In my Flashback Friday post, I gave a link to a blog entry my sciurine pal Pensive did a few days ago where he displayed some interesting works of squirrel art he found on the internet.  Any long time readers of my blog will know I have a lot of different archived images I’ve drawn that I like to intersperse in my posts, and a handful of those happen to be takes on real works of art.  Since I mentioned this in my comment on Pensive’s blog, there have been a few of you out there who have asked for a compilation of these works that will never hang in the Louvre, or even the dumpster behind the museum.  Not wanting to be one to disappoint, here is as complete a collection as I can gather of my ES-itized takes on the classics….

You saw this one at the tail end of Friday’s post.  It is MBRS doing her best to recreate Sandro Botticelli’s masterpiece The Birth of Venus.  While I made one of my typical errors in making the subject off center, somehow without the benefit of Photoshop at the time, I made this one look a bit more like a painting than just another piece of sharp digital art… which works to a great effect!

Here’s another classic that’s pretty easy to recognize since it has become a staple of pop culture, Edvard Munch’s impressionistic piece The Scream..  While Sprots the character hasn’t really been a factor on my blog the way she is on my message board, here you can get a good visual insight into how she plays into the world of ES.  Squirrel loves Sprots, Sprots loathes Squirrel.  This is one of the most beloved drawings among my original set of ES fans, and I have to agree with them, as it always makes me smile.

I have a friend who has one million reasons to love Grant Wood’s signature painting American Gothic, so I’ve done quite a few tributes to it over the years, most recently in an edition of my ESN comic where her character played her customary role as a school teacher.  The design you see above was one I added to my shop last year, and I gave the honoree a T-shirt with dentist ES and farmer’s wife MBRS gracing the front of it.

No, there is no squirrel in the artwork above, it is a giraffe character that belongs to another friend of mine.  When she appeared on the game show “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire” four years ago, and went down on a question regarding the artist Gustav Klimt, I created this tribute to her in the style of Klimt’s famous portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer.  Considering that I drew this barely a year and a half into my newfound artistic hobby, and very shortly after I abandoned “trace and scan” for creating images fully by mouse, I am still very impressed with how it turned out.

How about famous artwork in the background?  Here, another of my characters who has gone underloved on my blog, Fanny, paints her take on Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam scene that was just a small part of the work he did on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel… only she is recreating this masterpiece on the ceiling of her crawlspace.  The inside jokes that inspired this image would take many paragraphs to explain, so you’ll just have to accept it for what it is and admire the artwork!

Did I mention characters who thrive on my message board but not on my blog?  Here we have Beebs, who painted me an actual, honest-to-God, beautiful watercolor of an impressionistic squirrel that I’ve had hanging on my wall for three and a half years now.  As a tribute to her artisticness, on her birthday I made this lovely image of her character that is MS Paint meets Georges Seurat.  The pointalism attempt comes off rather nifty looking.

In an attempt to do something completely abstract, I drew a simple little image of my squirrels Angel and MBRS posing with simple props, and went absolutely crazy with it on Photoshop.  I really don’t know what to say about this one, but then again, a lot of abstract art leaves me speechless.

I even have a squirrely take on sculpture!  or, well, statuary at least.  Fanny is from Colorado Springs, and my mother has an unhealthy obsession with the city, so when a conversation I was having with the former turned to the statue of General William Palmer riding his horse Diablo, a well known local landmark, I couldn’t get it out of my head that I needed to take my infamously horrible debut drawing of Rainbow Donkey and cast it in iron in the place of Gen. Palmer and his steed.  I don’t know what the good people of Colorado Springs would think about it, though…

Even famous commercial artwork is not immune from my magic mouse of manginess.  Here is the sweet, innocent Angel in one of her finest solo performances, as the girl in the Sun Maid Raisins painting that has been appearing on raisin boxes for almost a century now.

As for other stylistic artwork, here is an image I drew for a music game on my message board featuring a sciurine version of the ultra rad 80′s minimalistic art used by the short-lived band The Power Station on their one album that gave us the great tune “Some Like It Hot”.  This art style was even animated for use in the music video.

And while I’m on the subject of music, here’s one of the eleven tributes I did to famous album covers for another game that I was allowed to guest host.  I chose this one since I think I may have a Beatles fan or two who follows me over here.  If there is any interest, I may post the others in a future entry…

And finally, upon his death last year, here was my touching tribute to popular commercial artist Thomas Kinkade, who was known as the “Painter of Light”….

Bad squirrel! Bad!!!