I did one of these #meetheartist drawings but I didn’t include any dislikes because this has been a bummer of a week and I wanted to stay positive.
Heaven to me is a bowl of Ellen’s buffalo chicken dip, a cold beer, and an evening of M*A*S*H on MeTV. The suburbs have claimed me as one of their own.
Oh and “Hey Joan” is what I sing to my daughter when I put her to bed every night. It’s just Hey Jude with her name swapped in for Jude’s.
By now you probably know the drill – every Christmas, I draw our family into a holiday themed picture which then gets used as the X-Mas card we send out to our friends and neighbors. Truth be told, I already had a go at The Grinch six years ago but I was never happy with how that one turned out (too much yellow!) and the previous grinchy doodle was done BEFORE we started sending these out as holiday greetings so… yeah, natural do-over.
Feel free to click here and peruse that last 7 years of holiday drawings.
If you’ve been following my comics here for long enough, you know the drill – every December, I draw my family’s Christmas card featuring all of us in some kind of seasonally appropriate homage. This year I decided to have a go at Rankin/Bass’ seemingly immortal Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. As a kid, this one was always my favorite.
Every year, I draw our family in a Halloween themed drawing. This is 2015′s effort. I had already done Ellen and I as Frankenstein’s Monster and The Bride a few years’ back but I wanted another whack at it with the kids in tow.
Here are some past Halloween (and Christmas!) drawings of the Pearce family.
I get students asking me for drawings a lot. The way I manage these requests: On the last day of classes before mid-semester exams, I allow students the period to prepare an index card full of whatever materials they think they might need for the upcoming test. While they work on that, I pass around a clipboard and have them write down something they want me to draw for them. I like to joke that these quick doodles are their holiday gifts.
Some friends of mine have an annual holiday party for which I’ve been drawing the invitation these past three years. This summer, I made the mistake of mentioning how cool it would be if I did the invite up in the style of the album cover to Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.
As soon as I said that out loud, I regretted it because immediately that became the idea for this year’s invitation… no ifs, ands, or buts! I was dreading the amount of work I was going to have to put into this piece, but it ended up being great fun. I gave up on having one-to-one representation of the album on here, but in general I think I got the spirit of the original right on.
There’s a lot of little in-jokes and references from within my circle of Midwest friends on there. Don’t feel bad if they’re a mystery to you.
Here’s last year’s Festivus invite, which I colored and I don’t believe I’ve ever posted. Frankly, there was no way 2014’s Festivus invitation was going to be colored, with all the tiny details.
For the past few years, I’ve been drawing our family’s Christmas cards. It’s been a fun way to contribute to the holiday. Last year we did a standard Santa Claus scene featuring a pregnant Ellen. This year Joan makes her debut as the Sugar Plum Fair in our production of The Nutcracker.
Here’s a little doodle I did in preparation for second semester’s Shakespeare work in my classroom. I liked it enough to ink it and scan it… but not enough to color it. If you’d like to color this, you’re more than welcome.
On the other hand, here’s a doodle I did of the characters from the Cartoon Network mini-series Over the Garden Wall. I liked this one enough to get out the Prismacolor markers… but marker colored pieces always look weird when I scan ’em.
OTGW was fantastic, by the way.
Over the summer, I discovered sketch covers… regular issues of comic books that are released with blank covers. The thought is (I’m guessing) that you’ll take the comic and get your favorite professional artist to doodle on the cover. Having said that, there’s nothing stopping us nonprofessionals from having a go.
When I saw that they had published a sketch cover edition of Bob’s Burgers #1, I jumped right on it. The cartoon is a favorite of mine and I have just the right number of family members to make this homage work… although Elliot had to be the stand-in for Tina Belcher. If you know Elliot, you’ll know he’d be just fine with this.
Normally I color these covers in, but the paper this cover is made out of doesn’t take marker very well.
If you’re interested, I have a gallery of some of the other sketch covers I’ve done over on my Tumblr. I’ve sold all of those but I should have a couple new ones up for sale pretty soon.
Longtime readers of my comic may remember that every Halloween I draw a seasonally themed cartoon of my family for posting on social media.
New readers… that sentence above is a true statement.
You can check out previous years’ Halloween (and Christmas!) doodles here.
Teachable Moments 