After revisiting the priests I decided that I wanted to sketch some other characters I hadn’t done in a long time. Out came Johnny Petrol, Jack Lightning, Davey Thunder and Rabbit Ears the Elf.
Category Archives: 2006
Evolution
The thing at the top is one of the Suessaliens.
The three creatures at the bottom of this image are the same three from my 1988 sketchbook. Only the way I depict them has changed in the passing eighteen years. The human and burrabb priests still compete to save the souls of the natives. The natives still blissfully ignore them.
Suessaliens
More aliens from the Dr. Suess planet.
Dunak
In seventh grade English class we had 15 minutes of free reading each period. Since I read all the time on my own anyway I wanted to do something different. I asked if I could spend those 15 minutes writing a science fiction novel. I got down 167 pages before the end of the year. I’m sure I’ve got the manuscript in a box somewhere. I’m pretty sure that there’s little salvageable in it except for Dunak and his intelligent ship.
Dunak was a blue furred creature out exploring the galaxy. I’ve redesigned him a few times since seventh grade but he always looks basically cute.
The goofy looking thing on the left is not related to Dunak. He/she/it is an inhabitant of a world that looks like it was designed by Dr. Suess. As interpreted by me since no one draws like Dr. Suess.
The Black Destroyer
I did this sketch right after reading the first quarter of A.E. Van Vogt’s Voyage of the Space Beagle. The book is divided into four parts; each part featuring an encounter with a different, dangerous alien species. The creature here, the Coeurl, infiltrates the ship and kills a few members of the crew before the humans manage to trick it back off the ship. Voyage is one of the classics of the space exploration genre of science fiction and, unfortunately, like many old science fiction novels it’s a bit hard to read now. I’ve already encountered many of its more interesting ideas in more recent SF novels (or comics or movies or TV). Without the novelty of new aliens and weird concepts we’re left with flat characters and outmoded science. That can be fun to read as an exploration of 1950s nerd culture but it’s not so engrossing that I want to do it very often.
Serious Women
Most women are beautiful and their beauty comes in a wide variety. These sketches are examples of me trying to represent some of that variety with pencil and paper.
And, hey, a date. It only took me a few decades to think that dating my sketches might be a good idea.
Designing George, Part 15
Hey! It’s George!
Now that his design is finalized the client mostly just comes back to me when another George is needed. They tell me what they want George to be doing and I do up some sketches of what that might look like. They then pick and choose what elements they like and I do up a new sketch combining those elements. In this case they requested an illustration of George looking thoughtful.
Closet Monster
This is my version of the closet monster from The Brain That Wouldn’t Die, a movie that I’ve yet to see. I don’t watch television and my movie watching is limited to a rented DVD once, maybe twice a week. I get to the theatre once a month, maybe. When choosing a DVD for rental I try to choose a film that can be enjoyed by the rest of the audience at home. Cheesy b-movies from the fifties and sixties aren’t very high on the list of potential choices. It’s a tragedy.
The creature here, if what I’ve read in plot descriptions is correct, is the amalgamation of the leftover body parts from the mad doctor’s previous experiments.
Edison Frankenstein
On this I’ve got three attempts at designing a Frankenstein monster based on the Edison Frankenstein. At the time I did these sketches wasn’t able to find much photo reference to the creature. The best I could find is the one that’s the first image on the other side of that link. Unfortunately the versions I had were pretty small and blurry. I’ve since seen the film on youtube and found out that my local video store has a copy. If I were to draw the creature again I’d rent the DVD and stop the film on a regular basis for quick sketches.
The other creatures on this page are:
In the upper right, the closet monster from The Brain That Wouldn’t Die.
Under the closet monster is a version of the Peter Cushing Frankenstein with a version of the Christopher Lee creature under the Edison creature’s arm.
At the left, midpage, is a version of the David Prowse creature from Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell.
And under that is an exaggerated version of the Universal Frankenstein.
Teenage Frankenstein
This Frankenstein is more “inspired” by the creature in I Was A Teenage Frankenstein than “based on” said creature. I haven’t seen the film yet but I’ve been looking at photos and paintings of the makeup since I was a kid. I’m pretty sure that the monster in the film isn’t a motorcycle riding thug but that’s what my imagination called up when “Teenage Frankenstein in the 1950s” got tossed into the machinery.
