Continuing from yesterday – more Oblivion Seas character portraits.
On the left is the First Mate, if my memory serves me correctly, the narrator of the original novel. In the center is a merchant, one of the Glenn Carig’s passengers. On the right is the merchant’s secretary. Both the merchant and the secretary are my additions to the story.
Today’s, tomorrow’s and the day after tomorrow’s character portraits are all from 2000 or 2001. I was playing around with taking the Sargasso cartoon series idea and turning it into a comic of some sort. Sargasso was inspired by William Hope Hodgson’s The Boats of the “Glen Carrig”. “Inspired by” meaning that I took the general premise of the novel (shipwreck survivors encountering trapped ships and weird monsters in a sea of weed) and headed in a different direction.
Not too different a direction really. I thought the general premise was great but I wanted more weird creatures and more identifiable human characters. Most of the sailors in the story are nameless and even those with names don’t have much in the way of personality.
These portraits were done help me think of characters to populate the story with. I often find it easier to come up with character names and personalities after I’ve come up with character appearances. I don’t think I got as far as naming any of these gentlemen. The big guy on the left would be one of the regular sailors, the bearded fellow would probably be the bosun, and the young chap would be a cabin boy.
The final three monsters (of nine) from 2000 or 2001.
The creature on the left is some sort of giant leech thing, inspired somewhat by the Flukeman in The X-Files and the giant leeches in Attack of the Giant Leeches. Giant Leeches freaked me out as a kid because it was one of the first movies I saw in which the monsters weren’t all destroyed by the end of the story. They were still out there, waiting to suck again.
In the middle is a version of the Creature from the Black Lagoon.
On the right is a Mummy. The Mummy is one of the “classic” monsters that I’ve never really understood the appeal of. Sure, if I were stalked by a relentless, reanimated corpse in real life I’d be plenty scared. But I’d be scared if I were attacked by giant flesh eating bunnies too. Lots of things that would scary in real life are not so scary in the movies. One of these days I’ll have to watch the original Karloff film to see what the appeal is. If nothing else Karloff is always entertaining.
I’m guessing these three monster portraits were done in 2000 or 2001. I know they were done at about the same time as the nine portraits of women that were posted over the previous three days. So those portraits might have been done in 2000 or 2001.
How do I know that these monsters were drawn before the women. Because, when I’m practicing, I always draw monsters first. Always. Some people sketch fruit. Some people draw sexy babes. I draw monsters to loosen up.
From right to left we have: a vampire, a werewolf and a zombie. But that was obvious wasn’t it?
The three women portraited today (the portraits themselves having been done in 2000) are from my own fiction. The first is Lili Veracruz from Misspent Youths. The middle and last are Sister D and the Jade Buddha, respectively, from Bugfuck Palace.
Three more cartoon portraits of women done in 2000. The first two are one-offs, done without a specific character in mind. The last one is my version of Cruela De Vil. But that’s obvious, right?
I am not going to complain about how much I’ve been working. I am not going to babble on about the Day Job. I am not going to bore you with the details of data entry or finicky Ustream feeds or our customer’s failure to understand that we do not control the internet or their computer.
Instead I’m just going to post these three portraits from 2000. They are not from any particular project. I was doing them as part of series of practice drawings. I do a lot of practice drawings. Or I try to. I haven’t gotten a lot of drawings, practice or otherwise, done recently. But I’m not going to say any more about that.
This the illustration that grew out of the sketch I posted yesterday. It’s not bad but, honestly, I think would have done a better piece (and finished it faster) if I’d done the whole thing in pen and ink or in pencil. I spent a ridiculously long time playing around in Photoshop trying to get the look and effects I wanted. Still, I learned a lot in the process. (Mostly that trying to do everything in Photoshop was doing it the hard way.)
The Day Job has been keeping me pretty busy. Busy enough that I’ve honestly been forgetting to post. It’s a lame excuse even if it’s true.
This is the original sketch for the first illustration I did for The Black Seal #1 back in 2003. I’d learned just enough Photoshop that I deluded myself into thinking I could use the program to create an illustration from this sketch. Tomorrow I’ll post the result and you can decide whether I succeeded.
