Heh. What I really like about your multitasking thing here is that he’s just generally kind of ‘meh whatever’ in this case about his other tasks and just looking/slightly smiling at the phone while doing everything else. This is all second nature to him after all, making use of all those limbs at the same time. You really get that impression.
For some reason I really ike the fact you see some teeth on the bar, the fact his coffee cup is so BIG not to mention his tail. (I really like Randall’s tail generally but for some reason I really like how you’ve done it here).
Great picture!
(Random question is the bar he’s gnawing on itself a particular brand? It’s not something I recognise myself anyway so I wonder if you made it up or if it’s some brand over in America.)
Yep, the bar is a PayDay bar, which is basically a peanut brittle log that takes teeth like Randall’s to eat. And of course, a little Styrofoam cup of coffee ain’t gonna cut it when it comes to this guy! The phone is an IPhone and the MP3 player an IPod Nano, of course, since Apple is owned by the same guy who owns Pixar.
Apple and Pixar are owned by the same people? Never knew that! Wowa, guy seriously knows his stuff in the business department… or he’s really lucky anyway.
Yeah, Randall needs his caffine fix no matter what huh?
I can’t imagine Randall without coffee anymore, it almost sounds insane to me to imagine him without it in his life.
If I might wax lyrical about this piece, it almost works symbolically, even if that wasn’t PBL’s original intent- it shows Randall being plugged into technology, but to a certain degree that would distract him to what is really happening to him where he is in the physical world at this particular moment of time perhaps. To the degree he has a faded muted grey background in his mind, because he deems it unimportant to what he is currently doing unless it directly affects him (and like in the movie he’s more or less on his own and has to look after number 1 because it seems no-one else will when it comes to the crunch), and perhaps misses out on this because he’s too wrapped up in what he is doing to see the bigger picture.
Sometimes like a lot of us these days. So in essence Randall is all of us and how we are as a society sometimes today.
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Don’t look at me like that! Fanart can be taken as deep!
Haha, I love it, pitbulllady! So like Randall to multi-task like that, and I really like the style in which you draw and colour in Randall. You add lots of little details that are a pleasure to look out for.
Seeing Randall using such up-to-date technology always seems strange to me though, I guess because although the movie is set at the time it was actually made, the Monster World (or at least what we see of it) always feels to me like it was set in the '40s or '50s or something. I don’t know why, but I always imagine Randall listening to old records rather than having an iPod Nano.
I still like it though! You always have such fresh takes and new ideas on things.
Some of my Randall pics are set post-MI, and this is one of them. I like to think of him going against the grain of most monsters who find themselves stuck in the Human World, for whatever reasons, and rather than hiding in some remote corner of the globe, forced to live like a wild animal, Randall would simply adapt and do what he does best-blend in! Randall might not be the geek that his former Scare Assistant is, but I can imagine that he’d be totally fascinated by our technology and gadgets.
I think that one of the reasons the movie had a sort of vaguely 40’s or 50s-ish feel to it is because the architechture of that factory building is very post-WWII Industrial, very like many of the factories which proliferated here in this country during and right after the war, very stark and bulky. I can remember when I was in the second grade and my father’s place of employment, Sonoco Products, Inc., had what could be considered a precursor to the “Take Your Kid To Work Day”, where the company(which is a paper company, by the way)invited employees’ families to come out and eat lunch with their family member and tour the place. That part of the factory, which has since been torn down and replaced with a modern building, was built in 1945, and it looked a lot like the M.I. building, just this huge, stark imposing structure with very bulky-looking interior fixtures. If anyone has seen the M.I.-related video game, “Pinball Panic”, which shows what I presume to the “Wreck room”, there’s all this steel visible, and these sort of inverted traingular glass-and-steel things that form barriers between different parts of the room. They had those same things at my dad’s workplace, filled with water, and it bugged me as a kid that they weren’t used as aquariums-they just had water in them, no fish or anything like that! In the movie, though, we can see that the monsters DO have computers, even though they’re more like the PC’s we had back in the early '90’s, so they’ve definitely got technology that is way past the '50’s.
That is a very emotional and heartbreaking piece, pitbullady. I can tell from your username you must be a fan of pitbulls. I really despise speciests, and most Hollywood movies aren’t helping (Anaconda, Jaws, Eight-Legged Freaks, etc.). If a film was made about a certain group of people being depicted in a demeaning way, it would be perceived as racist, but for animals, oh, it’s all for ‘good entertainment’. And then you wonder why wolves, sharks and tigers are being ‘culled’/hunted to extinction.
And yes, I read your entire description. It’s very touching, and while I may not be a Randall sympathiser (though that may change, as it’s been ages since I’ve seen Monsters and I really need to reassess his character through more matured ‘adult glasses’), I can understand his plight in defending his new furry friend. Does the pooch have a name?
And really, you should just feed this ‘plot bunny’ already, I’d love to read a fanfic on this! It’d be like a cross between ‘The Fugitive’, ‘The Road’ and ‘Watership Down’, in The Big Easy! Do you know how awesome that sounds?
I wish I had time to sit down and write, seriously. Either I don’t, or if I do, the “muses” don’t cooperate. I’m also not that spontaneous as a writer; I have to envision how a story will begin, progress and end before I’ll write it, and if I can’t come up with a logical way for it to end, I can’t write it. I also have a difficult time just writing short stories(as most of you who take time to read just my posts here can probably figure out, lol), so they tend to progress more into novels, and that is where the time issue comes in. That is the case with this particular story, since it would have to delve into things like prejudice and judging others based on their appearances, and of the negative stereotyping that you mentioned, which is one of the reasons why I have problems with Randall having been put in the position of being the “bad guy” in the first place. There is also that theme of while Randall saved the dog’s life by liberating her from the “death van”, she ultimately saves HIS, not from some attack by something or someone, but through her “joie de vie” and her enthusiasm for life, in spite of all that she’s been through herself and in spite of how the world still perceives her, at a time when he was so low and down in his spirits as to contemplate the unthinkable as his only way out of his situation. The dog doesn’t judge him, and could care less about the things he’s done.
I hadn’t really settled on a name for the dog yet, but I was sorta leaning towards “Bonnie”, since it had a nice Scottish or Irish “ring” to it, and would contrast with how most people would see her: as an ugly, scarred-up devil-dog. Plus, I did think of a nice little back-story where Randall had had a dog named Bonnie(or rather, his family did)when he was still a young kid, before tragically losing his family(and he certainly has no family in the movie, seen or unseen), so he’d come up with that name because she reminds him of that long-gone little memory from his childhood.
Ah, man, this is just beautiful! I gotta say, this is probably my favorite piece from you! This is just incredible. And I love the back-story. I love the message about how you can’t judge people or animals just by what they seem to be. It’s who they are at heart that matters . And the image itself is gorgeous! If you don’t mind me asking, what do you use to color your pictures? I really like this, and was just wondering how you do that. It’s absolutely amazing! And the anatomy of the pit bull terrier is amazingly spot-on! And I love the phrase you used. Keep up the great work !!!
I actually had to use a freebie program I downloaded off the internet, called “ArtWeaver”, which is nearly as good as Corel Painter Essentials. My Corel Painter program on my computer has somehow gotten messed up or corrupted, and my aunt mistakenly threw out all my graphics and other software when my father had to move in with me following the loss of his house in a fire, so I can’t reload the Corel and I can’t afford a new one right now. You can download Art Weaver here if you’re interested in giving it a try, though I don’t know if you have a Wacom or other graphics tablet or not, and it definitely is designed to work with one: artweaver.de/
I use mostly the digital airbrush feature with the program to color in my work after I upload a photo of a pencil sketch to the program.
“Wacom” is a brand name of digital graphics tablets, which work with a special “pen” that comes with the tablet. There are many models available, some of which are USB and others which are Blue Tooth. These tablets really let you get the most out of applications like Photoshop and Corel Painter, and many others, and even work with Microsoft Paint. I use the Intuos model tablet now, but I started out on the old Graphire, which is no longer being made. I got my first tablet and software with a computer graphics course for teachers that I took several years ago for re-certification, and I’ve been hooked on digital art ever since! You can learn more about Wacom tablets and products here: wacom.com/index.html .
You can use ArtWeaver on any computer-just go to the website and download the program for free. It will work with a mouse, BUT you aren’t going to get those subtle details without a digital tablet. I for one can’t do diddly with a mouse, when it comes to digital art, and with a tablet, it “feels” like I’m drawing or painting on paper or canvas. You can often find good used digital tablets on Ebay or Craigslist, if you are able to buy stuff from those sites.
Oh my gosh… Sorry it took me so long to reply . But thank you for the info ! I’d love to have one of those eventually. I’ll remember that for later down the road. Right now all the extra money’s going to getting a puppy .
Cool, what kind of puppy are you getting?
I’ve gotten to the point of preferring older dogs myself, but honestly when I have to balance getting a piece of new technology vs. getting anything that eats and poops, the technology usually wins out! That’s one of the reasons I much prefer snakes to dogs; they only eat and/or poop once a week instead of several times per day!
Anyway, I debated whether or not to even upload this here, given the large number of Randall haters, but goes my latest, suggested to me by one of my sixth-graders, who is a wealth of “plot bunnies” and “art bunnies”. He suggested the idea of Randall as a Blues guitarist, and so here goes the results:
Yes, he’s a left-handed "stringer’, and if you pay really close attention to the movie, he’s a southpaw in that, too, so I figured I’d have him following in the paths of the great Jimi Hendrix and Otis Rush and Albert King. Yes, it WAS a BIG challenge to adapt those four hands to the guitar, too!
Wowa, guy seriously knows his stuff in the business department… or he’s really lucky anyway.
And it just so happens that I have Corel Painter Essentials myself! 
I can tell from your username you must be a fan of pitbulls. I really despise speciests, and most Hollywood movies aren’t helping (Anaconda, Jaws, Eight-Legged Freaks, etc.). If a film was made about a certain group of people being depicted in a demeaning way, it would be perceived as racist, but for animals, oh, it’s all for ‘good entertainment’. And then you wonder why wolves, sharks and tigers are being ‘culled’/hunted to extinction.
. And the image itself is gorgeous! If you don’t mind me asking, what do you use to color your pictures? I really like this, and was just wondering how you do that. It’s absolutely amazing! And the anatomy of the pit bull terrier is amazingly spot-on! And I love the phrase you used. Keep up the great work 
.)
. But thank you for the info 