A while ago someone asked me why there are no photos of me on this blog (there actually are, but you'll have to hunt around to find them). This is an art blog, anyway – so how about some drawings of me? There aren't that many in my archives, but here are some for you to look at. It's always interesting how someone else renders you in artistic form – regardless of their artistic ability!
This one was by Mladen, an accomplished illustrator. He drew it in 2014 at either the first or second monthly comics meetup in Melbourne that I attended. If I remember right, although he was sitting opposite me, he had a basketball player in mind when drawing this! He drew it in ink on textured watercolour paper and was kind enough to give me the drawing when he was finished.
A Japanese girl called Miho drew this one, in 2002. While living and teaching in Japan, as someone of a different culture I was probably drawn a bit differently than the way Japanese high school students usually drew their friends and other people. In this case, with a purposeful stride, schoolbooks under my arm, shoujo manga-esque eyes, and noodle arms and legs! That's me all right.
Another one drawn by a Japanese student, a girl named Mami. Like Miho's drawing above, it was drawn in the corner of a bit of schoolwork. I wonder if these girls drew little caricatures of the other teachers who'd be marking their work?
This was drawn by my 4 year old niece, Aanya. It's a drawing of her, her mum/my sister, and me. You might think the big person in the middle is me, right? Wrong. I am reliably informed that the smallest person, the one on the right with a single long strand of hair, is in fact me. Like most young kids learning to draw faces and bodies, Aanya is used to giving hair to every head. Perhaps she felt sorry for me so she gave me a single long strand instead.
It's another drawing of me looking vaguely dissatisfied (my default expression, it seems), done by Daniel, an attendee of the monthly PCAF comics workshops in Perth, in 2024. As you can see he used magenta and yellow graphic markers to do it and he told me that those are not 'stink lines' above my head, but frustration or worry lines. I tend to make the same facial expression as the character I'm drawing so I can only assume I was drawing a worried face at the time.
Back in 2008 another guy called Daniel did this drawing in Illustrator, depicting him, me, and two of our graphic design classmates, based on Jeremy Plumb's cover of Blur's best-of album, called, oddly enough, Blur: The Best Of. This image looks dodgy because it's a scan of a printout – I don't have the source file for this one.
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See that yellow face? According to my cousin Gabby, that's supposed to be me. She drew this when she was 7, and is now 31 (and probably still draws like this). Okay, maybe not.
Another drawing done by one of my students in Japan many years ago, named Ikki. That's him looking in from the right. I'm the one at the bottom left, and I have to say, even though he nailed the caricatures of his mates Shingo and Takahira-kun, he's depicted me in a rather unusual way, complete with blonde hair. I was actually thinking of making this my online profile picture! But that would be silly.
