I usually presign my papers before I go to a party. Since people pay me by the hour, I try to do as much as possible before I'm 'on their clock'. So in my free time, I'll presign my papers, I'll put them into the mats, things like that.

They'll frequently be cartoony signatures. Quick happy playful things. But I just mentioned Pictorial Calligraphy in this blog this morning. And I came across this little scrap of paper when I opened my desk drawer this evening. It's a practice paper I made when I was seriously studying Chauncery Cursive several years ago:

Remembering. Old dreams of Fine Art. Hmmmmmmmmmmmm.

So when I started presigning papers for this week's gigs (I'll be drawing M&M people for the M&M Company on Tuesday, and I have two parties on Saturday - a 13-year-old Birthday and a Graduation, and I'm expecting the deposit to arrive for a 10-year-old's Birthday for Friday.... That's about 200 papers. When you sign them all at once like this, you really see how presigning saves the customer from paying extra. It only looks like a partial second to sign a paper. But when you do all 200 of them at once takes a really countable chunk of time.)

So Like I say, I figured I'd best to presign a whole lotta papers. Chauncery Cursive seemed too precise to jump right into just now. But I do Curly Writing in my day-to-day world. That's a lot like Pictorial Calligraphy.....

Here's some of the Signatures I made. Each one is like a piece of Artwork. They're not my 'real official signature', but they 'claim' my Pictures:

Don't think I just look at Faces. It's a Great Big World out there. I'm see so many things.

I'm interested in Calligraphy. I've previously worked very seriously on things like Ornamental Calligraphy(got to get back to that beautiful stuff), very curly writing (I still do that often), chauncery cursive - that sort of stuff. And it includes Graffitti. I do see that around. Some of it is better than others. I study both the good and the bad ones - sometimes it's useful to add 'attitude' to my Caricatures.

Here are some photos that I took of Graffitti around NY. Some were taken by standing on the street. But others were taken from a moving train or a moving car. It's tricky. Because there's a pause between the time I press the button to take the photo and the time that the camera clicks. So if the vehicle is moving, what I thought I snapped a picture of is gone. I had to take 'blind' pictures. If I thought a graffitti site was coming up, I'd aim out the window and press the button. Had no idea of what I got until I came home and put the pictures onto the Computer. Surprise!

Following is a particularly special one. I've been seeing it for years on my way from the city. When I'm driving. It's on the street in L.I.City where I turn to get onto Route 495:

And here, from way in the bowels of the NY Subway as the train speeds through a dark tunnel:

Lol - A friend saw these photos. He told me that he noticed that I had an "SB" there, and that the "SB" usually stands for "SkateBoarders". I'm looking - let me know if you see an "SB" in these photos?

Here it is, 2 am, and I'm drawing pictures from the World-Wide-Web again. This one was F U N . Here's my picture and the reference picture I was drawing from. It's a picture of an Artist from AUSTRALIA! What a world. His name is Terry Dunnett.

I call it 'The Green Jelly' because of the amorphic shape that inspired this picture.

The Green Jelly - lol. Our lives pass through our heads while we're playing. I wonder if anybody else knows the story of

THE GREEN JELLY - Whoooooooooo !

It was a 'scary story' that was told around the campfire when I was a kid at Camp Olympus. Children can think that the whole world has the same experiences as they have in their own small worlds. I had become an adult thinking that 'The Green Jelly' was as universal as Mickey Mouse or Humphrey Bogart (and even they are not known Everywhere in the world). Anyway, I'll think of The horrible Green Jelly as likely as I'd think of the 'I Love Lucy'. (Ever hear of That?)

The Green Jelly was a lump of jelly that rolled through the town enveloping people and anything in it's path, growing bigger and Bigger and BBBIIIIIIGGGGGEEEERRRR!!!!

Tonight I was playing with flopping Terry's face around, sort of the amorphic way that I imagined the Green Jelly to move. I was just having fun - plaAAAy-Ying. And when we play, we match things up freely from whatever we think of. Uninhibited.

Have You ever heard of The Green Jelly? Could it have originated in some early Sci-Fi movie?

Everything turned out fine this past weekend. I should have reminded myself that 'Things don't usually turn out as bad as you think they might.

I'll try to post some pictures from the weekend's events later. Meanwhile, I want to remember the following two pictures. I had drawn them on paper-plates while watching Groundhog Day with my breakfast yesterday morning. Groundhog Day - the movie with Bill Murray. Sometimes the pictures that we 'doodle' are beautiful.

I just made up the first face. Simple and direct. The second face wasn't supposed to be Bill Murray, but I kinda used him to give me ideas of what to draw: