Author Archives: skook

Spectreman Gets Schooled

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I’m starting school tomorrow so I’m not sure what posting is going to look like for the next few weeks. I look at how much time I’m scheduled to be in class and it seems like I should have plenty of time for art, blog posting and doing all the exciting chores that life seems to require. But the last time I was in school was high school, many many years ago, and I’m told that college has a much different ratio of class time to homework time. Plus I’ve got a commute looks like it could run anyway from an hour to two hours depending on how smoothly I make my bus transfers.

So. Rather than post this sequence over a few days I’m putting it all up today. This was done for the current Remake/Remodel challenge at the Whitechapel Forums. Instead of giving us a brief character description Ellis posted this –

When I was a kid I watched some (perhaps all) of the Spectreman series on the Captain Cosmic show. I don’t really remember much about it. I think I found it somewhat disappointing but it did provide me with a giant monster fix so I caught as many episodes as I could.

Because this a giant monster fighting hero I felt compelled to add a contribution to the Whitechapel challenge. And because I’m currently in the middle of half a dozen other art projects (and school is looming) I felt equally compelled to get the illustration done as quickly as possible.

First I sketched out a logo. That will show up later. Then I sketched out a quick redesign of Spectreman. Quick. I added a random array of monsters behind him. Quickly. I inked the outlines of Spectreman. Quickly. Normally I like to fill in all the blacks of an illustration on paper but this time I decided to photoshop them.

Adding the spot blacks in Photoshop was faster than doing it via brush and ink but it’s not as relaxing. I know that these days a lot of artists do most of their work digitally but I still prefer to do most of mine on paper first. It’s more relaxing. (Unless I’m making a lot mistakes. In that case I find myself wishing I was working with Photoshop and its undo capabilities.)

I colorized the background to give me a base color to work with.

Next I selected and colorized the different shapes of the Spectreman figure.


I added the logo and matched its colors to Spectreman’s. In order to make the figure stand out from the background I changed the color from red to blue. And then I posted it to the forums before I could spend any more time noodling on it. And, man, do I want to noodle on this.

Ah well. Lots to do. I’ll post when I can.

Playing with MISTY

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This is my contribution to the latest redesign thread over at the Whitechapel Forums.

The instructions were:

You are an artist/designer. You have to put together the cover for a comic called MISTY.

MISTY was a British comic for girls.

It included stories such as (and I’m making none of this up, the 70s and 80s in Britain were nightmarish):

Moonchild – Rosemary Black possesses the power of telekinesis, like her grandmother before her, as shown by a crescent moon on her forehead. Her harsh mother is jealous of the power and forbids Rosemary to use it – but temptation is getting stronger against the bully who picks on Rosemary…

School of the Lost – a boarding school that demands a special tribute for the ongoing success of parents who send their daughters to it.

Whistle and I’ll Come – a ghost dog companion.

The Four Faces of Eve – Eve Marshall is trying to unravel her true identity, but she seems to be the bits and pieces of four dead women.

The Cult of the Cat – Nicola Scott is destined to become a member of a cult who worship the Egyptian cat goddess Bast.

The Sentinels – Two empty tower blocks connect our world with a parallel world where Hitler conquered Britain in 1940.

Screaming Point! – the public hangman is also a resurrectionist who believes he can bring the dead back to life.

Winner Loses All – Sandy sells her soul to the Devil to save her alcoholic father.

You are told that the cover should feature at least one of these. But I don’t think anyone’s paying much attention to you, everyone in the office seems to be drinking heavily and crying quite a lot.

The added challenge I gave myself was to get the work done as quickly as possible. No subtle shading, no fancy colors, just the basic artwork.

Gator Fan

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The following three images are stages of an illustration I did for a friend of mine who is both a Man-Thing and a Gator fan. I did this drawing in October of 2010. I’d been working a lot at the Day Job and hadn’t been at my drawing table in quite a while. It was the first drawing I’d finished in months.

The first stage is the final inked drawing with the contrast adjusted to get good solid blacks.

The second stage is the scan of the final, marker toned art.

For the final version I combined both the first and second versions in Photoshop and set the layers to “multiply”. This gave me both the solid blacks I wanted and the variety of the marker tones of the original. Someday it might be fun to color this too.

Fantasmic Four

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This was done for the most recent redesign challenge at Whitechapel.

The Instructions –

You are an artist/designer. You have to put together the cover for a comic called THE FANTASTIC FOUR. It is issue 1 of this book.

You have been told that the comic is about four people who steal a spaceship, fly into space, get heavily irradiated by cosmic rays, and return to earth weirdly altered by their experience.

And that’s it. The bastards haven’t told you one more damn thing than that. Not a clue. They might all be women. It might be about the Indian space programme twenty years from now. For all you know this is a JG Ballard story, for christ’s sake…

It’s up to you what kind of company you’re at. What kind of comics you make. How you translate that description of The Fantastic Four. What era you’re in. Who you are, even. Go nuts with it.

So I decided I was a stoner artist doing underground comics in 1971 who very liberally reinterpreted the description of the contents of the comic. I did the basic artwork while I was waiting for Nizzibet at the dentist. And because my brain tends to keep working on an idea for days (or weeks or years) once the seed has been planted I’m finding myself coming up with stories I could do with these weirdos. Sigh. If I had all the time I needed to execute all my ideas (stupid or not) I’d live forever. Ideas are easy. Having the time to execute them is the real challenge.

Anyway, there are a lot of cool reinterpretations of the FF at the other side of that link above.

David Lynch’s Spider-Man

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This was done in November of 2010 for another redesign challenge at Warren Ellis’s Whitechapel forums.

INSTRUCTIONS:

You must design a poster for a movie called SPIDER-MAN directed by David Lynch. This is all you know.

That’s it. You have one week. Begin.

I’m not really a fan of David Lynch’s work. I really like some films. Others don’t really do anything for me. Looking at his IMDB listing I see that I actually haven’t seen most of his films. So this probably wasn’t the best challenge for me to take on.

Spider-Man was the first comic I regularly read as a kid so I felt compelled to try anyway. This was another case of not having a lot of time available. I did the illustration elements during a lunch break at the Day Job and then did a quick colorization and type treatment that evening.

Go to the first link above to see the work of a lot of other cool artists.

New Worlds Relaunch

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This was a quick design done for one of Warren Ellis’s redesign challenges over at his Whitechapel forums. The basics of the challenge were –

You are an artist/designer.

You have to put together the cover for #223 of something called NEW WORLDS.

You have been told that NEW WORLDS is the most groundbreaking, forward-looking, ambitious and original science fiction magazine in the world.

And that’s it.

This was back in May of 2010. I was being kept really busy at the Day Job and I was mostly exhausted by the time I got home. Getting a new illustration done, no matter how fun the project, was just not going to happen. So I cheated. I grabbed an old piece from my Epilogue.net gallery, colorized it and did a quick type treatment for the logo.

I like the results but there are many, much more impressive pieces to be found on the original thread.

The Oz Squad

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Simpler is often better, or at least easier, when it comes to cover designs. Especially when it comes to elements of cover designs. Compare and contrast these two sets of Oz Squad portraits.

The top set is richer in colors and tones. Each portrait tells (or at least suggests) a story. I like each one individually. As a group, however, they don’t really work. Each has elements that clash with at least one of the others. With Nick’s portrait the amount of action in the background makes that picture really stand out from the others. With the Lion’s portrait the lack of a background makes it seem a bit unfinished, like it hasn’t gotten the same attention as the others. Dorothy and the Scarecrow’s portraits go together pretty well. The lack of any human figures in their backgrounds make those backgrounds seem more harmonious even though one features a tornado and the other a sunlit field. A human figure would tend to draw the (human) eye to it so by not having a human in that background the figure in the foreground stands out more. That very harmony between the portraits of Dorothy and the Scarecrow makes Nick and the Lion’s portraits clash more.

The second set of portraits are, individually, less exciting than the first set but they definitely fit together better. They use the same background colors. They feature approximately the same portion of each character in each portrait. For the purposes they’re going to be used (elements on the cover of a book and not the main elements) they work pretty well.

Just for the fun of it I’m tossing in one more compare and contrast set.

And here, because of the simplicity of their design the portraits of the Scarecrow and the Lion go together best. With Dorothy and Nick the exciting backgrounds in the first portraits makes the lack of backgrounds in the second portraits really noticeable.

Anyway. Hopefully this lesson will stick with me the next time I work on a complex cover design.

Coloring Oz – Nick 4

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I quite like how this turned out. As an individual illustration I think the color and the composition work well. I like the tin Nick in the foreground and Rebecca, Amy and meat Nick acting out their destinies in the background.

Unfortunately I’d intended this portrait (and those of Dorothy, Scarecrow and Lion) to be part of a composition on the back cover of a book and this illustration doesn’t work with the rest of the art at all. The portraits of the other characters work okay but this one is just too darned busy. There’s too much action and the red in it clashes with the reds in the rest of the cover.

It looks like I’ll need to do new versions of these portraits. Keeping them simple this time. And working with the colors already established. Sigh.

Coloring Oz – Nick 3

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It’s not that I don’t have anything to say about Nick and the process of coloring this illustration. It’s that I’ve got a lot of paperwork to fill out in order to make sure I get into the spring classes at Seattle Central Community College. The paperwork from the college itself is minor – it’s the financial aid forms that eat time and kill the brain.