This a pinup I did in 2003 or 2004 for Greyduck a graphic novel about giant monsters done in unique art style. Until this morning, when I went a-googling, I didn’t realize that this book had seen print. I don’t know if my illustration actually made it into the book. I’m going to have to write to Mr. Dang and see. Or buy the book.
Greyduck is the long necked thing. The other beast got invented for the illustration.
Over the years I’ve complained about Epilogue.net rejecting this or that picture. Given that they are a free service I’m not really that upset. Free has its price and if I don’t like it I can go somewhere else. Or get off my lazy butt and build my own danged website.
I’m not saying that I can always tell when one of my illustrations is bad. Usually it’s that I can’t tell if an illustration is really good. That’s why I have other people make the final picks whenever I put together any sort of portfolio. I’m more likely to see the flaws than the merits of an illustration.
Which brings me to today’s post. I did this one intending to post the finished version to Epilogue. But after working on it diligently I finally decided that it … well … kinda sucked. And that nothing I did to it would make it better.
Often times I’ll do an illustration, not like it much and then look at it again years later and find its merits. This one was done in 2003 or 2004 and it still looks like the only way to improve it would be to start from over from scratch.
Somewhere on the external hard drive that I use for storage there should be a finished version of this illustration. I originally did it for my Epilogue.net gallery but it was rejected. I no longer remember the exact reason. Too blurry?
Eh. Whatever. At the time I was pretty annoyed. Now I pretty much expect my submissions to get rejected. Even ones that were commissioned and accepted for publication. Most get accepted but I’ve learned not to expect it.
Here’s the pre-photoshopped art for A Burrabb Bead Crafter.
The Monster of Piedras Blancas was a big shocker for me as a kid. It featured a creepy looking monster, at least one onscreen severed head and a dead child. I’d seen other movies with creepy looking monsters but I’m pretty sure this was the first I’d seen with a severed head and a kid killing monster. In the past if monsters killed kids it was accidental i.e. the kid got stepped on while the monster trashed the city. Usually children survived monster attacks.
This is the pre-Photoshopped version of my revision of the creature. The final version can be found in my Epilogue.net gallery.
Here is another of the original illustrations I did to build up my gallery at Epilogue.net. This one is a new interpretation of the alien from The Thing from Another World. Since the creature is a mobile sentient vegetable I wanted him (it) to look, well, look like a sentient mobile vegetable. As I wrote elsewhere at the time –
My reworking here was fairly easy. The original monster looks a lot like the Universal Frankenstein monster and it’s supposed to be a kind of ambulatory plant. The biggest thing I had to think about was why a plant would wear clothes. And what would they be made of?
Alien spider silk. With the spiders still in residence. They even repair the outfit when it tears – take a look at the group working on The Thing’s right arm.
And it wears the silk to retain moisture during its travels.
I’m a fan of both versions of The Thing. I don’t really consider the 1980s version a remake. It’s actually a more faithful adaptation of John Campbell’s original story Who Goes There?. Both films use the story’s idea of a thawed alien menacing an isolated base but the 1950’s version chances the nature of the alien and therefore the nature of the story. The final illustration can be found here.
In 2003 I set up a gallery at Epilogue.net. Of course, a gallery isn’t much good unless it’s got art in it so I got to work creating new illustrations to post. At the time I didn’t have much work that I thought would fit. I had a lot of sketchbooks but most of my finished work was either comics or Labor of Love designs or so old that I didn’t want to post it.
This is a scan of the original art for A Hot Dry Hunger, one of the illustrations in my B-Movie Re-Imagination Project series. BRIP is my occasional foray into redesigning the monsters of old, usually low budget, movies. I try to retain as much of the original design of the creature as possible while letting the design evolve in ways it couldn’t originally because the original costume had to be created cheaply and fit on a human actor.
This illustration is from an environmental education project that Labor of Love put together in 1999 for a major mining company. I have no idea how much of the project was actually implemented. The budget we were given to work with was pretty darned small. We did a series of posters and handouts designed to educate and remind employees of safe practices in handling hazardous wastes. I think this illustration was part of a test packet. Testees were to circle all the negligent practices or trouble spots they could find.
I’m not sure of the vintage of this piece. Like most of the sketches I turned up it’s undated. I’m guessing it was done in 2003 when I was thinking of doing a site of regularly posted illustrations set in the Sentient 39 “universe”. I’m guessing that more because of the size of the illustration than the subject matter. I don’t know what’s going on here.
Moving may be a pain but there’s at least one thing that I can appreciate about this one – I now have access to a bunch of my old art that was stuck in boxes. That were buried under other boxes.
One of the other tricks about living in a new place (and working at a new job) is rebuilding habits. I forget how much I rely on my habits to get things done until I have to come up with new ones. Posting here is one of my habits so I’m glad to finally be able to be doing it on a regular basis.
This sketch is undated but I’m guessing it’s from 2000 or so. This fellow looks like a character from the early incarnation of King Roach – a military operative assigned to capture KR.
