Author Archives: skook

School. Sleep. Work.

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Out in the real world I have been accomplishing less than I would like. That’s not terribly unusual. I have always accomplished less that I would have liked. I suspect that that is true for any halfway ambitious person. And I’m only halfway ambitious.

I’m doing fairly well in Math. My Unix class seems to be pretty easy. My C# class is the one I’m having the hardest time wrapping my mind around but my understanding gets a little better every session. For creative pursuits I’m slowly updating the Oz-Squad.com site and I’m doing illustrations for a project that should start serializing January.

Anyway. Nizzibet recently made a watercolor painting of one of my sketches. Isn’t it cute?

Still Broadcasting

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I did this illustration for my brother’s birthday. The actual date for the occasion was last week but I wasn’t able to give it to him until yesterday. The two main gentlemen are Jack Lightning (on the left) and Davey Thunder (on the right). Glenn has been featuring them recently (along with the Elf and the Dragon and the Ugly Dog of Heaven[not in this picture]) on his  Lovesettlement blog in his Thousand project. Every day Glenn posts a hundred words of prose/poetry with the goal of hitting 100,000 words total. As of today he’s got 55, 100 words down. Go Glenn!

Sometimes It’s Better to Start Over

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The above sketch was my first stab at the first illustration of a new project. I’m doing a series of illustrations that need to look as if they were done in the early 19th century for one of the British penny publications. That’s kind of tricky. Early magazine artwork was usually pretty crude. It had to be produced quickly and it had to be simple enough to be mass produced. The art was etched onto steel or copper plates and then printed on the cheapest paper available. Many of the those early illustrations had their figures posed as if on the stage so there tends to be a static quality to the characters.

I got about a third of the way through inking this piece before I decided that I didn’t like how it was turning out. I’m not sure if I can say exactly what doesn’t work for me. Mainly the figures just look too stiff and posed. While that may have been the predominant fashion for illustrations of the time and media I don’t care for my version of it. If I’d managed to completely hide my normal style I might have liked it better. Maybe.

In any case, I’m redoing the illustration. I’m keeping the basic composition but I’m putting a little more life into characters. You’ll be able to see the results on January 1st. Stay tuned!

Short Break.

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It’s going to be quiet here for a few days. There’s more art in the hopper. I just haven’t had a chance to write any posts.

Most of my online energy has been going to Oz-Squad.com. My goal is to have that site be nice and robust by the end of the year. I want to be sure that folks have a good reason to visit.

And school is begining to take more of my attention again. Math especially is requiring more and more time to complete the homework. And I’m finding C# baffling. I know that it will seem easy eventually but right now I’m still not grasping the language’s syntax enough to write a program with any sort of ease.

So, yeah. Whine. Complain. Back to work!

WAKE UP!

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I submitted this image to a recent Remake/Remodel challenge at the Whitechapel forums. The hand holding the CD case is a creative commons image that I found here –

The original image, outside the CD case looks like this –

 The Little Nemo in Slumberland comic strip has had a weird influence on me.

On the one hand it’s a masterpiece of comic art. Each page is beautifully composed and drawn. Each panel is filled with detail and nifty ideas. Describe any episode and it sounds like the epitome of weirdness.

Which brings me to the other hand – I can’t read more than one or two strips at a time. The strip was created when the vocabulary and pacing of comics was still being developed and, while it’s easy to see the action based on looking at the page, trying to read the captions and word balloons is kind of painful. They’re badly placed and just physically hard to read. The characters aren’t engaging. The punchline of each strip is Nemo waking up.

So I find myself picking up my Nemo collection, reading a strip and putting it down again in frustration that there’s … not … something more? It seems silly to complain that something is just a pretty piece of art but I read comics for stories and I never feel like I get a story.

So, every so often, in my copious spare time, I think about doing a version of Nemo that would have the weird dreamstuff that is so attractive and feature a story that engages me at the same time. The image about isn’t related to any of the ideas I’ve had so far. None of them are distilled enough yet to be represented by a single image. I just knew I wanted to contribute to the challenge so I let my subconscious go to work and that’s what I came up with.

A pretty image with no story behind it. Sigh.

The Living Ghost!

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These days I rarely draw anything just for the fun of it. Certainly the process of drawing is fun and I pretty much only take on the projects that I want to. It’s just that the drawings I do are generally part of larger projects – a commission, a role-playing game, a book cover, a present, a website, the occasional remake/remodel challenge. To just sit down and sketch something out because it seems like fun in the moment doesn’t happen very often.

Last week,  however, Andrea Bonazzi posted a link to this comic on the Frank Belknap Long facebook page and I thought, “That Living Ghost character looks like he’d be fun to draw!”

So here he is. And you know what? He was fun to draw.

Back to work!

Royal Historians

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 A lot of folks have written a lot of Oz stories in the century plus since The Wonderful Wizard of Oz first saw print. For the purposes of the Oz-Squad.com site I’m only designating a few of them as official Royal Historians. I’m including their biographies and Oz bibliographies over at that website. These portraits will also be colored there.

L. Frank Baum
W.W. Denslow
John R. Neill
Ruth Plumly Thompson

And Steve Ahlquist, of course. I don’t think he wears this suit very often. We had to vacuum off a bit of dust before he sat down for the portrait.

I’ve gotten up to John R. Neill in writing the bios. I’ll post a notice here when I’ve finished the rest.

The Black Lion

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The Lion in 1955. Or maybe it’s a Lion in 1955. Dorothy was replaced involuntarily. Perhaps the Lion had a substitute as well? I don’t know. The 1955 Lion appears twice in the flashback in issue 8 and neither version looks different than any of Terry Loh’s contemporary versions of the Lion. But, since everyone else on the Squad has gone through changes since Dorothy first came to Oz over a century ago, it seemed unfair to have the Lion stay the same in every incarnation.

Tin and Chrome

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Nick Chopper, the 1955 version. Drawing Nick is always a bit of a challenge. I’ve known a lot of artists who had an affinity for drawing cars, robots and other machines. My preferences are drawing organic objects – animals, plants and landscapes. So representing the Tin Man usually requires twice as much preliminary sketches as any of the other characters.

Terry Loh drew Nick with 1950s styling for that 1955 version of the Squad so I’ve tried to duplicate and preserve that.