The Great Gatsby

Hey Bloggers!  Just wanted to change it up today by posting some of my random doodles instead of the usual cafe sketches.  Two things I really love are old pictures and books...They fuel the imagination and are really great inspirations for costume design and character details. 

One site that I go to quite often is SHORPY.  They've got really great old photographs from different eras scanned in at super hi-resolution.  I was scanning through the site the other day and saw these two pictures.   For some reason, the book "The Great Gatsby" by F. Scott Fitzgerald went through my mind so I decided to do some doodles based off these two photographs.  

This could, perhaps be the book's narrator, Nick Carraway, the young 29 year old who is the neighbor to the enigmatic Jay Gatsby... 

Next up is this photograph of  three women on a miniature car.  Their hairstyles and carousing attitudes really spoke volumes and just made me want to draw them!  As you can see from the drawing below, I pretty much took the pose of the girl on the left and tweaked it a bit...
In Fitzgerald's novel,  this woman would have been Daisy Buchanan, Nick's lively cousin, long believed to have been inspired by Fitzgerald's love affair with a Chicago heiress!
She does look like a "Daisy" wouldnt you say! Hope you all enjoyed this post and be on the lookout for more!

Ignatius Reilly!!!!!

Recently, Steven Gettis of Digital Medusa asked me to submit a literary themed drawing. I feel really bad because he's already asked me twice before but i've just been so busy that I haven't had the chance to do a drawing for his site. Well, since I've wrapped on Wall-e and now have plenty of downtime, I decided to go ahead and draw one of my all time favorite literary characters from one of my all time favorite books: Ignatius Reilly from "A Confederacy of Dunces" by John Kennedy Toole.

The character is a behemoth of a man. He still lives with his mother and constantly writes manifestos about anything and everything on pads of paper in his room. The basic premise might sound lame but I guarantee, its a great read and there are moments in the book where Ignatius interacts with his mother or other characters that are just hilarious.

Toole describes Ignatius in the beginning of the book:
A green hunting cap squeezed the top of the fleshy balloon of a head. The green earflaps, full of large ears and uncut hair and the fine bristles that grew in the ears themselves, stuck out on either side like turn signals indicating two directions at once. Full, pursed lips protruded beneath the bushy black mustache and, at their corners sand into little folds filled with disapproval and potato chip crumbs.

Anyway,I'm a big fan of the site and I encourage everyone out there to check it out.... I'm sure you'll get a kick out of it!!