First, the original pencil sketch, probably done back in the 90s:
And my modern interpretation of it:
And some miscellaneous notes and observations:
I tried to incorporate the ZOOM!! text but never liked the way it looked, so off it went
I originally resisted adding the reins to the bananas, because I don’t see the Gum Gum People needing them, but with their poses it looks a little better
If I redid this, I’d have them leaning forward, like they were riding motorcycles, without the reins
I removed the dialog because it is now canon that Gum Gum People do not speak
The motion lines/puffs don’t seem to convey the motion that well, probably again due to the posture of the racers
The shadows are iffy
I slightly reduced the size of the background GGP, but they still look too close together?
The GGP in the back has bigger feet, but, uh, it’s just a trick of perspective!
I decided to look for some daily drawing prompts to help grease the ol’ drawing, uh, wheels. Or hands, I guess.
Some sites essentially hide everything away until you sign up, or are weirdly specific, like “write something about your daily life…every day!” I live my life, I don’t want to draw it, too. Well, maybe a little.
And then there is drawingprompt.com, which gets points for the most on-the-nose web address.
But it offered this as its first random prompt when I visited:
And the would-be English teacher curled up my toes in horror at the missing comma. Or maybe it wasn’t missing, and Toast Human is a thing. Then I noticed “cloths” instead of “clothes”, using “their” and then “he” to describe the bulldog and, really, just how weird the prompt is, but weird in a wholly unappealing way.
Then I decided I don’t need to find a daily drawing prompt, I’ll just make something up. Take that, SEO-driven, AI-addled internet! I’m using my own brain!
One of the drawing prompts I did way back for Making Art Everyday was CHEF. I used a Gum Gum Person because of course I did, but I never liked the final result, and at least one guy in my gaming group said the apron looked like a dress.
Tonight I came across that sketch and redid it from the original. The only things that didn’t change were the colours.
I was totally into dinosaurs as a kid, and Godzilla was a dinosaur. Or close enough. I watched all the Japanese Godzilla movies from the 1950s on the Tacoma station KSTW (channel 11). They aired as part of their Sunday noon SCI-FI THEATER. It was all the sci-fi schlock I could handle–and then some! So many terrible, yet amazing movies.
I drew a lot of dinosaurs, and in my 14-year-old mind, Godzilla would have absolutely been a tyrannosaurus rex if he had been a REAL dinosaur. So I drew him as such in 1978.
Below is a traced copy of the sketch. I tried to keep the line work as close to the original and I think I came pretty close, using the Narinder Pencil in Procreate, with an HB Pencil for the shading.
Why do this when I still have the original sketch? This was both an experiment and a nostalgic trip back to my hippie-haired youth. The nostalgia part is obvious, the experiment was to see how easily my hand could follow the lines I drew 45 (!) years ago, and, really, just to see what it felt like.
It felt weird. It felt weird not because it was dead simple to trace (it’s a pretty straightforward sketch), but because as I traced over it, the lines felt like mine, right down to giving Godzilla puny little arms that were still pretty ripped. And giving him a funny-looking snout that would probably work as the front end of a car.
And I still draw rocks pretty much the same way in 2023.
Anyway, it was an interesting way to reacquaint myself with some of my oldest surviving artwork.
And the original scan (this is not a great scan, I’ll probably redo it at some point):
I wonder if I should do a modern take on this…as an experiment.
Bonus: I tried to imagine how I might have coloured it back in the age of disco, and this is what I came up with. I think it’s pretty close:
I’ve now got it in my head that I want to do one or more cartoon with geese, because they intrigue me and horrify me in equal parts.
My first step was to do a bird drawing of a Canada goose, but in a more deliberate cartoon style. This is my initial attempt, which I’ll refine as I go along. I’m using the most obvious joke here, they’ll probably get weirder or more obscure if I do more.
This is based on a photo of a goose going berserk (as they do) at Reifel on April 22. Most of these photos turn out blurry because the goose is whipping its head around (as they do).
I started this bird art thing with a chickadee, but it was very simple line art (I sort of want to do some more in that specific style). Here’s another chickadee, in my now-established style.
I wanted to draw something simple and quick, and an orange is just a circle that’s…orange.
So here it is.
(This is also me getting back to the “draw something every day thing” where I’m less concerned with quality and more concerned with building good habits and a vast collection of hand-drawn fruit.)
Done using Procreate, using Dry Brush and 6B Pencil.
