A couple of years ago, I stumbled across Exploding Dog, a website created by Sam Brown (Adam Culbert), an artist who allowed people to send in ideas and then turned those suggestions into random stick figure drawings.  I immediately fell in love with his artwork.  I’d send him phrases in the hopes that he’d eventually get around to drawing one of my suggestions.  He never did.

I wasn’t really all that upset, though.  Prior to this, I had stopped drawing & doodling, things I did a lot more often when I was younger.  After Exploding Dog, though, I just felt like drawing again.  I forgot what that felt like, and I’m glad Exploding Dog allowed me to reestablish this long-lost connection.  I mean, I don’t consider myself another DaVinci or Picasso; still, it’s less about the final product and more about the time I spend swimming around in my own imagination.

Eventually, I ended up creating a LiveJournal account (good ‘ole “cainsdrawings”) where I asked my friends to send in ideas, which I’d draw.  Fun for me, and hopefully fun for them.  I’m not sure what caused me to stop.  But it was unfortunate, especially considering the fact that I think I ended up deleting all my drawings along with my LiveJournal account.

But I think it’s time to bring back the drawings.

I created a Twitter account (follow me @cdbull23) that will hopefully get me started again.  If you’ve got a request for a little cartoon, send it my way (Twitter probably being the best way).  Here’s the first of what I hope to be many:

"pacquiao raising fists in victory w/ bloodied puerto rican in the background"

Sometimes, the imagination runs wild when at work.

In case you haven’t already heard, the White House had the bright idea of flying an Air Force One lookalike over parts of NY and NJ in order to update the picture on file for the plane.  Unfortunately, they forgot to alert all the people living in these places that they were gonna do this.

I’m sure you can imagine what everybody was reminded of when looking up in the sky and seeing a huge plane, flying low and very, very close to some buildings.  Here’s the final product:

Come on, White House!  This little stunt ended up costing the taxpayers over $300,000.  $300k?!  Seriously?!  You guys wanna spend $300k in order to take some snapshots of the pretty plane?  And the horrible part? : THAT’S NOT EVEN NEW YORK IN THE BACK, IT’S NEW JERSEY!

I swear, we have fools running this country.  Here, I’ll offer my services for free:

Here’s Air Force One flying over Los Angeles.  Pretty!

Here’s Air Force One flying over the Golden Gate in SF.  Amazing!

Here’s Air Force One getting ready to land in the Mushroom Kingdom.  Didn’t even know that was possible!

And finally, here’s Obama saving the world and flying Air Force One into the alien spaceship from Independence Day.  Change you can believe in!

So there you are.  Take your pick, White House.  I gave you 4 pictures (that I made in about 10 minutes), and it cost you $0.  Feel free to pay me $300k if you feel like it, though.

Who would have thought that ONE drawing, a result of boredom during a meeting, could have led to many, many more drawings?  I’m having a great time trying to figure out how to make simple stick figures resemble several of my friends.  Pretty fun stuff.  Here’s what I’ve got so far:

LOL.  It even makes ME laugh.

Step 1: Have a meeting at work.
Step 2: Start talking about something not important to you.
Step 3: Begin to doodle.
Step 4: Begin to doodle yourself and friends.
Step 5: Laugh at the funny picture.
Step 6: Post on Facebook and on Cain’s Brain.