It’s been a while since I’ve done a good monkey post.  Enjoy!

I love “David After Dentist“!!

As it says in my bio, I am a former teacher.  I spent two years teaching art at an elementary school in Tarzana, Ca.  It was an amazing experience that really helped me learn to appreciate art again after working 5 years in the animation business .

As you can see from the previous posts in the blog, I have a monkey character that I like to draw when nothing else is inspiring me.  I made a habit of drawing a quick sketch of the monkey on my classroom whiteboard every week (that’s right, there are no more blackboards.)   The kids loved it, and I was always trying to keep the monkey topical.  Sometimes the monkey would be doing something I had done recently, or maybe it was a character from an upcoming movie.  Either way, I recently found some pictures I had taken of some of the sketches.  I thought I’d share them just for fun.  Some of them are quite crude, but you can see the slow evolution of the character over two years.  I’ll break it up into a few posts.  Enjoy.

The final design for my “Making Lemonade” series.  You can find the full story behind the designs here.

This design started out as a bit of a caricature of my friend Mike, who is the drummer for the Australian band Kistone.  Unfortunately it looked too familiar to Jimbo from “The Simpsons.”  So I made him a blonde and drew a little inspiration from the “party kid” from Australia that was prominantly featured on “The Soup” last year.