The 80's

When I first saw this was the IF subject, I didn't like it. I still don't like it. The initial reaction is to think of the decade. Perhaps temperature, perhaps age, but mostly it's the decade of zippered shirts, parachute pants and hair metal that flits first through the mind. The 80's saw the rise of the teen romantic comedy, the decline of SNL and The Police, and enough bad tv shows for a boatload of Trivial Pursuit games. I graduated high school in '86, so I'm allowed to talk like this.

Anyway, here's my cheesy idea to go with a cheesy subject:



Here's a bonus pic:


With this particular work, I thought it was just going to be an exercise in drawing the same character over and over; no tracing. It turned out that repetition was the easy part HAIR was the hard part. My god. Hair makes drapery look like drawing a single line segment. I can do hair on subtractive media like stratchboard. Fabulous hair. But, on additive media, I need lots of work.

The entire purpose of posting with IF is to force myself to extend my abilities. Part of that is to do these as quickly as possible; to post as close to Friday as I can. I'll never post an image I did previously that happens to fit the topic (my first post, 'HELP' is the exception. While it was done of a Friday, it was done for another project). I find myself losing hope regularly. I know what 'good' is and I'm frustrated that i'm not there. The five-year break I took certainly isn't helping, but I think I'm just about to where I was five years ago. It's tough. It's rather like the old Bloom County bit where Opus looks in the mirror in the morning and screams because he suddenly realizes that he isn't Tom Sellek. I do the same thing, only I scream when I realize that I'm not Alan Davis.

Yet.

Rick out.