Crimes and misdemeanours

An "in" joke for my Instagram f(r)iends.

Those who know me know I’ve been making fingerprint art on Instagram. Like the Mona project (sad clown faces on famous artworks) the goal is to make 100 somethings. It takes discipline and a fair bit of daily creativity. That’s what I get out of it.

For you(s), well, likes and comments are super encouraging. So thank you.

As a result of the Insta effort, I have not been doing much drawing. It’s mostly Photoshop. But I miss drawing, and then this idea came up of combining the two in a kind of whodunit.

Drawing-wise, this is definitely still on the sketchy side of life. I used Procreate, which is a great program, free and with an amazing range of tools, including fake pencils. Maybe I’ll try to work this up with “ink”. Maybe I won’t.

Six highlights of this ‘toon

Anyway, I had a lot of fun and here’s why. After conceiving of the scene (of the crime in this case), and positioning the cast, you get to the drawing part. If one is lucky, there are some moments in a drawing that are just fun, they make you smile, or even laugh out loud. Here are six in this particularly drawing:

1. This foot was just a twitch really, and so perfect.

2. Hand prints were an afterthought. Ha ha. See Instagram for why.

3. There are few things more fun than “burying” your signature somewhere in an artwork, literally in this case.

4. Waaa happened to that foot? Turns out, using Procreate, if you draw some shapes in a continuous way and hold the pen still on the screen at the end, the program automatically turns the line into straight lines. Who knew?! I liked it, so left it as is.

5. Another great foot that was little more than a twitch. I feel so fortunate.

6. Ok, so, I was not sure about putting a body, or bodies into the scene. It could work without them. I mean, do I have to hit you over the head with the fact that it’s a crime scene? Maybe not. But then again, it just made the whole idea more ridiculous. At first, this was a “real” body, with fingers, closed eye, tongue sticking out. The dead person trope. Then I thought maybe it should be just the outline of a body, like the coroner has taken the body away already. That’s kinda where it ended up. Just don’t ask me about the guy hanging.

Thanks for staying with this my loyal subscribers. Just for you, here’s the original, even sketchier sketch. Actually in pencil and probably gooder (sic) than anything I could try to “finish.”

The post script

Captions continue to be tricky for me. I added “dead to rights” but it’s not necessary. Etymologically, the expression means “completely, in proper order,” according to The Etymology Nerd. In the original, I had just “His prints” not “fingerprints. “Prints” would have been enough for those who know about the Insta fingerprint project. They would have got the pun. But if you don’t know the Instagram project… well, you probably are not going to get this gag anyway. Sigh…

Ciao for niao.

The post post script

Does anybody publish pencil cartoons? I mean other than art magazines.