Supermarket Rubble part 11

December often means putting my regular art projects on hold while I get my annual Christmas card done, and handle the end of the semester/grading stuff.  So it's been a little while since I last worked on my current block, the latest in the supermarket series.  But tonight is critique night and it's time to get back to work. Most of the block drawing is finished, but one thing not fully resolved yet was the pile of bricks right in the center of the composition.  I prefer to draw from life when I can, but since I don't own a giant pile of bricks, the next alternative is to seek a reference.  Then one day I found a great one while watching cartoons.

In 1938, Warner Brothers put out one of the all time classics of animation, a cartoon called "Porky in Wackyland."  It was in black and white from director Bob Clampett, showing Porky Pig traveling deep into Africa in search of the last dodo bird, worth a fortune.  (actually the dodo was native to only the island of Mauritius, hundreds of miles away from Africa, as I learned when I was partnered with an artist from that island for a big international collaborative project. That very limited environment is why extinction came so quickly)  The cartoon was remade almost shot for shot in the 1940's in color under the title "Dough for the Do-Do".  If you ever saw either one, you'd never forget it.  The original is on the authoritative list of all time greatest cartoons and is in the National Film Registry, but most people are probably more familiar with the color version.  Almost pure surrealism, Porky moves through a landscape that seems directly taken from Salvador Dali, inhabited by creatures that would fit into a Bosch painting if not played for laughs.  In the above scene, the DoDo bird is running away from Porky and suddenly drags a large brick wall into the path of the pig, the collision bringing it down around himself.  My childhood memories of the cartoon center on the crazy inhabitants, but when I saw it again a few months ago, I noted the brick wall scene.  So when I saw it again on the Looney Tunes hour recently, I recorded it for future use.  This afternoon I took a few screen photos like the one above, then used them to do some sketchbook drawings of a brick pile- no need to be exact to my source, but just to try to achieve the shapes and rhythms.

The other major thing to still deal with was the upper right corner of the block, deep space beyond the cars in the parking lot.  The leaves are now down from the trees, and seeing my apartment complex through the branches, I thought that might work.  However, the level viewing angle used in the composition won't allow for anything that far away.  My plan was to get up to the Studio a few hours early (parking can be a challenge on Monday nights) and update my sketches before everyone arrived.