of rules that I follow when creating a Monster Mania drawing but those restrictions still leave plenty of room to experiment and evolve. The most notable change has been my approach to coloring the drawings. The early drawings were colored in a more painterly style, and I used a variety of watercolor and chalk brushes to color the drawings. I would start by laying a foundation of splatters and drips and textures, creating an abstract painting that served as both a background and an underpainting for the drawing. I would then proceed to color the line art using flat colors. Then I would use chalk brushes to paint the shading and highlights. I would often play with opacity levels and layer effects to allow bits and pieces of the abstract underpainting to show. The end result was messy and haphazard like a real painting. In 2018, Clip Studio Paint became available on the iPad, and I started doing the majority of my inking and coloring on my iPad. The iPad ch...
When I was a child, I loved to play with insects and draw insects and study insects. My next door neighbor’s house was surrounded by a beautiful flower garden that attracted swarms of bumble bees, grasshoppers, praying mantises and butterflies. It was insect heaven. But that was the 80s, I rarely see a grasshopper or a monarch butterfly these days. I imagine this Monarch Butterfly has mutated in order to survive climate change and deforestation and droughts and pesticides and herbicides and angry birds and hungry spiders. This Monarch Butterfly’s nectar is human blood. It has seen things and it has done things. Terrible. Horrible. Things. But it is still a beautiful butterfly.