Tuesday, March 25, 2008

I am intrigued by your ability to draw deericorns

There's really legendary and accomplished sci-fi/fantasy artist named Darrell Sweet coming to the art gallery here and I would like to go see him. I'm always complaining about how Rapid City really sucks when it comes to stuff I'm interested in but this guy sounds pretty cool so I wonder why he's coming through here. His body of work is interesting and spans many genres. He's done like a tryptzillion book covers and he has a trading cards set and he even did the 1982 Lord of the Rings calendar plus he illustrated an edition of The Last Unicorn. I wish I was more of a fan so I could get all hardcore on the guy, but I'm not. I don't have anything he's done. I recognize and appreciate his talent but I secretly wish he had done something I was more familiar with like maybe an Iron Maiden album cover or at least one Transformers comic book.

We went to the gallery last weekend to check out his works on display and despite my lack of exposure to Sweet stuff I even recognized one cover of a book I read in grade school, but I think I checked it out from the library so I don't have it. My wife noticed she's read a couple of books he did the covers for. But while we were remotely familiar with one or two of the over 3,000 things he's done, we were nowhere near the league of fan that the girl behind the desk at the art gallery was. Holy crap was she hardcore. All of a sudden I found myself feeling inadequate as she went on and on about her collection of this guy's beautiful paintings of winged dogs wearing magician robes and I was hoping with every fiber of my being that the conversation would somehow turn from dragons and unicorns to goddamned Dinobots. Just something I knew more about.

So I went home and I started internetting for information on this guy that could maybe give me a Cliff's notes understanding of his work so I could maybe say something halfway relevant if I were to meet him when he comes here. But about the most interesting thing I found was a message board post where somebody said his interpretation of The Last Unicorn was more deerlike instead of typical unicorns that are drawn more horselike. Deericorns? How is that going to come up in casual conversation?

I did really like the cover to one book he did called "Inherit the Stars" where these two astronauts are burying a skeleton astronaut on the moon or somewhere out in space. But I keep looking at the cover and my eyes jump around, reading the letters out of sequence so instead of "Inherit the Stars" I read "In her ars", which sounds funny to me. I wonder if Darrell Sweet ever noticed that. I also wonder if he was related to Michael Sweet, the lead singer of Stryper. I wonder if he did any Stryper album covers. So far all I have is ars, Stryper and 'deericorns'. Maybe it's best if I stay home, but damnit, he's doing a class for kids on how to draw dragons. If there's ever something I wanted to check out was a class on how to draw dragons by someone who has drawn an assload of dragons.

I am excited about what will happen April 5th. Will I go to the art gallery and see Darrell Sweet? Will a situation come up where I mention deericorns? Will I attend his dragon drawing class with a bunch of five year olds? FIND OUT IN THE NEXT EXCITING EPISODE!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I like that style of artwork.

 

Minibox 3 Column Blogger Template by James William at 2600 Degrees

Evil King Macrocranios was voted king by the evil peoples of the Kingdom of Macrocrania. They listen to Iron Maiden all day and try to take pictures of ghosts with their webcams.