Just For Laughs

by M. Lizabeth Currain

I turned on my old Dell laptop for the first time in ages. Guess what as on my desktop? If you guessed “a mp3 file of the Brotherly Love theme song”, you would be absolutely correct! This theme song is amazing. I remember in high school myself and another girl would just sing it randomly, that’s how awesome it was. And just in case you were completely out of touch and living in a cave in 1995…

That was back when Joey Lawrence, oh! Excuse me, Joseph Lawrence, didn’t look like a wax statue of Mr. Clean:

This is such a weird look.

WAIT FOR IT….

AM I RIGHT OR AM I RIGHT?!

Clearly, Mr. Lawrence needs to reach out to the folks at Procter & Gamble and work out some sort of endorsement deal.

Moving on to the more important business of the evening. I did some more packing! And that means I came across more random garbage from my past. There is a question on OkCupid that asks, “If you were to die, would whoever goes through your personal belongings be shocked by what they find?” I answered with “Maybe”.  I think they’d be shocked at the kind of lame things that I managed to hold on to over the years. Like a Dell Jukebox mp3 player with a lot of John Mayer on it (Ugh, so sue me! It was the early 2000’s! My body is a wonderland!), postcards and letters that I found while working at a thrift store, old drawings from an art class in college…

That’s what I am really here to discuss. I am by no means an artist. I am fully aware of the fact that 90% of what I draw is terrible. Sometimes I get lucky and something turns out okay, but that happens very rarely. When I was in college, since I was a fashion design major, I had to take a lot of art classes. One of those classes was Fashion Illustration. The name of the class should have really been, “Broke-down Figure Model Drawing”. We were in no way, illustrating fashions; we were either drawing a chick that would fall asleep while posing or one that had no eyebrows. Then we would take those drawings and scan them in to the computer and gussy them up in Photoshop. Bad idea all around.

Drawing Number 1: Beavis as Caesar.

Caesar, is that you?

It is safe to say, that is not even close to what this woman looked like or what she was wearing. Also, you’ll start to see that “no feet” was a common theme in a lot of my artwork.

Drawing number 2: Brian Fellow’s Safari Planet

“The rain forest, that sounds wet.”

This was probably my favorite drawing that I did in that class, obviously because of the flagrant artistic liberties I allowed myself. She was not actually holding a spear and a lion did not eat her feet. The best part of this was when I scanned it into Photoshop, I put her in an African setting and put a lion in the background. My professor was appalled and didn’t understand my artistic vision. I looked for the image on the various flash drives I have lazing about my apartment, but I could find it! I am truly saddened by this.

Drawing number 3: “There’s no crying in baseball“:

Feet! I drew feet!

I couldn’t even begin to tell you what’s going on with this drawing. I am starting to think that I closed my eyes while drawing and just drew whatever was in my mind at the time. The photoshopped version of this, I am pretty sure, involved some Yankee blue stripes and a Louisville Slugger. You may be asking yourselves, “how is this related to fashion illustration at all?” I asked myself that same question all semester long. I’d like to say that my drawing skills got better by the end of the semester, but I don’t think they did. I think I actually started caring less about the class and by the end was just drawing whatever the fuck I wanted.

My professor loathed me. She actually gave me a written warning that I was in danger of failing the class because of my “attitude”, “inability to take things seriously”, and something about how I didn’t care about my future. Boy did she have me pegged! I think she must have ended up giving me that ‘A’  because of my serious talent as an artist.