Back to the sketchbook. In 2002 Nizzibet and one of her brothers spent a little time working on redesigning some of his marketing materials and she asked me to take a stab at redesigning his logo. He’s a dance instructor and his logo includes a stylized illustration of people dancing. I spent 5 five years as an assistant in ballroom dance classes so you’d think this would have been an easy challenge. Dancing is, however, one of many activities that I’d never spent any time drawing. Easy in theory, requiring a lot of thought in practice. Many of the movements of a dance don’t look that interesting individually. Many of the dramatic moments are hard to capture without seeing someone performing them. And I had no models. Back in 2002 there were also a lot less visual resources on the net so a lot of drawing had to be done from my own memory and imagination.
Author Archives: skook
The Comic, Page 8
And thus the day is saved. No punching, no flashing bolts of energy, just mysterious technical expertise.
The Comic, Page 7
Deus Ex Machina!
The Comic, Page 6
The tension mounts ….
The Comic, Page 5
The blinking question mark is mostly a thing of the past. These days people call us about the spinning rainbow wheel of doom.
The Comic, Page 4
Things go from bad to worse.
The Comic, Page 3
Is the suspense killing you yet?
The Comic, Page 2
The boss did suggest/request minor changes to the script here and there but, for the most part, he was happy with the results. The main reason that the comic never got published was lack of time and changing attentions. I didn’t have a lot of time to draw at work with my other duties so work on the final art was slow to start and slower to progress. My boss isn’t good at working long form projects. Anything that can’t be pulled together in a few meetings or work sessions will get set aside for something more interesting. The more time that passed without concrete results the more his attention turned to marketing projects that could be produced and distributed quickly.
I’m okay with that. I prefer to use my art skills outside my day job.
The Comic, Page 1
I ended up writing the comic. The boss originally hired a writer (one of our clients) to script the story but her first draft was more absurdist and comedic than he expected. He was apparently looking for something more “realistic”. With superheroes.
I think there’s an inherent goofiness to superheroes. If they’re tackling “real” problems they lose a lot of their magic. Superheroes require super problems to justify their existence. The boss and I talked about it and, with guidelines, he told me to come up with a story. I think I probably tooks some ideas from the writer’s script (I don’t remember now) but I added plenty of my own and made things even more absurd. The image posted this morning is the first page of the script. I sketched the whole thing out so the boss could get an idea of what the final product might look like.
Beware the Squid
I have even less idea what this character’s story is than I did the monkey. If we’d needed a villain for a later story he probably would have been some representative of waste and sloppiness. Mostly I was just filling up another page. Dr. Bland and D.U.L.L. were going to be our heroes first adversaries.
