Mike Carp

I know, these days the swine flu seems so passé.  However, these pigs were rendered last summer when the virus still had the ability to incite some good old-fashioned dread.  If you were like me, you probably wondered how long it would take until the whole thing degenerated into some sort of apocalyptic I-Am-Legend-esque scenario.  You know the one:

Swine floozies.  Lurking in the shadows. Waiting for nightfall so they could infect the remaining few with their unnatural mutation.  It all seemed so inevitable.

Anyway, this post isn’t meant to be about the swine flu as much as it is about sketching and repetition.  While there are 3 versions of a flying pig represented here, I probably did a hundred other sketches of the same pig with the same bat wings.  It all started when a friend (who had just recovered from the swine flu) mentioned making a t-shirt with a flying pig on it.

I decided to try and come up with something, but I quickly realized that I didn’t know how to draw pigs.  In this respect, the repetition really helped and it was nice to see improvement with each new sketch.  At a certain point, however, the quality reached a plateau and sketches were cranked out with little or no variation.  The repetition ceased to be a useful learning mechanism.  It had mutated into an eerie, compuslive automation.  It was sort of like writing REDRUM on the wall or drawing circles over and over like that kid in The Ring.

Still, the flying pig is just one of many lazy, repetitive doodles to add to my repertoire, which includes zombies, robots, hamburgers, and sasquatch (to name a few).  What I need to do now is find something new that I can mindlessly sketch over and over; something that would genuinely alarm a casual onlooker if they happened to glance in my direction as I am furiously scribbling on a sheet of paper.  Imagine looking down at the paper only to find it to be jam packed of identical drawings of - I dunno - NANCY PELOSI.  And all of the Nancy Pelosies are staring right at you!   Whooaa…I just freaked myself out a little bit.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 21st, 2010 at 3:45 pm and is filed under sketches. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.