Some UFO-inspired Inktober Sketches

Marshall Applewhite, leader of Heaven’s Gate

Like most artists, I began keeping a sketchbook in which I could doodle initial design concepts or just doodle whatever the hell I fancied some time ago. At first I used cheap notepads that I brought along during the Paradigm symposium conferences in Minneapolis to write notes, but then I chose to keep these journal/sketchbooks in a much sturdier medium –Canson’s Art Book ONE with 98 pages of 100 g/m2 paper is currently my favorite choice; their price is affordable enough and I can use ink as well as pencil to sketch my ideas. The paper is not great for fancier media like markers, but nowadays affordability is paramount for my artistic needs…

Usually these sketchbooks would last me at least a year, because I’m a very lazy artist. However –as I mentioned on my last post— at the beginning of this year I began reading Jacques Vallee’s Forbidden Science journals, which proved to be an incredible source of inspiration, because his writing compelled me to annotate many notable quotes on my own journal/sketchbook, as well as creating caricatures of the many figures mentioned by him. Sometimes I would use the few photos illustrating the FS books as inspiration, but other times I would simply grabbed my phone and find a photo of the person using Google.

Because or this, I decided to share a few of those caricatures last month, using the #Inktober challenge that is followed by many artists. I posted these images originally through my Twitter account –I took photos of my sketchbook with my phone’s camera instead of scanning them, hence the low quality of the images– but since I received quite a few compliments for them I decided to gather them all up and publish them here. Enjoy!

Jacques Vallee: UFOlogist extraordinaire

Cartoon inspired by Vallee’s coinage of the term “ufocrat”

One of those awesome quotes I found in one of the Forbidden Science volumes, which I found very appropriate to describe someone like my friend Mike Clelland

No, Commander Fravor is NOT mentioned in the Forbidden Science journals (the last one stops in the year 1999) but nevertheless many things discussed by Vallee in those books are perfectly applicable to the state of current UFOlogy.

Vallee meet Ferriz, the father of Mexican UFOlogy, in the 1970s

There’s a LOT of things about Uri Geller in Forbidden Science 2!

This is inspired by a passage found in some old mystic book. A still-valid cautionary tale for any would-be Contactee eager to become the appointed emissary to higher intelligences…

One of the most (in)famous figures in modern UFOlogy

And here’s another controversial figure: Bob Lazar

All these sketches were made with only a fine-point, black gel pen and a 1.5 mm calligraphy pen to accentuate a few elements. No previous pencil sketch was used, in order to challenge myself more on how to capture the person’s resemblance on a first attempt. As you can see all of these drawings are very rough, and were done under 15 minutes; nevertheless I got a very positive reaction from them, and was even encouraged to make some sort of coffee table book out of them –an idea worth considering in the future, perhaps?