One of the things I hear often is, “Clearly the fact that you’re madder than a hatter on shrooms helps, but how do you come up with all those amazing ideas for things that you doodle? I mean, you’re a bonafide creative genius the likes of which haven’t been seen since Da Vinci! Clearly there is some sort of secret to your unbelievable and endless ability to create horrifying cartoonary!”
Yes, Yes there is.
I actually have many sources for my doodles, and they all blend together inside my head to create things that this world would be better off without, like today’s doodle, the Barrel Shooting Monster.
I’ve named him Steve.
STEVE
Now, there are many ways an abomination of the imagination like Steve can come into existence, for example, he could be part of a drawing challenge, or be requested by a friend, but no, Steve got his life from one of my favorite things in the world.
The Random Word Generator!
Steve’s Words
Normally, when I use random words to get ideas, there is a bit of time in which they are spinning around inside my head slowly ticking together into the root of the new picture. These words did not have that happen. No, almost as soon as the page loaded, I knew exactly what a “Barrel Shooting Monster” would be. Although, I have to admit in the interim, with Steve now officially out of my head and on to paper, the words are already spinning into a new doodle. Possibly a cowboy, yeah, there is a cowboy floating in my head asking to be drawn. I’ll get to him later.
STEVE’S SKETCH:
I had pretty much finished roughly sketching Steve within a few minutes of seeing the words on the random prompt list. I couldn’t help myself. It was like I had a barrel shooing monster compulsion to bring it to life and secretly hope that every D&D Game Master in the world sees it and gets crazy ideas. Yeah, I’m that kind of bastard, I know.
Once Steve was sketched, he had to go and get some ink up in this mug, which I do with sharpies because they smell like awesome.
As you can see, sharpies really make my drawing what it is. If it wasn’t for sharpies, I’d be a completely different artist. Probably one that doesn’t smell like sharpies.
Sharpie is incredibly resilient against erasers, so Steve no longer has pencil lines!
From here, he gets loaded on into GIMP, and using secret, Open Sourced Magic becomes the finished product you see above.
And that’s how doodles are born.