Dirty Little Cigarette.

Most of you have seen my drawing of the early Gary Cooper. I did it for my level 1 drawing class final project last semester. If not- here it is.

Ever since drawing the hansome Gary Cooper, I've had this huge fascination with cigarettes. Don't get me wrong. I hate the dern things.

Hate the way they smell.

Hate the way I smelled them on my Grandpa and Great Grandpa before they passed.

And HATE how they control a person's life.

Most importantly, I hate how they control the lives of those closest to me, my family.

But if there's one thing I love about the things, it's how intriguing they are. They really are. When you were a kid, didn't you always gaze at the smoke clouds that drifted out of some ones mouth after taking a long pull from a cigarette? Not only that, but in pictures. I'm not going to lie, they look pretty bad ass. I'm kind of scaring myself with my fascination with these tiny little rolled, tobacco filled, lung cancer carriers. But no need to worry, my hate's outweigh my fantasies.



I guess what got me started on all this was the fact that I'm working on a second drawing, and the girl just so happens to be smoking a cigarette. Coincidence? Not really I don't think. Until I really did THINK about it... Cigarettes make for some really neat art. Let me show you.






Here's my girl, she is an unknown girl... so I named her Jenny. Namely because we're not quite sure if that's a cig or a joint. But in Forrest Gump, Jenny was quite the experimenter. So it suited her. Photographer- Christian Bazant




Interesting eh?. Here are some others that I have casually come across, thanks to http://www.flickr.com/

Sure they, look intriguing and such. But man let's go a little deeper here. With some stats. :)

• Every eight seconds, a human life is lost to tobacco use somewhere in the world. That translates to approximately 5 million deaths annually.


• Ambergris, otherwise known as whale vomit is one of the hundreds of possible additives used in manufactured cigarettes. (Yum, I wanna inhale whale vomit)


• Hydrogen cyanide, one of the toxic byproducts present in cigarette smoke, was used as a genocidal chemical agent during World War II. (hmmm funny how smokers are voluntarily putting the exact same chemicals into their bodies that were to blame for the deaths of many WWII Vets.)


• Secondhand smoke contains more than 50 cancer-causing chemical compounds, 11 of which are known to be Group 1 carcinogens.

Wanna know more? Check out this link. http://quitsmoking.about.com/od/tobaccostatistics/a/tobaccofacts.htm

Well that's all for me.

I'm gunna go get high on some life.