The Story of Boozer Doodle, Part One

A collaboration drawing from 11/04/09- Election Night!

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!