Its that 'recycle an old doodle' time of the year!
I don't usually write lots of boring stuff in these posts but I figure that once a year can't hurt. This year I decided to get back into drawing after carefully avoiding it for too long. So when I discovered sites like Zazzle and Redbubble it came as a bit of a surprise that I hadn't found them before. After a bit of the usual artistic doubt (but what if people think my drawing is rubbish, what if these places are a scam, etc.) I got a bunch of stuff out there on the internet. A good chunk of time and effort later and I now have something to show for my efforts. This blog and a whole bunch of drawings!
The bit that really stuns me is that some people have paid money to own something with my doodles on. Thank you so much to those who did actually spend out, you have no idea what a pleasure it is to receive those emails. Thanks also to the people who have helped out voting, reblogging, liking and tweeting about my work. I'm pretty sure I wouldn't be still doing this without all that help.
So here comes another year and I'm hoping that more of the same happens. So please invite your friends to have a look, leave a comment, and maybe even buy something. Should be fun!
"Who you getten bratty, Goggly Gogol? Johnny Zhivago? The Heaven Seventeen?"
"What you got back home, little sister, to play your fuzzy warbles on? I bet you got little save pitiful portable picnic players. Come with Uncle and hear all proper. Hear angel trumpets and devil trombones. You are invited!"
I might have mentioned in passing that A Clockwork Orange is one of my favourite films. Well the Disk Bootik scene is one of my favourite bits of the film. I've always wondered what the bands and songs are on the chart, so with the help of a pause button and slow motion I figured it out. Sadly (for me) it just makes it even more interesting. What sort of band are Bread Bros? Is Jelly Rock a dance? Is any of it any good?
Health and Safety are important in the modern workplace.
The awesome people at TeeRaiders.com have decided to print Low Flying Spacecraft! That means that you will be able to get hold of this Star Wars based design for 72 hours for only $10! It will be available from Monday 26th through to the end of Wednesday 28th of December. TeeRaiders also sell hoodies starting from $30 so if you need to keep yourself a bit warmer you can get one of those instead.
Head on over to my Facebook page to get the latest info on print dates and new designs as soon as it happens. I'm thinking of having a bit of a giveaway when I get past a certain number of likers, and in tribute to the Star Wars-ness of this design I think the magic number has got to be 66. So share with your friends, tweet to your twips(?) and reblog to your followers to make sure that magic number gets hit.
My latest doodle is based on Assassin's Creed. With the release of the newest game there hasn't been a lot else going on in my house, which meant I had plenty of time to consider the weapons. If the Turkish assassins have this fancy hook blade why wouldn't other nationalities have there own version? So the obvious choice was the Swiss. They love having a tool for everything so why wouldn't their hidden blades be ready too? So here he is, Ezio Auditore after a visit to Switzerland. No can will stay safely closed now.
You can show your love for multi-purpose tools and 15th century assassins by getting a T-shirt. Check out the Doodle Dojo Store for more info.
Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure is one of my all time favourite films. And Doctor Who is one of my all time favourite TV shows, so when I started wondering what would happen if they met up it was fairly obvious that it would end up as some sort of picture! The TARDIS is well known for being slightly out of control, so its bound to turn up occasionally in places it shouldn't. The three future dudes manage to hide their surprise pretty well though I thought.
Random stormtrooper eye testing begins on the Death Star
Stormtroopers always seem to get a bad rap for being rubbish at things like shooting guns at people. But I think its a bit harsh myself. Its no good blaming them when the emperor wouldn't hire a decent optometrist when he was building the Death Star. Lots of money for detention centres and garbage crushers, nothing for vision correction. He was going to put it right for Death Star 2 though, the optometrist moved in the day before the rebels attacked. Things just might have been different if it had been a week or two earlier.
Don't Make Me Angry is going to be printed on Qwertee from Saturday 26th of November! That's £8 or €10 or something else entirely in $ for a top quality screen printed T-shirt. Can't be bad.
Because this is a bit of a big deal for me, I'm having a bit of a giveaway as well. So if you head on over to Doodle Dojo on Facebook and hit the like button you will be entered into a random draw to win a sticker from Redbubble. That's any sticker of your choice from my Redbubble store for nothing. Got to be worth a go right? You can see the full range of available sticky goodness here. So click that like button and I'll keep you up to date with all my doodling.
Moustache Men - an evolutionary relative of the wookies.
These are the mysterious moustache men. I doodled these for Creaturemag's Moustache Illustration Awards. The brief is nice and open, draw something moustache related. Success with these guys I think! I tried to cover the full gamut of moustache styles and colours. I figure they are probably about 6 inches tall and live in a very cold part of the world. Their extravagant facial hair could be used to attract females during the mating season and also protect them from the thorny bushes in their natural environment.
My entry is now up on Creaturemag for viewing along with a whole bunch of other awesome moustache related pictures, so take a look. The awards are in support of Movember which aims to raise awareness of men's health issues, so its in all for a good cause too. Not only that but all the illustrations will get published in an ebook at the end of the month, result!
The amazing people over at Catch of the Day Tee will be printing my tribute to the Highlander's nemesis on Friday November 18th. You will be able to get hold of this my Kurgan Fried Chicken T-shirt for only $10 but only for 24 hours. So either put it in your diary or tell Siri to do it for you. Unless it is Friday when you read this, in which case head on over there now! If it happens to be after Friday, where were you? Of course it will still be available through the Doodle Dojo Store afterwards.
Invented by Dr. Cavor in H.G. Wells First Men in the Moon
As you might have spotted, I'm a bit of a science fiction geek. So for this one I've gone back about as far as its possible to go in the genre and taken some inspiration from one of the originals. H.G. Wells had some amazing ideas and wrote some incredible books. One of his best ideas was Cavorite, which featured in The First Men in the Moon (Its free! Download yourself a copy). If its possible, his character reasoned, to have materials which are transparent and opaque to different forms of energy, why shouldn't it be possible to have a material opaque to gravity? It still seems like a pretty good idea today, so I thought I would have a go at designing an ad for just such a material.
I had a good look at some victorian adverts to get a feel for the style and made sure I got the copy in period too. The illustration shows the cavorite spacecraft which the heroes of the story use to visit the moon. That's where the main part of the story takes place, but as usual I got sidetracked by how cool it would be to fly around space in this contraption!
When I added this to Redbubble, I got a nice mail from Synaptyx (of Synaptees) asking if I would like to add some of my work to a group he admins called Corporation Inc. Of course I said 'yes please,' and they have been kind enough to feature some of my stuff on the group's main page. Thanks very much!
As always this design is available on all sorts of T-shirts, iPhone Cases and Stickers. Just go through the Doodle Dojo Store to find all the links.
I thought it was about time for another submission over at Threadless. This is a little sketch that keeps cropping up in corners of my sketchbooks so I thought I would finally give it some proper attention. Its a bit of a daydreamy thing, but I like it, so its time to see if other people do as well!
It would be great if you could head on over there and send some points my way if you have the time.
Harry "Archibald" Tuttle - Freelance Heating Engineer
Terry Gilliam's science fiction movie Brazil is one of those often overlooked gems of cinema. Its got a wonderful dark view of a future taken over by bureaucracy, red tape and complications. The people are scared into a life they don't really want by a fear of terrorism. But in the middle of all this comes a man who has ducked out of the world of forms and doing what you're told. A heating engineer called Harry Tuttle (played by Robert De Niro). He tells Sam, (the hero of the movie,) that he became a heating engineer for, "the action, the excitement. Go anywhere, travel light, get in, get out, wherever there's trouble, a man alone."
I love the utterly surreal idea of an armed man busting into a house in order to fix the air conditioning without doing the paperwork. Reminds me of those soldiers that do the missions we never hear about, black ops. So what beter way of representing Harry than as the guy from Call of Duty.
Yes, this is also available on T-shirts, iPhone cases and stickers. Click on over to the Doodle Dojo store to find out more.
A Clockwork Orange is an all time classic film. It somehow manages to make the utterly horrible Alex into a character you care about and feel sorry for, even though everything that happens is bought on by his own actions and behaviour. The main reason for that is when his humanity is stripped away through the use of the Ludovico Technique. So I thought I would make a logo for the Institute where it all happens. The only other institute I could think of was the Torchwood Institute from Doctor Who so I thought I should mash the two together and see what happened. Turned out real horrorshow.
This is now available on T-shirts and other stuff from Redbubble at the Doodle Dojo Store.
Just a quick reminder that the Evil Mummy is available for today only at 24tee.com. If you want to get your hands on this shirt for a mere $10 you only have this one day to do it, so get on over there and get one before its gone.
Oompa loompas are definitely a weird bunch. They didn't improve much in the remake of Charlie and the Chocolate factory although they did get a lot more uniform. I liked the idea that they don't just do the routines that you see in the film. They probably have a whole repertoire that they practice to make sure they get their timing right. So here they are in mid practice of that most classic dance routine, the YMCA. Everybody knows it, but I doubt that many do it quite as well as Oompa loompas.
Go and have a look at the posters, stickers, iPhone cases and of course T-shirts available on the Doodle Dojo Store.
This evil mummy is not happy to discover that his internal organs are being stored in jars. I think I would be pretty cranky too though after 3000 years locked in a basement. But now he's being revived and stuck on a T-shirt. Doesn't look like its making him too happy though.
24Tee are printing this design on Wednesday the 26th of October. It will be available on their site for 24 hours only, at the very reasonable price of $10.00. So if you fancy a bargain, get yourself over there and grab yourself one. You can't complain at a price like that!
Thanks to 24Tee for picking my design, its great to be working with them.
Maurice Moss wants to get an iPhone without paying any money to Apple. And if he could just get his arms free he might be able to get it. This illustration is based on this scene from the IT Crowd. One of the best sitcoms in a long while from the creator of Father Ted. Its looking like there will be a fifth series sometime soon, can't wait. I wanted to get some nice geeky toys in the machine with Moss so I've used a little imagination rather than copying what was actually in there. No prizes if you spot them all, but I'll be impressed anyway!
The Death Star can be a dangerous place, the clue is in the name really. But no matter how dangerous it is, it can always be made a bit safer by those wonderful people from health and safety. Even Darth Vader understands that good men are hard to train, so he doesn't want them lost to avoidable accidents.
Star Wars is the film that got me into all the other sci-fi in the world. Its probably the biggest single thing to turn me into the geek I am now. So it had to happen that one of my ideas was Star Wars related eventually. Well here it is, so what do you think?
Obviously, this is available on T-shirts from Redbubble over at the Doodle Dojo Store. There is also a version on their brand new iPhone cases and of course there are stickers too. So get yourself on over there and take a look!
2001: a Space Odyssey is one of my favourite films. Amazing visuals and great music with a strange story about the evolution of man. Not to mention a mad computer trying to kill all humans. So this is my tribute to the classic. My god, its full of stars! I'm afraid I can't let you do that Dave, etc. etc. If there is one person in the universe who knows his space suits, its going to be Dr. Dave Bowman. Just make sure you don't forget your helmet (supplied separately).
This doodle is available on T-shirts at the Doodle Dojo store via Redbubble right now in two versions. One with Dave and the other with just the logo. Its also up for voting on Qwertee which means that if you get over there and give it a vote (and get your friends to vote as well ;-) ) it might be available in screen print quality at a very reasonable price.
The Doodlers Anonymous 2012 Calendar draw for December is now open for voting. This one (like the lasttwo) is to get featured in their 2012 calendar, available from the Doodlers Anonymous site later in the year. As usual the only rule is no computers, so it was time to get stuck into a sketchbook and scribble away furiously.
The theme is nice and easy for December at least! You don't really have a lot of choice in that one, the only question left is what exactly to draw. In my opinion the tree is the most important Christmas decoration of them all. You have to have one to keep your presents under at the very least. So thats what I went with. Hope you like it, any votes are very much appreciated!
The Highlander themed Kurgan Fried Chicken is up for voting on Qwertee. I need your help to get it printed though. More votes means more chance of being able to get hold of it nice and cheap and in a good quality screen print as well. They have loads of good shirts over there, and lots of chances to win free tees as well. So if you are a T-shirt fanatic you really should already be a member. If you don't I'll send this guy round to persuade you, and you don't want that.
The traditional British fish slapping dance. This ritual dates back many years and was on the verge of being forgotten. Then the celebrated filmmaker Monty Python recorded his documentary on the subject and the practice was reinvigorated. Now people all over the country can be found slapping their fellow man in the face with the biggest fish they can find.
The fish slapping dance is a Monty Python classic. The art of surrealist comedy distilled down to its barest essence in 15 seconds. Two men, three fish and a canal, this is humour at its best. So when I realised that nobody else seems to have tackled this particular scene through the medium of illustration, I knew that I would have to give it my best shot. So here is the result.
Of course if you head over to the Doodle Dojo store, you too can celebrate this British tradition with a T-shirt.
Highlander is one of those classic movies from the old days that is sure to be remade very soon. A great premise, superb music and great action. There isn't much that can compare to immortals trying to hack each others head off with large swords after all. Then they had to go and make a sequel that had nothing to do with the original story and spoil the whole thing. Still we can all pretend that never happened and carry on with our lives.
But what if the Kurgan took his love of fried chicken and tried to make some cash from it? This is what I like to think that would look like. You can even get some good tag lines out of it: There can be only one. It's a kind of magic. Don't lose your head, etc. etc. I wonder if there's a gap in the market?
My choice of lunch the other day inspired this one. I think I was probably humming a certain Queen song to myself as the local KFC came into view. Once I remembered that he was called the Kurgan it was a done deal. I couldn't quite believe that nobody else had made the connection, so I thought I better had and here is the result.
As usual, if you head on over to the Doodle Dojo Store you can get yourself this guy on a T-shirt.
This is one of my latest works of weirdness. I don't really know why, does a cow need a reason to be evil beyond beef burgers? This is obviously a very rare carnivorous cow that has probably developed a taste for human flesh. I kind of like the expression of pure nastiness, and of course the hypnotic evil eyes as well. Sometimes I guess you just have to go with what pops into your head!
As usual the Evil cow is available on lots of products, including T-shirts, hoodies, badges and bags over on the Doodle Dojo Store.
The Doodlers Anonymous 2012 Calendar draw is now on to October (a little early but I guess they need to get stuff ready!). Doodlers Anonymous is a site for people who just have to doodle and draw whenever they get the chance and, along with featuring great artists, they also run a few challenges. This one (like last time) is to get featured in their 2012 calendar which will be available from the Doodlers Anonymous site later in the year. The only rule? No computers. Get yourself a pen or pencil or any other way of making a mark on a piece of paper and create a calendar page for October.
Well this one is a little abstract for me, but it does have some sort of basis in reality. We went for a short break last weekend, and on the way we stopped off at the New Forest to see the deer at Bolderwood. Its always amazing watching a whole herd of deer just wandering around taking no notice of us humans. We went for a bit of a walk after and found the remains of an fallen tree. As you can see from the photo, the roots look incredible and so thats what I've (loosely) based my illustration on.
Collapsed trees a might seem a tenuous connection to October, but that's the way my mind works so there you go. I thought I might need to add some details that suggest Autumn a bit more directly as well, so hopefully my little sketches in the empty date boxes should help with that!
So now the voting begins! Get on over to the showcase page and click favourite on your favourites. Thanks in advance to anyone who votes for mine, much appreciated!
So I've finally gone and got together a submission for Threadless. Their 'Threadless loves Horror III Challenge' was the prod I needed to get me going. Seemed to suit me perfectly, so off goes my first entry.
The basic idea is (obviously!) weapons from some of my favourite horror movies. As you can see I've got a fairly wide ranging selection going on. I reckon that if you had this little list available, you would be able to survive until the end of most horror films. It makes for a nice little game of trying to name the film that they come from as well, which is always a bonus. I wanted to keep the colour palette nice and simple, partly because of the printing process and partly to keep everything visually linked. You are allowed a maximum of 8 colours but I managed to keep it down to 6.
I've been having a good look at some of the competition and there is some great stuff there. which means I need some votes to stand a chance. So click on the little thumbnail over there and give it some points, if you think it deserves some. This one can't go on any other sites for a while, so if you like the looks of it, you have to get over there and score it. As always its very much appreciated!
My latest doodle is this scary, slimy swamp monster. I think the swamp monster is an underrated horror icon myself, so I thought I would give him a shot and see if I could improve his image a little. I'm quite pleased with the final result really. I wouldn't want him creeping up behind me on a dark night. Although you would have to imagine that creeping up quietly would be tricky for something that probably has webbed feet. Do fish based creatures often come out of the water looking for land based meat? Regardless he looks pretty mean and that is the way I wanted him so there you go. Hope you like him!
Presumably there are people in the world who think clowns are funny and nice and friendly and all that nice stuff. I do not think this way myself, I just guess that there must be some of these people, otherwise clowning as a career would have died out a long time ago. I guess its partly Stephen King's fault, with a bit of help from Scooby Doo and Batman, but I think clowns are a bit weird. Slightly scary even. So when I decided to draw a clown, this is how he ended up. To me this is what clowns are all about. Trying ever so hard to be fun and jolly, while actually ending up being scary and slightly evil. Come to think of it this guy is probably quite a lot evil. But I'm sure you understand what I mean.
Just a quick edit to say this has been submitted to Illustration Friday as a 'scary' drawing. Hope you like it!
As usual this picture can be put on many items of your choosing if you visit the all new(ish) Doodle Dojo Store.
Total Recall is one of my favourite movies and this line is just classic stuff. I felt that there just aren't enough tributes to this iconic moment in cinema. So I made my own. It needed a little bit of an update to bring it in line with the way the world works now so thats where the tablet screen comes in. Not exactly cute or funny this time, but now and again you need a little blood and gore to set the scene. You can almost hear Arnie saying it in his Austrian accent.
I'm also taking this opportunity to introduce my new website, DoodleDojo.co.uk. That's where I've gathered up all my T-shirt design into one convenient place so you can browse through the designs without having to put up with my rambling.
So if you want a print, poster or even a T-shirt of this classic sci-fi moment get on over to the 'Get Your Ass to Mars' page on Doodle Dojo and buy yourself one. I've got five kids to feed!*
Craft Guerrilla is a website and Zine based in East London. They organise craft events and support Artist Makers. Recently they asked if anyone would like to do any illustrations for their zine and so I offered my services. The theme was obviously summer, so I thought of a good old Punch and Judy show. Its a little old fashioned but still a very traditional sort of summery, beachy type of thing so I thought it would be perfect. Luckily they agreed and so my picture was chosen to be printed in their latest issue.
As this is for a craft Zine I thought I had better stay traditional and so I stuck to hand drawing with my trusty black pen for this one. The crocodile scenes are my favourite part of Punch and Judy so thats what I decided to draw. I really enjoyed doing all the little detail bits on the stage and getting the texture and shading just right.
The best bit though, was getting my copy of the zine and seeing my work in print. Especially when I saw that my drawing is opposite a recipe for a cocktail called the zombie. I'm definitely going to try that one out! You can get yourself a copy of the zine if you visit the Craft Guerrilla website and go the shopping page. They have it available as a downloadable PDF and of course you can have a paper copy mailed to you if you want.
I've just posted Don't make me angry up on Qwertee for voting. If it gets enough votes it gets printed and goes on sale for two days for the amazing price of £8! Of course it needs lots of votes to get to that stage so thats where you come in. If you would like the chance to get one of these t-shirts for a ridiculously cheap price you need to get on over to the Qwertee site and vote.
Of course if you have no patience (or perhaps green is just not your colour) its also still available on RedBubble.
Update: Thanks to Doug at the Hulk Discussion Boards for posting a link to this on the forum. Hope any visitors from there like it!
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In other news I didn't quite make it into the Doodlers Anonymous Calendar. But I did make it to second! So huge thanks to everyone who voted, I'm really pleased with that result for a first try. I'll be back with something even better in October.
This is my entry for the Doodlers Anonymous August 2012 Calendar draw. Its a site for people who just have to doodle and draw whenever they get the chance and, along with featuring great artists, they also run a few challenges. This one is to get featured in their 2012 calendar which will be available from the Doodlers Anonymous site later in the year. The only rule? No computers. Get yourself a pen or pencil or any other way of making a mark on a piece of paper and create a calendar page for August.
I thought that sounded like fun so I pulled out the sketchpad and started scribbling away on a new illustration. If you've looked through my work before you've probably noticed that most of it is vectors (I love illustrator!) I do a lot of sketching before I get to that stage though, so it wasn't as much out of the ordinary as it first seems. I was just finished one step earlier!
August for me is the time of summer holidays and getting out to the seaside. Where I am that almost always means there is a pier nearby. So what better symbol of a hot, sunny, summer month is there than a pier with a fun fair and an ice cream booth. I thought I should carry on the seaside theme and fill in the gaps in the calendar with a few underwater items too. Its all drawn first in pencil and then gone over with a nice fine black pen.
So all I need now are some votes. So does everyone else who entered, so get yourself over to the showcase page and vote for your favourites (you have until Monday) and help decide what 2012 will look like. If you fancy adding a vote for me I will, of course, be eternally grateful. Well possibly not eternally, but for quite a long time at least!
A little while ago I was knocking around on Twitter (like we all do!) when I came across a freebie from Moo.com (Thanks to a retweet from @Iamassault). 52 stickers for nothing with your own design printed on them. Well I'm not one to pass up a freebie so I jumped in with both feet and they arrived today. Just in case you're wondering, the only connection I have with these guys is that they sent me some free stuff so I'm posting about it.
Free stuff is always awesome.
As you can see its a nice little package. Got some bonus stickers with a re-order code and a nice little card folder with all my Ninja Carrot stickers in it. The quality is very good, they are plastic coated or laminated so its a nice glossy finish and I'm quite pleased with the colour. Orange is a particularly troublesome colour with CMYK printing but these came out nice and bright with lots of detail. Cue the close-up.
Ninja Carrot / Doodle Dojo goodness in sticker form.
The upload and design tool was nice and easy to understand and they even give you a couple of hours to change your mind. Overall the only slight downside was the turn around time, but then if I had paid them some cash maybe that would be different? Now all I have to do is find some places to stick them!
Everyone has days where the slightest touch can set you into a fuming rage of anger. This is known the world over as 'hulking out'. If its going to be one of those days today, the least you can do is warn the people around you to stay well away from the blue touch-paper. After all everyone deserves a happy life and this little reminder might give everyone a better chance to get along. Besides if they don't take any notice, they can hardly claim they weren't warned!
So next time you feel you might turn green, make sure you've got one of these available to keep the rest of the world safe. You can even get more than one if you're the sort of person who will need one every day of the week. In a world of health and safety, its the only decent thing to do.
This is one unhappy snail. I get the impression that he's had a particularly bad day today. You know the sort of thing. Your keys go missing, you forget to take any money for your lunch, you miss the bus. The sort of day you would rather forget. Well this otherwise perfectly ordinary snail has had one of those days and he doesn't appreciate people just looking at him at the end of it.
I think that all snails feel like this the whole time. Don't really know why, must just be something about the way the carry themselves (and their shells). What would a snail actually get depressed about though? Its such along way to that leaf? I hate crawling over concrete? Oh no they've put those pellet things down again?
Anyway this happy little fella is taken and modified from the Snail Stampede banner I did for Creaturemag. The reason he's up here today is that I've added myself to RedBubble and this guy is my first upload. Go along and check him out!
I've got a freebie for everyone out there. Android and iPhone wallpapers in fire and rain colours.
These are free for you to use on your own phone but please don't redistribute them without permission. Do feel free to get everyone you know who might like one to come and get their own though! Get on over to the Free Stuff page to see all the options.
These are set up in the most common size for Android phones but there are a lot out there. If you need a different size, or even a different colour, I'm open to persuasion. Just leave a comment here or get hold of me on Twitter or Facebook. I'd love to hear from you anyway!
Just in case you want to go 'all over' with these patterns, there are iPad and iPhone cases available at the Doodle Dojo Store with the same design on them. Get them while they're hot! (or possibly cool depending on which is your favourite.)
Dogs are usually thought of as cute, cuddly, obedient, happy, man's best friend and all that stuff. Not Dastardly Dog. He's bad tempered, mean, moody and doesn't do what he's told. In fact even BarbaraWoodhouse would probably give up on this one. As you can see, not your usual dog at all, and I'm not just talking about the shape of his head. Or the fact that he's purple. Don't ask why, he just is ok? Just don't try to pet him if he's not in the mood, those teeth are sharp! So if you would like a dog that's a bite out of the ordinary (I know, I know, classic stuff!) then this is the one for you.
I call this one Snail Stampede, for obvious reasons! Not really sure if snails can have a stampede though? There should be a proper word for a herd(?) of unstoppable snails. Kind of like a murder of crows, a cete of badgers or a flange of baboons. Anyway, I'm not sure what it is that the terrifying horde of snails is running from, but you do not want to cross their path. They will mow you down, without a second thought.
Anyway, after I finished doodling away, I submitted it to Creaturemag, the online art magazine, who have kindly accepted it and are now using my doodle as a banner on their site (thanks guys!) Its in rotation with some other great art so keep visiting the site every day and you'll spot it soon. There is plenty of other artwork and music to keep you occupied while you are there! Here it is in place if you don't get lucky enough to see it first time.
According to horror movies voodoo dolls are a magical way of getting at people in all sorts of horrible ways. You stick a pin (or several) in a voodoo doll and the person it represents feels the pain. Sounds a bit nasty really! Of course it turns out that isn't the truth as far as real life is concerned. Voodoo isn't interested in hurting anyone very much and certainly not by using dolls with sharp things stuck in them.
But forgetting all that, this little guy is just drawn for sticking pins in. Large pins. Probably more like knitting needles really, but thats not nearly as scary (or as sharp) as pins. He is guaranteed not to cause anyone pain, as long as you don't stick pins in him while you're wearing the T-shirt. Health & Safety first people!
This is the wacky witch doctor. I'm not too sure what it is that makes him wacky now I look at it again. He's probably got a really crazy sense of humour or something. Of course being a witch doctor also means that he's an expert in scaring away evil spirits and stuff like that. Not to mention an expert in crazy looking eyes and fiendish grimaces.
Apparently witch doctor is a european term and is not really meant to be used for african spiritual healers. This sort of mask would have been worn by a shaman, but sometimes you just have to go with the more popular usage. Especially when you only realise afterwards.
