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Come on out tonight and enjoy some quality drawing time at the Clermont Lounge! 8-11pm, bring a friend! www.drsketchysatlanta.com

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(Continued from previous post- click on “Events” to the right and scroll down to find Part One)… I called my friend Ashley Zeltzer, who had been doing promotional material for the Dames Aflame burlesque group. Ashley is crazy talented,

(click below for the rest of the story)

and had been creating the graphics and photography for the groups shows which were held at the Laughing Skull Lounge, in the back of the Vortex restaurant in Midtown atlanta. She was into it immediately, and introduced me to the owners Michael and Kristen Benoit.

Talented artists themselves, they also liked to the idea and wanted to use the event to draw more attention to the Dames Aflame show, which was already the best burlesque show in town. To that end, they arranged a meeting with performer Mike Geier and his wife Shannon, who manages the  Dames.

We batted around some ideas and finally Mike decreed that the event be named something like “Zeltzer Fantastico’s Shots and Hotties Boozer Doodle and Tater Tot Bonanza, Featuring the Legendary Dames Aflame in the Laughing Skull Lounge”, which would include the delicious free tater tots we would serve at the event, as well as the  smokin’ hot Dames. Paring it down to the bare essentials (drankin’ and drawin’), it became known simply as “Boozer Doodle”:

Ashley created the poster and went about the hard work of organizing the event. I already had a lot on my plate- organizing a weekly figure drawing class and working with ASIFA Atlanta, a local animation group, as well as working my (then) full time job at Turner Studios as a Senior Animation Director, so Ashley agreed to take on the heavy lifting for this event. My participation would be to help promote it and make sure plenty of people showed up, and working with the performers to let them know what the artists would need from them.

Here’s the sold-out first show. Our first performer/model was one of the Dames best- Luna Luxx!!

She did a great opening performance as Marie Antoinette, preparing a disastrous recipe with delicious results. There I am on the front row! The folks at the Laughing Skull Lounge do everything full-on, and this event had it all: from a full stage show to free tater tots and plenty of prizes for the artists, including art supplies and shots!

Above is Kat Hagan, winning the first drawing contest.

One of my favorite contests is the “Round Robin”, where four artists collaborate on a drawing. Every five minutes you move over one seat to the next artists drawing and take over, so you end up working on four different pieces. It’s a great way to loosen up and enjoy the other artists approach. Then, you can win a shot!! Above are winners Steve Sweney, Joyce and John Ryan (not sure who that is next to John?). Ashley and Luna help celebrate! For the rest of the pictures, check out the Vortex’s flickr site.

Future Boozer Doodle host Lucky Yates trying his hand. Lucky is one of the many talented and cool people I’ve gotten to know through these events. I’m constantly amazed and inspired by the way this whole thing has unfolded.

But- it hasn’t all been so pretty…

Next post: SCANDAL!

My first attempt at using “Brushes”, an iPhone painting application. This is “Freckles”, our chicken who is ailing from an eye infection. It’s a little tricky figuring out the program on such a small canvas, but it works pretty well!

Dione modeled in July ‘09, eight months pregnant. She came back to pose in January with her beautiful baby Ruby!

Tonight is a special event at the Westwood ASIFA sponsored figure class. We will have our “After” session with Dione, who modeled back in July when she was 8 months pregnant. Happily, she is back tonight with her baby Ruby! We will try some poses with both and hope to get some great drawings of mother and child.

A newborn session for the new year!

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The idea for Boozer Doodle started with an e-mail

from one of the artists at my weekly figure drawing class, James Burns. He sent me a link to the Dr. Sketchy’s website and suggested I try something like that with our class. I had been tinkering with some ideas, once even had the class form an “in the round” seating arrangement and do sequential drawings that I later compiled with fellow artist Raquel Asturias. I’ve lost her file but was able to put together a Flash file from the original scans.

About a dozen artists sat in a circle around the model. We all numbered our drawings in the sequence that we were seated, then each drew three sequential poses from model Ana Balka. I later scanned in all the drawings and re-sized and positioned them in Photoshop, then created the final transition movie in Flash:

This was a fun experiment, and I had been thinking about trying some different approaches with the models. One idea was to have  them act out a blind script pose by pose, and reveal a story through the final drawings.

When I saw the Dr. Sketchy’s website, I saw the possibility of something apart from the regular figure class- something fun, and more in the tradition of the Moulin Rouge and the bawdy night life drawings of Toulouse-Lautrec!

After reading several of Dr. Sketchy’s creator Molly Crabapple’s ideas for using a bar setting and hiring performers for models, I quickly thought of the Vortex in Midtown, with its separate back showroom for the burlesque group Dames Aflame.

NEXT POST: DAMES AFLAME!