1589 - "Poopitoo"

"Someone at work needs their text to end with a really good poop emoji," my wife tells me.  

"I never use emojis," I reply.  It's nearly completely true.  In all my life I have used exactly one emoji, a red heart.  

So, to complete the project, I made a custom icon I've named "Poopitoo", since who doesn't name their feces?  

Poopitoo is the first Ungood Art of 2019.  On JSVB, on every thirteenth day of the month I feature some artwork of mine that somehow avoided being Good and instead became Ungood.  

 

1577 - Seven Seconds Of Ungoodness

This is the last Ungood Art Day of 2018, and it can't come too soon.  The thirteenths dfay of every month on JSVB is Ungood Art Day, where I present some of my art that just isn't very good.  

This slice of Ungood Art took me maybe seven seconds to scrawl.  It's a schematic for facial shapes.  It is proof that Ungoodness can be created almost instantly.  

 

1563 - Puck In The Saddle Again

Back in the saddle again!  After a substantial time away from JSVB, I've returned to present yet another Ungood Art piece.  On the thirteenth of every month, I try to post some of my Ungood Art.  These are works that I have created that for whatever reason just did not turn out.  I think it's important to celebrate these failures because we all fail at doing things and from these botched efforts we learn to be better.  That and it can be fun for you to laugh at my mistakes, I get that.

Today's Ungood Art is one of the blandest ever, though.  It's just a hockey puck from my failed and abandoned painted hockey puck project.   I put the puck on my flatbed scanner (see the scanner in action by on JSVB Post #1462 - click here!).  In high resolution, the paint on the puck looks terrible.  It's a good thing it all peeled off.  Who knew you can't paint hockey pucks?

 

1561 - Brown Pucks Of Near-Infinite Regret

Today is the thirteenth of the month, a day normally reserved for JSVB Ungood Art Day.  Every Ungood Art Day, I present some piece of mine that started off its journey with the best of intentions but somehow fell off the rails.  

The thirteenth of October is also my wife's birthday, something that doesn't intersect well with Ungood Art Day.  Sometimes on this day I'll post birthday stuff, but today I have to report the unceremonious end of my Great Canadian Hockey Puck project.   Tomorrow, I'll post a little on my wife's birthday.

The idea for these pucks was to have them painted with hockey pictures to sell for Christmas.  Nobody seems to paint hockey pucks, so I decided to try the techniques I learned from writing religious icons.  Gesso primer sticks to puck rubber, so I felt I had a good start.

Sanding the gesso to make the surface smooth turned into a disaster, though: the pucks all turned brown.  Nobody will buy a brown puck.  The options were to re-prime the pucks (time consuming) or simply paint them white again (leaves a rough surface).  I decided to paint them white, which worked.  Time was short, though.

To speed things up, I set upon the idea of using heat transfer to set mass-produced images on the pucks, rather than having to detail each image by hand.  Heat, it turns out, causes the gesso to peel off the puck like a decal.   This isn't high heat either, just a friendly puff of warm air from a hair dryer.  

Time has run oout on this project.  I don't like letting it go, but I don't have any positive feeling about it, either.  People will just have to do without hand-painted hockey pucks this Christmas.  Oh well, there's always the Poopsie Slime Surprise Unicorn.

1546 - Heedlessly Redacted

The thirteenth day of every month on JSVB is dedicated to Ungood Art.  It's where I post stuff that I have created where I had the intention to do something well, but instead it turns out not so well, or as the opposite of good: ungood.  

 

This is the label sheet for the place names for both Mongo and Krypton, the custom-made globes I am building.  Each cut was supposed to be laser-precise: two vertical strokes and two horizontal strokes to contain each label in its own perfect rectangle.  Instead, it looks as if I've redacted Fred Flintstone's poem to Wilma:

I love thee Wilma, with hair like silk,
Lips like cherries, skin like milk,
Your shell-like ears, your dainty hands,
And eyes so black, like ▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓ ▓▓▓▓

I guess I need better technique with the knife.

*PS: the redacted words are frying pans.  

 

1536 - The Mystery Of The Cosmos

The Cosmos.

We gaze upon its infinite splendour.  A star glitters, a celestial diamond.  Behind that, a thousand million more stars.  Behind them a thousand million galaxies of stars.

This image is not that.  No, it's my monthly entry for Ungood Art Day here on JSVB.  Every thirteenth day of the month, I publish some foolish part of my art where I am (usually) trying hard to create something good and instead it goes sideways and become ungood instead.

Rubbing off the excess parts of the model of the Planet Mongo I am constructing yielded fractal patterns of dust on 600-grit sandpaper.   You can read the mystery of the universe in this picture, or see that I am padding my post count.  Either way, the macrocosm conspires to make us wiser.  

1524 - The Left Hand Of Artless

On JSVB, the thirteenth of every month is Ungood Art Day.  Instead of showcasing things that are great, Ungood Art Day raises the curtain on my flubs and bad choices.

This is an early version of one of my drawings of Superman.   It turned out okay, in fact I prefer the black and white lines to the coloured version.  The only problem I have was that I don't know what Supes has in his left hand.  It kind of looks like a gym towel...? I should know, I drew it.  I was trying to have Superman open his suit jacket, but I lost track of how clothing works and merely inked the vague lines I had pencilled.  

I ended up replacing the cloth in Superman's left hand with Clark Kent's eyeglasses, which worked better visually and thematically.   

1515 - Phoney Artwork

"Draw for me a picture of a blonde on the telephone," my wife says.  

So I do, or at least start to, but the artwork stinks because I'm not using a proper model or references.  

Welcome to Ungood Art Day, traditionally the thirteenth day of every month on JSVB.  Most artists try to always show their best art.  On Ungood Art Day, I'll put up something that didn't go well for whatever reason.  I'll next show a version of this piece where I restart and do it better.  

 

1504 - An Indifferent Hamster

Ungood Art Day is traditionally the thirteenth day of every month on JSVB.  I've been drawing a lot of hamsters lately.  This one is a sketch I was working up.  I guess it really isn't bad, but it's not good either.   It's ungood.  

 

1496 - How To Eat Godzilla

Today is the thirteenth of the month, which is Ungood Art Day on JSVB.  On every monthly thirteenth, I demonstrate some sort of art I've tried to make that started out with the best of intentions but somehow went south.

This Friday the Thirteenth, I'm illustrating a truly bizarre conversation I had a few days ago.  My friend Ted and I began to wonder if in the instance where Japan was to be hit with a disaster so severe (God forbid!) that the country ran out of food and everyone was starving, could Godzilla be killed and eaten for food?  We reasoned that Big G would probably be somewhere in the spectrum between chicken and alligator, so Japanese barbecue would work for the meaty parts, and you could make soup from the gristly bits.  Each portion should be cooked at around 350°F for maybe three to five hours until the internal temperature of the thickest part of the meat  reaches at least 180°F.  You could marinate the meat in a mix of peanut oil, soy sauce, ginger, garlic and sugar before cooking.  Serve with rice and Yubari melon.

So how many people would Godzilla feed?  The 1950's version of the monster is around the size of a 15-storey building.  Assuming one chicken-sized portion feeds one family for one day... well, that's difficult.  There are no chicken-to-Godzilla volume conversions.  

However, thanks to the Internet I now know that nearly 20,000 chickens can fit into a school bus.  I'll round up.  Maybe six school buses can fit into one thin fifteen-storey building, and that building would equal in size to Godzilla.  So, 6 x 20,000 = 120,000 chickens: that many people would be fed.  

In 1955, there were nearly 90 million Japanese citizens.  120,000 chickens would feed one tenth of one percent of the population.  That's not a whole lot, but I imagine it would be better than nothing. The mining town of Yubari, for example, had in the 1950's around 120,000 inhabitants, so slaughtering Godzilla could save that community.  Yubari is now famous for its Yubari melon, which is a popular gift to be given at Chūgen, which is a holiday on the lunar calendar for celebrating one's superiors.  

Shoot me an e-mail if you ever want to know how you can send me any spare Yubari melons you may have lying around!  

1486 - Ungood Infant

I've been busy!  So much so that I haven't been able to post to JSVB very much.  Also, I haven't been making any ungood art.  Yet today is the thirteenth of the month and that makes today Ungood Art Day.  

My wife found this baby sketch in her files.  It looks like something out of 1999 or 2000.  Probably, it would have been a better drawing if I had looked at a real baby sometime in that decade. 

1474 - Packing Meat: Hamburger Handgun

The meat pistol is real!  The Photoshopping is suspect.

Welcome to Ungood Art Day on JSVB, traditionally the thirteenth day of every month.  On this day, I try to show art that I have made that can't qualify as being "good".  

I did not on purpose go out to create a gun out of meat, why would anyone do that?  When I make my best spaghetti sauce, I use three kinds of ground meat: beef, pork, and veal.  The portions I got from the butcher were too big, so I split them.  The remainders went into the freezer for later.  

When I retrieved them, I had discovered the three meat lumps had frozen into a shape resembling a gun.  Knowing I had an opportunity, I took a picture of it and here we are today.  I applied some Photoshop to make the picture more dramatic and to make the meat more Magnum-shaped. 

1462 - "Use The Force"

Today is the thirteenth of the month, which is traditionally Ungood Art Day on JSVB.  Most artists strive to display their best work to the public.  I think it's a reasonable idea to show some of the doubtful things I have accomplished, since like any artist I will blunder, make mistakes, and despite my best intentions have projects that go not badly but rather ungoodly. 

People have remarked on my desk clutter, which sometimes oversteps into ungoodness.  Here, I am putting one of my sketchbooks into the flatbed scanner.  I have to keep the book steady while the scan head performs its function.  Rather than spending valuable human artist time holding up the book, I discovered that my lightsaber works nicely as a prop.  

After I was done my scan, I considered leaving the book where it was, since it gives me that much more handy shelf space!  I wouldn't be able to use the scanner again (or the lightsaber), although I do have an old scanner in the garage I could maybe pull out from retirement...  well, no.  I've learned that leaving things on the scanner bed tends to glue them to the scanner bed, and that creates a new set of problems.  

 Please click here to see JSVB Post #1034, and another view of my desk clutter from four years ago - notice the piles of stuff are all different! 

1443 - Old Turtle IV (Ungood Edition)

Well, today is the thirteenth of the month, which means Ungood Art Day on JSVB.  Previously, I had posted a bunch of old turtle artwork from the 1990's.  I had found a small stack of old archived artwork in one of my storage boxes, so without too much shame I used them to pad my JSVB post count.  

This one, well, it's an old Turtle too (an inside joke).  My friend Earl returns to his most natural form: the Star Trek Captain.  The girl is a friend who somehow didn't become his wife.  Well, I was never all that good at drawing her, so I guess not having to make any more portraits of her is a blessing for all of us.  

 

1431 - Curse Of The Red Underwear

The thirteenth day of every month I try to feature my Ungood Art on JSVB.  Ungood Art is some version of a project I am working on that started off with the best of intentions but somehow the artwork went awry.

This bit of unfinished artwork has a long history with unhappy associations. I've hung onto it for a while before deciding to catalogue it with my JSVB Ungood Art file.  

It was going to be a comedic documentary piece about the supernatural effects of red underwear, something that I know very little about but apparently is a strong belief in equatorial locations around the world.  Specifically, as you might judge from the stereotypical sketch of the happy latino, I was going to look at the topic from the point of Mexico.  That's where I discovered the cultural mystery of red underwear: Mexican lingerie outlets were running out of red clothing on account of the solar eclipse.  Local belief was that wearing red underwear would ward off any evil effects of the eclipse on August 21 of this year.  

So, being lazy on the subject,  I delayed working on this art piece since it was just for my own amusement and a provided chance to practice drawing using the dreaded Bézier tool in Photoshop (not shown in this version of the artwork).  I started drawing on September 5 or so, with the plan to publish on the 6th.  On September 7th and then again on the 19th, Mexico was heavily rocked by violent earthquakes that destroyed much property and killed many people.  Shocked and depressed by this coincidence, I decided I'd better not publish the piece, and I never finished the drawing.  

Worse still, JSVB seems to be developing a track record for predicting natural disasters.  I drew a similar comedic piece involving an earthquake in Japan.  I published JSVB Post #296 (click here to see it) on January of 2011, and the massive tsunami hit in early march of that year, a little more than a month from my post.  

Coincidence, yes, but I still can't help feeling rotten about that. This discouraging sentiment continues to dog me to this day.  

 

1416 - Fozzie The Bread

So just what happened to Fozzie The Bear anyways?  On Ungood Art Day, maybe my oven has the answer...

 

 

 

Well, it's a stretch, but JSVB needs Ungood Art above all on a Friday the Thirteenth.  I made this hearth bread just a few minutes ago.  The other side looks like a perfect loaf.  When I flipped the bread over, it had this delirious smirk

"Quick, put some eyes on it, and you can post it as Ungood Art," my wife says.  The eyes are from a collection of Hallowe'en stickers we've been saving over the years for defacing (I say enhancing) smiley-faced vote-for-me political posters.  

 

1409 - Rockfish

  The thirteenth day of every month on JSVB is Ungood Art Day.  If I am not producing much art, then there isn't going to be a lot of Ungood Art, and that's Ungood as well.  

   The closest I can get to Ungood this month is a sort of visual pun: it's a rockfish.  I hope you see it. 

 

1394 - The Turtle

It's a turtle, not an alien.  One of many indicators that this design didn't achieve its goal of letting me have a nice easy afternoon of not massaging the ego of the client.  In other words: Ungood Art.  Seeing as today is the thirteenth of the month, traditionally Ungood Art Day on JSVB, I thought I'd better show this turtle.  Or alien.  It doesn't matter, as the design got dumped.  

The PoCo Wheezers are a corporate bicycle racing team who wanted a logo that showed them being athletic and maladroit at the same time.  Thanks, corporate team.  At first, I considered a turtle, which is a slow animal. The turtle wasn't enough, but a turtle on a bicycle didn't appeal to them so I tried a unicycle.  That appealed less, somehow.  The drawing is pretty good as long as you don't mind E.T. The Extraterrestrial wearing a necktie and carrying a briefcase to make him look more like an executive.  Although I ended up doing a lot of work leading up to the deadline, I agreed that this design was too Ungood to be used.  Who knows, though, maybe someday someone will want a reptile riding a unicycle. 

Even more Ungood were my attempts to put a human face on the turtle.  Knowing that all you really need is the expression in the eyebrows and the appropriate crookedness in the smile to capture any human face in caricature, I made the attempts below.  It turns out that eyebrow expressions and smile crookedness is really hard for me to draw.  

Being an artist is almost exclusively about making bad decisions, starting with the one where you decide to become an artist.  All the artists I know are fully compatible with making mistakes, and are used to them by the time they've made something out of their careers.  Experience teaches the artist how to overcome those gaffes and salvage something useful out of the effort.  An artist's technique is equal parts skill and the ability to overcome pitfalls.  There is always a budget for error, something that many clients don't grasp.  The corporate world doesn't like to reward mistakes, at least not under public scrutiny.

Of course, like the baseball player who swings at futile pitches, the artist won't get anywhere on blunders alone, home runs have to be hit eventually.  Any artist who perseveres will learn how to master their craft and score those runs.  The difference is: will the stadium be crowded with fans, or will you just be hitting rocks with a stick in the backlot of a deserted warehouse?   

 

1383 - Jeff Prances Camerawards

Today is the thirteenth of the month, which is traditionally Ungood Art Day on JSVB.  I show some of my works that just isn't all that great.  Most artists always strive to exhibit only their best work, but the ungood stuff is often the foundation for the final product.

Take the photos above, which are self-directed of me walking in a stiff and peculiar manner towards the camera. They aren't much to look at, but with a little love and attention, I can build them into something I figure people will like - see JSVB tomorrow. 

Sometimes, it's irritating for me to show clients me work in progress, since often the early stages are so ungood.  I remember one client whose wife told him to drop me because my stuff was looking really rank.  Truth be told, it did look bad, and I wasn't even certain I could pull the project together.  One thing I have learned, though, is that a piece won't seem complete until I get around ninety percent into the project.  It's almost always that last push that makes the whole thing sing... or not.  

 

1374 - Chicken: Covenant

I am excited enough to see the new Alien: Covenant movie, just enough to snap this Ungood self-portrait, but not enough to put much effort into making the chestburster look less like one of my toy stuffed chickens.  

Welcome to Ungood Art Day, traditionally the thirteenth day of every month, where I post my stuff that ain't so good.