Category: Drawings (Page 6 of 19)

Inanimate objects. For some reason, having to draw them is not my favorite pass-time. However, “Wild Years (the music and myth of) Tom Waits” starts off like this:

[…] in the 1973 press-kit bio for his first album, Closing Time, Waits claimed that he was born in a taxicab with three day’s growth of beard. As soon as he popped out, he told the driver to head for Times Square on the double. In other interviews, he maintained that the driver wouldn’t let him out of the cab until he had come up with the fare — which was pretty tough since he didn’t have any pockets.

… and so a car needed to be drawn. Some model that was around in 1949 to be more exact: a DeSoto!

Google Images to the rescue. Here’s what I started out with:

… on to a preliminary sketch:

… pretty shabby. Some cleaning up was in order. I transferred the above onto another piece of paper, and realized by now that, in order for the newborn Tom Waits to get out of the car, at least the back door should be open…

… so that’s the drawing we ended up using. For shits ‘n giggles here’s both drawings super-imposed:

See? Told you there was a reason for this.

… and yes: I am now officially knee-deep in Tom Waits Territory. Last week, Gaby and I robbed the local library of whatever Tom Waits CD’s were available, and have been putting them on heavy rotation since. I absolutely love working on this — wish I had more illustration jobs that were equally challenging and inspiring.

Big Time.