Random Birthday Muscle Porn

Random thought of the day
If you were to eat an "Airborne" table, would it boil your mouth, or just make your breath effervescent?

Old enough to be president
This year marks a milestone in my life; I have joined the ranks of the "mid-thirties" crowd. I am now old enough to run for president, if I were ever to be brainwashed into thinking that taking the job would be a good idea. This was also my first birthday as a new dad. Given that my daughter's birthday is also this month, my birthday was pretty much what I expected, that is it passed mainly unnoticed in the looming event of my daughter's first birthday. Which is ok, I think that's as it should be. I've had thirty-five birthday's now, and this will be her first. It should be a bigger deal.

That said events of this week have been difficult to bear. Work is...not going well, and on top of it the baby was sick, which meant I had to be out of work for a couple of days. Add to that the frustration of having to turn down a call back, not an audition, a fucking call back, because I needed to be home with my sick daughter, there was no alternative, and work piling up on me and this birthday was something I have never experienced. Namely, I just wanted the fucking day to be over with already. No more passive aggressive bullshit at work, no more sick baby, no more of feeling guilty for trying to be a good dad even if it means missing out on paid acting work, just no more. Just be done with the whole goddamn day.

I've never felt that way about my birthday. The one shining light in my day, and arguably my week, was my wife made lemon bars. For anyone who's had the good fortune to sample the ambrosia that flows from our oven when my wife decides to bake you'll understand what I mean when I say that I'd been looking forward to tasting these all day. When I finally did get to bite down through the sticky, crumbly, crunchy, sweet, tart treat it made so much of my week up to that point melt away. Every bite was worth the wait. My week, and possibly my birthday, may have been shit. But my wife made the best lemon bars I've ever had.

The (who am I kidding) daily doodle: for the ladies

When I'm just doodling my tendency is to draw women, more often than not. It's not anything puerile (usually) I just enjoy drawing what I think to be beautiful women.

It occurred to me that I would not be complete as an artist if I just focused on that. The running horse from my last post came from a similar impulse. To round out my understanding of anatomy and the human form I would need to draw men.

Once again I turned to the holy bible of figure drawing resources known as DeviantArt.com. It yielded a lot of photos of guys making self portraits of their junk, but mixed into the forest of dong shots (with varying degrees of shrubbery) I found a few gems.

Truth be told there are a lot of very serious artists on DeviantArt.com, many of whom produce beautiful work, like the photo I used as a reference for this drawing. I'm not sure why I picked it. I think the lighting and the model's expression evoked a kind of bashful melancholy that called out to me.

I call this drawing "muscle porn."

Random Fable Horsies

Random thoughts
I'm having a passionate tech love affair with Down Them All. It's a Firefox plugin that will let you download multiple documents or images from a web page in a multi-threaded (yay tech-speak) process, so that you don't have to do one download at a time. Don't tell Google Wave, it gets jealous.

We're watching Downton Abbey which is an absolutely amazing show full of mumble-y British people. In one episode the heir of the estate is explaining that his job (oh, scandal) won't interfere with the day-to-day running of Downton Abbey because there are always the evenings and weekends (help, I feel a swoon). To this Maggie Smith, in the amazing way she has of delivering her lines says, "What's a weekend?" It made me realize that we take for granted some things that are fairly recent developments in the scheme of things. In fact, the 40 hour work week wasn't a national institution until 1937 with the Fair Labor Standards act. Saturday morning sounds that much sweeter when taken in that context, doesn't it?

Why are there so many birthdays in March? It's really hard to imagine all those young couples humping to the tune of "My Country 'Tis of Thee."

Fables

I know I'm kind of going on about this series but I just finished books ten and eleven of the awesome ongoing story of Fables. When I come across writing of this caliber and stories this well constructed it makes me shed a few tears for the state of literacy in our country that so many are ready to turn up their noses to graphic novels, but they'll religiously follow Jersey Shore.

Fables 10 is a particularly good story that takes a famous fable with whom we are all familiar, but casts him as a strong and heroic figure. For those who've read a little bit of Fables, this character is one who's been a beloved fixture of the supporting cast since book one. The arc he takes in this book is the best example the transformation, or awakening of an unlikely hero that I've ever read.

If I have a complaint about the Fables books it's that you can't just dive right in. If you haven't followed the story from the beginning, the latest issue of the comic book on the shelves of your local comic book store is going to leave you feeling lost. That said, get the trades. The entire series is worth a read.

The (laughably not) daily doodle

For a while I'd been drawing faces, cartoons, weird aliens, and boobies...more boobies than I would be likely to confess to drawing, if I'm being honest. I realized that I'd never really tried to draw an animal, much less an animal in some kind of dynamic pose. So I turned to the magnificent treasure trove of (boobies) art that is DeviantArt.com. In it I found a picture of a horse running, which led to the drawing here. I hadn't finished cleaning up this drawing when I scanned it, and you can still see the guide marks I made for the horse's face and body.