Spare Time Compass

I have an extra day off from work today, because for some reason, when you resurface a parking lot in 112 degrees and 60% humidity, it doesn't dry overnight.  Go figure. 

So, this is what happens when somebody gives me some free time.

Everybody knows that I want to be Stephen King when I grow up.  ("Sam, tell us one more time, then, why you write a humor blog, and not something... I don't know, scary?")  One of the other things I want to be when I grow up is an artist.  Put a Michael Whelan or Boris Vallejo or Keith Parkinson or Xia Taptara or Feng Zhu work in front of me and my face will melt into a blissful expression that can usually only be recreated with dental anesthetics.

For a couple of years, I actually did quite a bit of graphic design for the casino where I work.  The comments from my superiors ran the gamut from, "That's freakin' classy," to "It looks like a freakin' X-ray."  Regardless of who said them, comments always seemed to involve the adjective freakin'.  I'm not sure why.

Over the past few months, I have been following various tutorials to find out what I don't know that I don't know about art and maybe drop the freakin' meter a couple of degrees.  Of course, I decided that this would a good opportunity to torture my kind readers with a few of my efforts.  Here is one of the results of an anatomy study (my apologies to those of you who have taken anatomy courses and can see how inaccurate this is):

This was done without a reference.  To me, it looks generic, less like a person and more like a mannequin.  For example, compare it to an unfinished sketch I did of Stephen King back in March, where I used a different technique called triangulation.  The reference was a photograph taken by King's wife Tabitha.

What do you think?  I take criticism well.  It's like when my wife slaps my leg.  Because I have had a back injury, I tell her, "Abuse me, I'm numb."  This, of course, is a really stupid thing to say, because if you have been reading this blog for any length of time, you'll know that she takes such comments as a challenge.