Thursday, January 16, 2014

Allroy Drawing

Descendents are my favourite band ever. Period. Early on at AKA Cartoon I got my first tattoo ever, which was Milo from the I Don't Want To Grow Up album (my good friend John Young has the same tattoo. I worked on the Eds with him and last year we were a storyboard team on My Little Pony. We were team Milo). Back in those days though I would send mail orders away to records companies for cd's, shirts and stuff. I was working on Ed,Edd n Eddy then so I drew the Eds drinking a ton coffee on the order I sent to the Descendents. Bill Stevenson ( the drummer) actually wrote me this scribbly letter back asking if I could do some art for them. I did the ALL shark drawing which they dug, but they were just looking for simpler t shirts designs at the time. I actually talked to Bill a couple times on the phone since he left me his number. I was sooo nervous before calling him. Nothing really came of it, but it was still cool. ALL is pretty much the Descendents with a different singer and I loved them just the same. Breaking Things, Allroy Saves and Mass Nerder were huge to me. I was lucky enough to see Descendents twice in'97 and I've seen ALL play at the Starfish Room plus every other time they've played Van, Seattle and Portland. Karl (the bassist) had a slight heart attack in 2007 and I had the idea to do a drawing of Allroy in a hospital setting. I am the worst proscratinator ever and usually super busy working in the animation industry and never got around to it. In 2010 Bill had a series of life threatening issues from having to remove a brain tumor and his heart passed a bratwurst sized blood clot. He still walked away and I got the chance to see them (ALL plus the Descendents!!!) at Punk Rock Bowling in 2011. They were back in fine form....if not better than ever. There is a great documentary about them called Filmage which I would recommend to anyone to check out, even if you are unfamiliar with Descendents/ALL. I figured I would actually finish this drawing of Allroy in the hospital once and for all before the screening of Filmage in Vancouver. So do yourself a favour and check out the Descendents. Check out ALL and check out Filmage. Enjoy.