One of the advantages about being an ‘artist’, is you don’t have to spend any money if you want to send your friends and loved ones a greeting card. Over the years I’ve relished in sending my Fortean friends one of my quick* doodles to commemorate their birthdays, and the idea is always to make a direct or indirect reference to the paranormal topics we love. The image above was made just today and sent to my good friend Joshua Cutchin, who’s written extensively about the many parallels between Fae lore and modern alien encounters.
This is the one I made for his birthday last year. For people who don’t get the pun, the idea is that one of the many things the ancient Celtic traditions warn you about, is NEVER to eat the food of the fairies, lest you want to be stuck in their realm forever:
Here’s the one I made for Tim Binnall last year. As people interested in paranormal topics may know, the web series Hellier –which started out as a search for goblins in Kentucky– has become increasingly popular.
The image below was sent to my friend and mentor Greg Bishop in 2017. It’s inspired by one of the most fascinating close encounters of the third kind in the annals of UFO literature: that of patrolman Schirmer in Nebraska, in 1967.
This one below was sent to Binnall in 2018. What can I say, I still have a soft spot for Pleiadian blonde bombshells 😉
And lastly, another one sent to Greg in 2018. The high strangeness case between chicken farmer Joe Simonton and the pancake-cooking UFOnauts is a favorite of ours.
I deliberately keep these doodles with a very “rough” look, but they are nevertheless an opportunity to keep experimenting with brushes I don’t usually use (like the ones that look like markers or watercolors). I also like the fact that the ideas for all of these tend to pop in my head just seconds after social networks remind me it’s one of my friends’ birthdays, so I want to think there’s some ultraterrestrial intelligence having a laugh by using me as its channel 😉
And remember, commissions welcome!!
(*) By ‘quick’ I mean it only takes me a couple of hours to complete them. Given how nowadays I can easily spend WEEKS finishing just one commission, this is my equivalent of ‘rush painting’ 😛
Absurd by Design 