I used to draw men.

So... I used to draw men. I was pretty decent, and I learned to work really quickly and with a fair degree of likeness. I have not kept in shape, although I may get back into drawing one of these days; it feels like drawing is one of the things that's likely to come back, that I lost to depression. 

Some of the drawings were from photos in porno mags - I liked Playgirl best, because they had more full-body nudes with interesting poses instead of just look-at-my-dick and hot action closeups... although I certainly liked the hot action scenes too. This stud was from a Playgirl, and it's rendered in silverpoint - sterling wire stylus on a prepared ground. The dark line in the drawing is actual silver. The highlights are chalk. It was used a lot in the Renaissance, because the charcoal drawings usually used as studies were not as durable. 

I think this is actually the same guy - I don't remember his name, but I remember that I was absolutely fixated on his posture, and his touseled blond hair. He was a gardener in his shoot; I don't know if he was just a film-shoot-fantasy gardener, or if he actually was a real one and just put that in his bio because it was true. It's always so hard to tell where the fact line lies. 

This one was leadpoint, which I just made basically a pencil entirely of lead, by pouring it into the corner of one of my Dad's ammo cans. "Can you help me make a leadpoint stylus?" was not at all an awkward conversation with my Dad. I have written about how traumatic it was to get the shit beat out of me, but I want to make it clear that he's always supported my creative hobby and art work. Now... I told him I was doing metal stylus work in the SCA - Society for Creative Anachronism - which is a historical reenactment society that pretty much ate my life and kept me drunk on geeky hobbies and sheer beauty, from 1988 to about 1996. I really WAS using it to explore historical drawing techniques, and I just didn't show friends and family the nekkid stuff that I was ALSO doing with the same media. I wrapped the styli in yarn, to reduce the likelihood of poisoning. Leadpoint will leave excellent marks on regular paper as long as it has a decent tooth, so the fancy tinted ground wasn't needed. 

And then, there was video porn. Video porn presented a fun challenge... I would set up my drawing materials, and then spend a while stroking my cock to get warmed up and decide where I liked the gesture of the figures, the lighting, the composition... and I'd freeze the VCR. Yeah.. VCR, fuckers. I'm VCR-porn-old. When you freeze the frame on a VCR, it would pause for five brutally unforgiving minutes. Three hundred seconds. And then I'd draw. For a couple of the ones with more development of shade or color, I probably re-paused it at least once or twice, but these are also SMALL drawings, so they didn't need as long. This is labeled ZAK01, so I know that's Zak Spears' dick about to be knob-gobbled... but I don't remember which movie or what boy. 

I remember that this is Jack Dillon's muscular butt, from a scene where he crops and spanks and then fucks Chance Caldwell. I liked the combination of his pale ass, his tan, the shadows, and the main modeling light. I looked it up online (because of COURSE it's online)  

https://www.porndig.com/videos/61377/jack-dillon-is-fucking-with-chance-caldwell.html

I keep thinking the moment was a position similar to 2:50 this video, although I'm pretty sure the exact part of the video I was looking for was not included in this bit. I remember Dillon fucking Caldwell, so it would have been after the sample clip ends. 

Prismacolors on tinted paper. I think this one may have been multiple re-pauses, just because I burnished the flesh tones, and that takes a while. The more I think about this, the more I can feel the channel back to that thinking-space opening, and I know I need to draw some more porny stuff, maybe that will help connect the sexual energy and take it to the drawing channel and get that channel nice and stretched out, and THEN I can go looking at flowers. Adapting this process to weaving has already started to percolate in my brain - what would a good sexy woven design be? How could I work with a leatherworker to incorporate it into a harness, if I did something like silver cocks intertwined like Celtic Knotwork, in Argentium brocade, on Size B black silk? I'm putting this stuff out into the Universe, so that the amazing power that has been bringing me hot boys by the the boatload will decide that I need to get my pencils back out again and get cracking. And all that weaving stuff is totally true, AND I can still out-fuck a lot of guys. It's kind of a litmus test, a Shibboleet...  and if you find yourself thinking, "Oh, dear, he appears to have misspelled Shibboleth, I must suddenly become a subject matter expert and give him a lecture about this," then you haven't clicked the link, because that XKCD strip is fucking EPIC, and I love Randall's stuff with the intensity of a thousand suns. Anyway - it's a test, to see if guys are actually worth fucking - if they hear that I'm THIS WEIRD, and they don't blink? They're much more likely to be fun to fuck, and more fun to engage in more of the intense stuff, the psychodrama, the role play. 

This is most likely an actual five-minute pose. I like using white and black on colored paper; it gives you a lot of tonal range without having to do much blending. You draw the gesture, you draw outlines as necessary, you hit shadows with black, you hit highlights with white, and BAM, it's modeled, with half as much hatching or scumbling or rubbing with the tortillon as you have to do on white paper - because you've got the tinted paper there to be the middle ground. 

And of course there was life. I drew my own hand a lot; this is a common trick in art courses, because you can pose it interestingly, light it how you want, and then you know it's going to sit there and be still, because you're the guy who's asking it to sit still a little longer. 

It's interesting to note how different my hands are now; I still have pretty delicate fingers, but they're thirty years older, more scarred in places, less flexible. I do like how the scars tell stories - here's the place where I cut myself making thin paper strips for quilling (which, if my parents didn't know I was a poofter, they were FOOLING themselves... click this link for a quick primer on  Quilling, if you don't already know what it is, and marvel at my secret unknown faggotry. OH, and by the way, I was TEN. I was in fifth grade. The weird historical shit that I've learned in my interests in art... I was doing that quilling paper cutting on the big paper guillotine at the house, and I sliced the fingertip pad off in a chunk big enough that my mom took me for an EXCEPTIONALLY rare emergency doctor visit (note: Not to the emergency room, to my regular doctor's office on a hurry-up-he's-bleeding basis, because she's a nurse and wasn't able to staunch the bleeding) but not big enough that we would put the chunk on ice and took it with us. Actually, I think we may have taken the chunk in a baggie, but more as a demonstration model than with any hope of it being big enough to stitch back on. Or the time that I leaned a little sideways to get a drink from the water fountain, balancing against the bathroom door frame in high school, and the door swung shut, amputating part of the tip of my thumb down to about half the nail, and because I'm a smart boy and a boy scout and a nurse's son, I squeezed it in my other hand to help stop the bleeding, and walked all the way diagonally across the school to the nurse's office, very fast, carrying my two hands out in front of me like something from a horror film, and dripping blood the entire way. The assistant principal, who was a hunter, tracked me by the spoor. The doctor had to Xray before he would treat it, because there was a decent chance of bone being involved, but fortunately there wasn't, and my hand works fine still in most respects. This list is nowhere near exclusive, and of course it needs to include the still-clear scars on my left hand from those flaming plastic bits from my cousin George [see also: Symphony for Cock and Fingers in A Minor] dripping a melted milk bottle on a stick and passing it above my hand. We had very different varieties of fun back then. I'm also fire-in-the-backyard-melting-milk-bottle old. 

This one was a hot guy named Brian. I know this only because the file is labeled BRIAN02 - I remember quite a bit of the afternoon, I just didn't remember the name until I looked at the file. I remember that he was in some kind of Army intelligence position, and he was smart and funny and a hot fuck. He had recently seen TITANIC, and he saw some pictures that I had drawn of other guys, like the porn stuff -[I didn't pursue the "Come up and see my etchings" line of hookup banter, but I had drawing stuff all over the house, more often thumb-tacked to a wall or held to the refrigerator by a magnet, than they ever were framed and finished - but I love that. To me, there's something very fresh and vital about a drawing, and I don't find myself feeling the same way about many finished paintings.]- ANYWAY, he decided after we'd both had entirely delightful orgasms, that he wasn't yet done with our experience, and wanted me to draw him. LIKE ONE OF YOUR FRENCH GIRLS. He actually said it, and we knew that it was kind of a joke, but at the same time we both felt it was super hot, thinking of Jack drawing Rose, her body glowing in the dim light and him hungry for her as he drew... and he DID ask nicely and FUCK but he was pretty, and a hot freshly-fucked young man who still smelled like my musk and semen was offering to model for me. So I put him in one of my Renaissance shirts, propped him up with a pillow in the bed with the massive velvet curtains for a good repose angle that I could see to draw but wouldn't make him sore from being still, arranged a clip light, and set up my board. He fell asleep pretty quickly, which was probably for the best. There is something very sensual about drawing someone you've just been naked and all over and inside of - it's like you're touching him again with your pencil, the line stroking over his body and lingering on features of interest. After I finished, I snapped a photo of the drawing and sent him home with the original.

And then there's this one. A still life study in black and white Prismacolor pencil on red Strathmore paper. There's a little bit of a story to this paper that I love so much - I worked for some years at an art supply warehouse, filling orders and stocking shelves, sending stock to Michaels and MJ Designs and hundreds of places across the country. I did some awesome drawing work there, mostly on my lunch breaks - the hand drawings were all 30 minute sketches, because I got a 30 minute clocked-off lunch, and I wanted to art more than I wanted to eat. I have sketchbooks filled with things like a fly that I found dead on a windowsill, a flower that one of the office girls had gotten in a bouquet, dissected to show the anatomy, my warehouse glove, a shed pigeon feather. If supplies got damaged, like a forklift pinched a case of pencils, or a careless shipper crumpled a ream of paper, there would be waste. Some of it was bought up by bargain-hunting supplies sellers, but some of it went home with the crew. So I had a pad with all these neat colors, and it had a badly dinged corner, but most of the pages were fine. I had a few reams of various art papers. Most of the drawings in this post were done on some kind of waste from there, and I still have quite a bit of stuff from then. 

There's a story with the drawing, too. The cockring on red was a technical study that I did before doing a portrait drawing of a leatherman. I rendered him in the same black and white on red, although it was more his chaps, than him...I mean, it was a recognizable portrait. But it was kind of like "Still life of leather, with Steve." I wish I'd gotten an image of that picture. It was actually a pretty awesome gay erotic art story. I had gone home with him and his husband, months earlier. His name was Steve, and that's pretty much all I remember aside from his sweet smile and big muscular smooth body. I don't remember his last name, but he was a sexy leather titleholder bodybuilder guy, very charismatic, did some sort of high-level economic modeling for the March of Dimes or similar. And because that's what he was into, of COURSE I fisted him, and fucked him, and left my hand prints on his ass. I should see if anybody has an archive of who won the Drummer contests, see if they can find the name. It had to be some time in the nineties - between 97 and 2000. ANYWAY. He had seen the picture of the boy wearing my Renaissance shirt, or another similar drawing. He knew that I drew like that. He was VERY intrigued. Apparently, getting original artwork of oneself is a super-hot thing when you're a Mister Drummer, and so he asked me to draw him, like that. I did the study of my own cockring to check out how I wanted to handle shading the leather; I'm pretty pleased with the textural shift between leather and chrome. If that little strip of leather could speak, you'd want to wash its mouth out. I fucked a LOT of butt with that piece of leather around my cock. A guy named Jay accidentally abandoned it when he left a play date; the best leather is given, but "left behind after hot fuck and discovered later" is also good. 

To make matters more interesting, Steve didn't ask me with a very long runway. He was leaving for his trip to the next level competition on Sunday; I did the cockring drawing on like a Friday, and he came over and posed for me on Saturday. He was going to Houston, to compete in Mr. Gulf Coast Drummer, I think; it was the level that was multi-state, but not the national champion. Regional? And he had to take a basket of goodies for the contest, they auctioned them off to raise money. So... would I draw him in his leathers, and we could get it framed and dressed up, and put it in the basket?

And, I did. He posed on the same pillows that had propped up that sleeping boy, although he never fell asleep or even appeared bored or drowsy; he was one of the most attentive models I've ever drawn, like this must be the kind of focus he pays to someone when he's in service. It took me maybe an hour; he was in a lounging resting pose, so it wasn't stressful and he could relax, although of course he got a little stiff from not shifting. I don't remember having to reset him. The picture turned out beautiful. I recall being not quite perfectly pleased, but for what it was, and the timeline, I had done good work.

So... we had to get it framed, THAT DAY. It was like five o'clock on a Saturday evening. We ended up going to Michael's. We took it to the framing department, and it was a clear enough likeness of him that the sweet twitterpated boy behind the framing counter asked immediately "Oh my God, is that you?" He said yes, and he pointed to me as the artist, and we talked art and life drawing for a few minutes before we left to wander around the store and let him work. I think Steve got a couple hundred dollars worth of framing for fifty bucks. Sweet boy was visibly shaking when he handed it over, and I imagine him being hard behind his apron, although he was never anything but totally professional in a sweaty-handed awkward way. I know that there was UV-filter non-glare glass to protect the tinted paper, there was special acid-free double matting with the fancy acid-free tape, and I know that Steve paid for the frame's materials, and the rest of it just appeared out of thin air, because Steve was one of those beautiful men who smile and people want to do nice things for him. That's why I did the drawing, too, to be honest - he flashed those teeth and asked sweetly. He never offered to pay; I had no interest in even asking for money. It was a hot experience and I wanted to do it. 

The next day, he left for Houston with it. I never did hear who ended up with the picture, and I don't remember details of how he did at the show, although I seem to remember him not making it to the National round. He and his partner were guys I only occasionally saw at the Eagle, back when you could get a sloppy blowjob on the balcony, and seeing somebody getting buttfucked on the pool table was not surprising. The leather pageant world wasn't really my thing, but I wish I had kept in better touch, he was a nice guy. Not many hot muscle dudes will drink the piss out of your dick in the Eagle bathroom. Well, I take that back... in the Dallas Eagle bathroom. The OLD Dallas Eagle's ladies room, to be precise. And the more I think about this, the more I think that a lot of them would. 

The cockring study, roughly life-size, ended up being framed in a tiny frame and taken as a gift to a guy who I met at a different sleazy bar - but that's another evening's worth of story.