Just a selection of the various variants of Lightning McQueen, my son’s favourite toy character. And of course upon finishing this, he points out which ones I did not draw, cars which to me look identical but to him have one slight variation that makes the most immense difference. Minute details are everything to that five year old. Never, ever forget: young kids are not stupid, they notice EVERYTHING, way more than adults do. It keeps me on my toes, let me tell you. I was the same, as a five year old counting the vertebrae on the dinosaurs at the Natural History Museum, oh I was the same. This was drawn in the excellent Stillman and Birn ‘Alpha’ book I’ve reserved for pictures of the boy’s things. I like Lightning McQueen as well, “Cars” is fun.
Tag: toys
to the batmobile!
My son has rather a lot of Batman toys. He quite likes Batman, and Super Heroes in general. This is one of his Batmobiles. I drew it in the Stillman & Birn Alpha book that I am drawing my son’s things in. While the current crop of Batman movies aren’t really suitable for a five year old, I did get him the original 1960s Batman movie, which I loved, and which he also loves. One scene in it though reminds me somewhat of the later sequences of the Dark Knight Rises, “some days you just can’t get rid of a bomb”. If only they had Batman flying around with a nuke and bumping into nuns and ladies with prams. Then there is Miss Kitka…
planet of the cars
Here are some of my son’s favourite toys, the Cars. I am forever tripping up on them, camouflaged against the roadmap rug in the living room, or lined up in very specific race positions on the many racetracks we draw together. The two movies, along with the Mater’s Tall Tales specials, are never far from the dvd schedule, and we all find ourself humming one of the tunes from the movies or saying ‘ker-chow’ or ‘dad-gum’ or such as like. My son has loads of these die-cast metal toys from both movies, some of them quite hard to find individually, to the point where it becomes a parent’s favourite quest to find the more obscure ones (I don’t know who Rip Clutchgoneski is in the movie but he for one is very difficult to obtain). And unlike so many toys, these get really played with, and my already multi-lingual son likes to get the Spanish one to count in Spanish, the French one in French, Francesco Bernoulli says ‘uno! due!’ tre!’ and so on. The German one is called ‘Vettel’ (actually it’s Max Schnell, but Sebastian Vettel is his favourite race-car driver, and I think he does the character’s voice in the German version of the movie, just as Lewis Hamilton guests in the original). See? I’m an expert.
Cars is a funny universe though. I read it as a Planet of the Apes type world, and would love to see Cars 3 run along those lines, whereby a human from the past arrives, does the ‘get your wheels off me you damn dirty Audi’ or something, and ends up with Mater pulling the Statue of Liberty out of Carburettor Canyon. Surely no crazier than the story of Cars 2?
I drew this in copic multiliner pen with watercolour, in the Stillman & Birn ‘Alpha’ sketchbook. I am using that sketchbook to draw a series of my son’s things. It’s great paper too.
lego garbage truck
This name makes much more sense than what it’s really called. My son got this for Christmas (let’s face it, it was for me too). He calls the bigger AT-AT a ‘garbage truck’, which really is a better name, so this smaller two-legged version is the ‘Lego Garbage Truck’. Drawn tonight in my Star Wars moleskine while watching Reservoir Dogs.
window dressing
The last few sketches from Saturday’s sketchcrawl: things seen in shop windows. I like drawing the colourful dresses, it’s very rewarding drawing all that fabric. The pink one was in the window of ‘the Wardrobe’ on E Street, and the blue dress was in ‘Preeti Girl’, on the corner of E and 2nd.
Meanwhile, I also sketched this lovely cuddly cow that was in the window of the Mother and Baby Source on 2nd Street. Cows are popular in Davis, some even call us ‘cow-town’. Cows are funny creatures. What is a Cow’s favourite TV show? Graze Anatomy. Ok I’ll restrain myself from any more of the the many bovine-related puns out there. Anyway, the next sketchcrawl in Davis will likely be on July 23, the day of the Worldwide Sketchcrawl (though I won’t be there, as I’ll be in Lisbon…)
“i’m leavin’, on a jet ski…”
This is the Robber, which came with the jet-ski as part of my son’t Playmobil Police Helicopter set. It’s great fun in the bath; that little metal thing at the bottom helps it stay upright and afloat. It’s funny how we know he’s supposed to be a robber because he is unshaven and wearing sunglasses (footballers and movie stars beware); I’m surprised Playmobil don’t make a little Hoodie, with a little toy Staff. Maybe for their ‘run-down estate street corner’ set. Maybe the title for this post should be ‘Thievin’ on a Jet-Ski’. This was drawn in Copic 0.05 multiliner in the small WH Smith sketchbook (one page until that one is finished!).
The fire-truck below however was sketched in my large ‘Urban Sketchers’ Canson sketchbook, from last year’s Portland Symposium. I realised that I’d not sketched this in a couple of years, since my son first got it at his great-grandma’s up in Oregon, and though it’s pretty beat up it’s his favourite of the fire trucks. I sketched it while watching some ‘Wolverine and the X-Men’ cartoons on tv, and wasn’t really paying attention when drawing the wheels – oops – but the rest is all where it should be.
Finally, I drew this a week ago or so, but another of the toy cars (and amazingly a toy that isn’t red). It’s the ‘muddy’ Techron car. These ones are fun to play with, and were given by his cousins. Plus every time we watch the San Francisco Giants play, they show up on a billboard at the edge of the field.
To see more toy drawings, go to my Flickr set “Toys“. Drawing toys is a really great way to remember a fun age!
that was some rescue
My son’s beloved toy ‘rescue boat’. I knew this was a winner when I got it at Toys R Us, only ten bucks. But it’s a rescue boat, definitely not a speedboat. Hey, three-year-olds know best. He always corrects me when I play with his fire trucks – “no daddy, not ‘woo-woo-woo’, it’s ‘nee-naw-nee-naw’!” Different fire engines make different siren noises in his world, but hey, he’s the expert, he should know. Jeez, before long it’ll be, “Daddy, Estonian is a Finno-Ugric language, don’t you know anything?”
emergency! ten-four, roger-roger, over-and-out
My son, watching Fireman Sam with his police ‘helicopter’ helmet on. It’s not often he sits still enough for me to capture a sketch!
you’re a racecar in the red?
Formula One starts this weekend, belatedly, and I can’t wait! Nor can my three-year-old son, who was busy playing with his playmobil racecar in anticpation today. I love watching it, even though it means either getting up really early or staying up really late (one of which i do anyway). Now I have the Speed channel, I can watch it properly; in the pre-extended-cable past, I used to watch the channel in a fuzzy black and white form with no sound but static, while watching updates on the BBC website; the real entertainment came from the closed caption subtitles, obviosuly written very quickly by someone completely unfamiliar with formula one driver’s names (eg, names like ‘kimmy right gone on’, ‘world champion jason bunton’ and my favourite, ‘knack jim’). Sometimes I put the captions on for old times’ sake. It’s a fun game, convert your name to a closed caption gaffe; mine’s ‘peat’s gully’.
Anyway, here’s to another season of safety cars and dodgy new circuits, alonso sulking, hamilton rueing some silly mistake, webber and vettel trying to convince us they’re teammates, and the great legend michael schumacher making a big deal out of coming ninth rather than tenth.
Illustration Friday this week is themed ‘toy‘, so this is my entry (thanks Shiho Nakaza for pointing it out, I hadn’t seen IF for a while!). I have a feeling I’ll draw more toys this week, since I have been lately. In fact I have put together a Flickr set of my toy sketches: “toys“.
By the way, the line that follows the title of this entry is one of the greatest in movie history…
i hear that train a comin’
Train sets are important in every boy’s life. Right now, it’s the wooden train set. Truly, one of the best things about being a parent is that you can play with all these cool toys completely unabashedly, and you get to remember how cool you thought they were when you were a kid. I tell you though, some of these wooden trains you get now are pretty great. Below for example, trains from the New York Subway, given by my sister-in-law in New York. They are brilliant! I’d love to have Paris Metro ones, or London Underground ones (and I’d make them break down and wait for ages on the track for no reason). I say ‘I’ but I mean my son, of course…
petescully 