Sharp Tongue, Dull Mind

My initial design concept was simple: create a caricature of some well known person who regularly sticks their foot in their mouth, and wrap the phrase around them. Since the phrase came to me from a music message board, I initially thought of choosing someone from the music industry. Problem there is no musician or record label exec working today has developed a outsized reputation for saying stupid, rancorous things. Not on a consistent enough basis to justify having that phrase hung on them at any rate. Unlike the fans who blow lava on message boards, they have to cultivate Good Press.

To find people whose very existence is built around drawing attention to themselves through force (or farce) of words alone, one must turn to that sub-species known as the Political Pundit. There we have a wealth of worthy candidates: Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity, David Horowitz, and of course Ann Coulter to name a handful. Full speed ahead! I collected some photos, traced their likenesses, distorted them this way and that... and realized I was on the wrong track. The problem with using a well known person is that they become the subject; I wanted my design to be about a specific type of behavior, the one described by the phrase.




For awhile I considered using all of them together, but in a way that was worse; the design would then have been about those specific people AND about a collective entity we might call Nationally Prominent Conservative Pundits.





It became obvious at last that my Sharp Tongued/Dull Minded subject had to look the part without looking like anyone in particular.









Fortunately, I knew just who I needed: the same Useful Idiot who posed in one of my other designs. This time he impersonated an Angry Lout Ranting Into A Microphone. A bit of tracing and I had a suitably anonymous face to work with.

But even starting at his usual low baseline, the drawing of my model's face still looked too intelligent. I needed to make it less so. As ever, photo editing software was the solution; in the political arena its value for this specific purpose, and for fabricating humiliating images of one's opponents in general, is well established by now. A little shrinking on top and stretching on the bottom, and the addition of a freakishly long tongue, got me to this. As an added benefit, his male pattern baldness became even more pronounced.

A moment's contemplation led me to conclude no matter how pointy I made the tongue it could never be sharp enough just as a tongue. For best effect it needed to turn into a cutting implement. A search of the Internet turned up this picture of a toy meat cleaver.



I traced it, and joined that image with the tongue to get this:





The next conceptual roadblock was deciding how to represent a Dull Mind; there is no universally recognized symbol for dullness. Since my model would not give me permission to saw open his actual head, the next best option was to use a spherical object that is universally recognized to have No Sharp Edges. Like a billiard ball. The eight ball would do nicely.



Thus resolved, I sliced off the top of my drawing's head, flipped it back like it was on a hinge, and drew in the proposed item, like so:

Before applying color, I decided to try two variations on my cleaver tongue to see if either of them 1) got the "sharp tongue, dull mind" idea across, and 2) didn't look quite so creepy doing it. They were:





The straight razor...

...and the moving razor.

It would have been easy enough to put the text under the image and call it a day.

But again, that would have been mailing it in. Besides, from the very beginning I had a notion the word "sharp" should look sort of sharp, the world "dull" should look sort of dull...

...and both should line up more or less with the cleaver and the 8-ball. This last called for some contouring of the first seven words.

Putting everything together got me this:

And that is what's going on my t-shirts and other stuff. I'm done. This is as good as it gets. You got a problem with that, mister? Huh? Huh? Think you're gonna take me down a peg? You and whose army!? I'm not rollin' over for a wuss like you! HEAR THAT? DO YOU HEAR THAT? THAT'S THE SOUND OF ME OPENING A CAN O' WUPASS! AND FOR DESSERT: A HEAPING HELPING OF HUMBLE FREAKING PIE! WHO WANTS SOME OF THIS? WHO'S NEXT?

A lens describing the sequence of accidents, blunders, crises, disasters, excuses, failures, goof-ups, hassles, imbroglios, jumbles, kerfuffles, lies, mistakes, numbskulleries, obfuscations, pratfalls, quarrels, reversals, snafus, tantrums, ulcerations, vacillations, and whimsies that led to the establishment of Illustrated Aphorisms, my store at CafePress.