Monday through Friday, Ben Rubin takes the subway from Park Slope, Brooklyn, where he lives, to his Manhattan office. The commute takes him about an hour, he says, which gives him “ample time for doodling."
The mastermind behind Instagram's aptly-named Subway Doodle, Rubin uses his time on the train to create drawings that fantastically reimagine everyday life in New York City. There's the grotesque one of a severed head under a subway seat, or the bizarre one of a giant who's fallen on a New York neighborhood.
His drawings also include a green, horned monster leering at kids in the West Village and Yoda hanging around outside a senior citizens' center in Brooklyn. From the twisted to the cute, the fanciful to the weird, it seems Rubin’s got doodles to satisfy every palate.
Rubin -- who, by day, works for AMC Networks -- says he adopted the habit of drawing on his iPad while on the subway a few years ago.
"It's a relaxing way to pass the time on the train, just listening to music and drawing," he told The Huffington Post in an email. "At first I drew random pictures. Then, one day, I took a picture with the iPad camera and started drawing on the picture. It soon became a daily habit -- get on the train, take a picture, doodle on it."
Rubin says he started off only drawing on pictures he took on the subway, but he's since expanded his repertoire to include images taken out and about in the Big Apple. He says he also sometimes collaborates with other Instagram photographers.
"Growing up, I wanted to be a cartoonist," Rubin told HuffPost. "I'm essentially still drawing the same things I was drawing in the margins of my notebooks in high school -- monsters and superheroes."
As for where he gets his inspiration, the artist says he finds it "everywhere and anywhere," from the Godzilla movies he watched as a child on Saturday afternoons and the comic books he once collected, to the street art he sees daily in New York City.
Scroll down to see a sampling of Rubin's doodles. Visit his Instagram page a more complete collection.
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