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Next session is Feb. 22nd with Sabrina Chap!

All right, let’s try this again. 🙂  Next Dr. Sketchy’s is Feb. 22 with Brooklyn cabaret singer/songwriter Sabrina Chap!  (That amazing photo above is by Dave Sanders Photography. The piano photo beneath the one of Sabrina is from a very generous photographer on DeviantArt.)

If you haven’t figured out yet, this Dr. Sketchy’s is going to be a special one. Here’s  a blurb from the “About” page on the music portion of Sabrina’s website.

….

Sabrina Chap’s got classical piano skills, the ballad lyrics of Tom Waits, the onstage antics of Phyllis Diller and the voice of a whiskey angel. Her sets are a ragtime stompin’ good time, full of laughs, heartbreaks, and just plain good songwriting.

A classical pianist since the age of 5, Sabrina initially came to songwriting once she picked up her first guitar in college. Her first album, Bedroom Sessions, is a collection of folk songs written exclusively on guitar and recorded in her bedroom using Garageband.

After years of developing a strong folk following at places like the now defunct Burkhart Underground, Uncommon Ground and virtually every coffeehouse in Chicago, she moved to Milwaukee to try find a new sound. It was during that time that she turned back to the piano, and learned Scott Joplin’s infamous ‘Maple Leaf Rag’, and began writing songs in the ragtime tradition.

Since moving to New York, she has performed at a variety of musical venues, such as Rockwood Music Hall, Bar 169, Vivaldi Café, Sidewalk Café and Bar 4. She has done a solo tour of England, Scotland and Germany, as well as completing a tour through Luxembourg, Germany and Belgium with Argentinian songwriter, Agustina Mancinelli. Currently, she’s performing in Berlin in anticipation of her debut album, “Oompa!”

…

Not only is Sabrina going to serve as a muse for your drawing pleasure, she’s going to play for you too at several points.

And she’s good.  REALLY good.  If fact, go to her website real quick and sample a couple tracks so you can get a taste.

Don’t worry, I’ll wait.

…..you didn’t go, did you?  [sigh]  You know how I know that?  Cause I NEVER click on links people tell me to click.  Just click the link and listen for a second or two.

This is going to be fun. 🙂

That said, there’ll still be drawing a plenty and a hootnanny’s worth of contests with prizes from our sponsors Atomic Books, Artist & Craftsman Supply, Baby Tattoo Books, AND our new sponsor, Cyclops right next door.  So, doors at 6 and everything gets rolling at 7.  Considering the special nature of this session and the fact that the last session got snowed out, I’ll bet you dollars to donuts we might really, finally, sell out at the Windup Space.  That means : Get There Early For A Good Seat.  Ye have been warned. 🙂

See you on the 22nd!

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Our evening with the marvelous Lauren Marleaux!

Photography Jen Swanson

(updated Feb. 13 with additional sketches!)

Well, the first Dr. Sketchy’s of the year, with the wonderful Lauren Marleaux of Gilded Lily Burlesque, ended up being the busiest one we’ve had yet.  The break over the holidays was great, but it was nice to be back.  You know, I even missed that crazy drunk homeless lady that tries to barge in every session and grab my beer.  (She didn’t want my beer this time, but she did declare loudly, “I ain’t payin’ 7 dollars to draw SHIT!”)

Though I heart crazy “I’m going to get your beer” lady, she missed out, cause when it came down to it, we were definitely drawing THE SHIT.

From what I could see over folks’ shoulders, there was some serious inspiration going on.  Wouldn’t you be inspired?

Photograph Jeff Schock

While we’re all thinking wonderful things about Lauren, let’s take a second to plug Gilded Lily’s show coming up on February 13th.

We’ll be there.  There’s two shows, 7:30 and 10, $15 for a regular seat and $80 for a table for two with your honey.  We can not stress how damn amazing their shows are.  If you haven’t been to one before, you’re missing a lot of what Dr. Sketchy’s is doffing its hat to.  Our models are amazing, stunning beautiful, but for the most part they’re pretending to be inanimate statues for your drawing pleasure.  That’s not THEIR art though.  They’re performers, damn good ones, and until you see Paco Fish hobble around on stilts or Lucille Lingerhans von Spankenstein crack the whip, you don’t have a full appreciation of who you just drew.

Photography Jen Swanson

Anyways, our first contest of the evening was the opposite hand contest, where if you’re left-handed you draw with your right, and if you’re right-handed you draw with your left, and if you’re ambidextrous there are several people who’d like to talk to you out back.  The two winners received two amazing creations of Russell’s, which, well, I hope they made it home okay.

Photography Jeff Schock

As a side note, at one point in the evening Jen Swanson came up to me and said, “Sppttt!  Aaron!  That guy in the front with laptop?  He’s using his webcam to take pictures!”  Now, if you’ve read the rules in the side bar to the right, or ever been to a Dr. Sketchy’s, you know that pulling out a camera is a serious, serious, no-no.  Our models are being paid to model for art and our promotional images . . . they would rightly demand a lot more for a full fledge photo shoot.  Basically, imagine what happens if you pull out a video recorder in a movie theater or camera in a strip club . . . Bill may be making the official Dr. Sketchy’s Baltimore documentary and doing some of his own drawing, but please don’t make the mistake of thinking he won’t put down his pencil and bounce your ass off the median out front.  If he had a good night’s sleep, you might even hit the front door of the McDonalds.

In any case, I, all flustered, rushed to the front to check out what was going on, laughed, and came back to Jen.  “Jen, that’s not a photo.”

“What?”

“That’s not a photo.  He’s just that good.  Go look again.”

Bryce Homick

Our second contest of the evening was, in celebration of National Bubble Wrap Appreciation Day, “What’s the most creative way to pop bubble wrap?”

Photography Jen Swanson
Bryce Homick
Brian Dugan
Lily Stark White
John Brewer

The two winners won a set of Sharpies from Artist and Craftsman Supply across the street at the corner of North and Howard and a Windup Space t-shirt from Russell.

Photography Jeff Schock
Photography Jen Swanson

The third contest was the infamous random noun contest, the noun shouted out being “taco”.  You know, after we rejected the first fifteen.  🙂

Photography Jeff Schock
Brian Dugan
Dre Time
Bryce Homick

The prize was a Munny from Atomic Books at the corner of Falls Rd and the Avenue in Hampden . . .

…and Beyond Ultraman: Seven Artists Explore the Vinyl Frontier by the Pasadena Museum of California Art and published by Baby Tattoo Books.

Here’s a couple more photos and drawings to round us out.

Photography Jen Swanson

Photography Jeff Schock
Bryce Homick
Lily Stark White
Paul Moscatt
Dre Time
Inna-Marie Strazhnik

Eamon Dowling

Mike Hasson

Thank you to Lauren Marleaux of Gilded Lily Burlesque for rocking the stage, thanks to Bill for policing the door and taking footage for the documentary, Jeff and Jen for the amazing photos, Russell for pouring drinks and spinning records (not to mention for the amazing space), and all of you who showed up, retweeted tweets, or wrote nice things on blogs to help us keep this going.  All of you are pretty neat.

Our next session was SUPPOSED to be February 8th with Little Luna, but Baltimore got kicked in the balls by Jack Frost, so our next session will be February 22nd with cabaret singer/songwriter extraordinaire Sabrina Chap.  We’ll reschedule Little Luna as quickly as possible…If I were you, I’d find solace in the Gilded Lily show this Saturday.

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Nicolette Le Faye, a few cocktails, and . . . err, Sheila Dixon.

Wow, I actually had trouble trying to decide which photo of Nicolette le Faye to choose as the lead here.

Usually which one to put up first is obvious the moment you see it, but easily a half-dozen could have worked.  When in doubt, the parasol always wins.

Apparently everyone knew Nicolette Le Faye was going to be knocking it out of the park as well cause Dec. 14th ended up being the busiest session we’ve ever had.  We thought it would be a little slow considering it was the end of the year, MICA was closing up, and most of Baltimore was on a bender of egg-nog fused holiday parties–well, we were wrong.

Our first contest of the evening was the opposite hand contest, where if you’re right-handed you draw with your left, if you’re left-handed you draw with your right, and if you’re ambidextrous, Bill would like to talk to you out back.  Holly, our lovely bartender for the evening (Russell was off somewhere doing something, supposedly “camping”), provided the winners with their compact, shot-sized prizes.

Here’s an opposite hand from Stewart White…

A few more sketches from Stewart White . . .

Our second contest was “What do you think Russell is really doing right now?”   Yeah, no one was buying the camping bit.

Does this guy look like someone who’s eating trail mix out of a plastic baggie while burying his candy wrappers out of sight from marauding bears?

No, that does not.

Unfortunately, we didn’t get many drawings sent in of Russell’s possible shenanigans, though if you peer closely at the above you can make out a Russell in drag and a Russell, umm, playing chicken in a swimming pool with Nicolette?

Here’s Brian Dugan’s…

The prize was one of the new Munnies by KidRobot being carried by Atomic Books in Hampden.  Specifically, we gave away the one called “Mini-Bub”, which is the one on the far right below.

If you don’t know what that means, it means Atomic Books’ annual Munny gallery show is on the horizon.  More on that in the next month as we get closer.

Rachel Boss…

Lois Borgenicht.

Ashleigh Haddad

Bryce Homick.

The third contest was the random noun contest where, basically, the audience yells out random nouns and whatever sounds interesting first, well, put that in your drawing.

We ALMOST went with “gift basket”.

And then some wise-ass yelled out “Sheila Dixon”.

Now, keep in mind this was back in early December before a billion Sheila Dixon jokes had made the rounds and the whole thing had been beaten into the ground by Twitter and every damn reporter in Baltimore.  (I mean honestly, do we really need 5000 tweets in one day on the Sheila Dixon trial….especially when there wasn’t even a verdict yet?  And yes, there were EXACTLY 5000.  I counted.)

There were some amazing drawings for this one, sadly, not all of which were sent in. (Yes, that is supposed to be a guilt-inducing statement).

Oh, and just so it’s on the record, none of this is our fault.

Mike Hasson.

Stewart White.

Brian Dugan.

Rachel Boss.

Lois Borgenicht.

Ashleigh Haddad.

Bryce Homick.

The two winners each got a mammoth stack of art supplies from Artist & Craftsman Supplies on the corner of North Ave and Howard St. beside Joe Squared.

The last contest of the evening was the gift basket idea from earlier that had gone unused earlier with the prize being Miss Mindy’s Sassy Paper Doll Bonanza from Baby Tattoo Books.  (I actually posted a bunch of sketches from this pose further up, cause I’m stupid, and since it will take 45 minutes to move all of them because of the way WordPress works, I’ll just post the picture again, the contest photo, and another one of the sketches.)

Brian Dugan.

Well, that’s all she wrote for 2009.  Oodles of thanks to Nicolette La Faye for doing a kickass job modeling in December! Not only that, but thank you to everyone that modeled for Dr. S in 2009.  Thanks as well to our sponsors, Atomic Books, Artist & Craftsman Supply, and Baby Tattoo Books who went above and beyond in donating cool stuff for our artists to win.  Last and not least, thanks to Holly for bartending, Russell for bartending and letting us use the absolutely amazing space that is Windup, Bill for filming the Dr. S Baltimore documentary and helping at the door, and Jeff for the stunning photos.

Our next Dr. Sketchy’s is Monday, January 25th at 7 pm, doors at 6, with Lauren Marleaux of Gilded Lily Burlesque.  Alexis is finishing up the flyer as I type, so we should have that tomorrow.