Various ballpoint characters. Going to pick up that book!
June 22, 2022
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You-Know-Who Saves…..
By Jack Ruttan in ballpoint pen, color, sketches
Ballpoint pen, and highlighter!
June 19, 2022
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Childhood Dog
By Jack Ruttan in digital, dogs, paintings
Drawn in Clip Studio Paint on my old Huion Tablet. My childhood dog “Pimmy.”
June 19, 2022
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Lilac Paper
By Jack Ruttan in cats, heads, horses, pencil, sketches
Some drawings on this pretty paper my pal has pads of.
The guy with a sword in his mouth is inspired by one of the stained glass images in the Sainte-Chapelle Church in Paris.
June 15, 2022
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Pen People and Things
By Jack Ruttan in ballpoint pen, black and white, color, sketches, watercolor, watercolour
June 12, 2022
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Anthropomorpic Rabbit and Bike.
By Jack Ruttan in ballpoint pen, color, sketches, watercolor, watercolour
Watercolour and black ballpoint. I think this character is my “Rabbit” from the comic strips I used to do.
June 12, 2022
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Harpy
By Jack Ruttan in ballpoint pen, black and white, women
Looking at pictures by Peter de Seve. He draws scary ladies, which I sort of like. Ballpoint pen, with unapologetic blobs.
March 28, 2022
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Eastern
By Jack Ruttan in color, Gouache, heads, paintings, sketches, watercolor, watercolour
I really hope that the little art shop in Chinatown near Clarke Street has survived. I like independent shops more than the big chains. Found cool stuff there, such as this book, and that brush.
This is actually a face I did years ago, in black gouache, and just added colour to, today.
March 7, 2022
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Two things I like to draw….
By Jack Ruttan in ballpoint pen, black and white, cats, sketches
Cats are self-explanatory. But I’ve always liked airplanes, and especially the DeHavilland Mosquito.
As a boy, my Dad picked up a scrap from the famous “F for Freddie,” a Mosquito that unfortunately crashed on an airfield in Southwest Calgary on VE day, 1945. (article here). I don’t know where that bit ended up….
February 23, 2022
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Jump
By Jack Ruttan in black and white, brush pen, horses
I come from Alberta, and when I was younger, I spent a summer building jumps and painting fences at the Spruce Meadows Equestrian Centre.
While I’m not a great rider (my sister was!), I loved seeing the horses. They liked seeing me, out in the fields. I think they mistook the paint cans for feed buckets!
February 18, 2022
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News Extra
By Jack Ruttan in black and white, montreal, sketches
This was such a fun freelance gig. I did illustrations and writing for NEWS EXTRA, a newspaper tabloid sold at supermarkets and gas stations. It pretended to come out of Florida, but was actually published from an office in the Notre Dame de Grace neighbourhood of Montreal.
Every other week or so I brought in my cartoon illustration for the “self help” section of the paper. Sometimes I did illustrations for creepy stories about ghosts, or monsters. I also made up captions for the gag photos. This involved writing mini-stories, including as many terrible puns as possible.
Literary lights of the Montreal English-language writing community wrote the feature articles under assumed names. Most of the stories about movie stars were cribbed from Italian glossy magazines, which had been roughly translated and then embellished.
The paper finally folded because Sylvester Stallone sued it for running an article implying he used artificial means to enhance his — ahem— “manly powers.”
Still, NEWS EXTRA was tremendous fun to work for. The editors were two young women, and the publisher was a guy who didn’t care what you drew, just as long as you handed it in on time.
This was a gig where they just told me to do my “Jack thing.” I learned a lot!
And my Grandma loved these magazines. She was thrilled to see my name in them.
The health articles had real information, and were researched by actual medical experts, I believe. This page has good advice on pandemic-style eating, so I’m putting the whole thing up. I don’t think I wrote the photo caption about the lion, but that’s the basic style we aimed for.
February 9, 2022
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Transformations
By Jack Ruttan in sketchesOut of my files, this is a comic I did way back in 1988, when Robocop was a big deal, and the Transformers Cartoon was airing.
I used this as a sample of my work, but don’t think I got it published anywhere, even in a Fanzine, which is kind of stupid. It’s still a funny comic, I think.
January 31, 2022
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Tuscan Red
By Jack Ruttan in Portraits, sketches
A couple more sketchbook pages! Pencil used was my Prismacolour “Tuscan Red.” (I think of Star Wars more than Italy here!) Or it could be brown, come to think of it. I’ve sharpened it so much it’s now a numb in a pencil holder!
Esi Edugyan has a cool lecture series at the moment on Ideas on CBC radio!
