I submitted this image to a recent Remake/Remodel challenge at the Whitechapel forums. The hand holding the CD case is a creative commons image that I found here –

The original image, outside the CD case looks like this –

 The Little Nemo in Slumberland comic strip has had a weird influence on me.

On the one hand it’s a masterpiece of comic art. Each page is beautifully composed and drawn. Each panel is filled with detail and nifty ideas. Describe any episode and it sounds like the epitome of weirdness.

Which brings me to the other hand – I can’t read more than one or two strips at a time. The strip was created when the vocabulary and pacing of comics was still being developed and, while it’s easy to see the action based on looking at the page, trying to read the captions and word balloons is kind of painful. They’re badly placed and just physically hard to read. The characters aren’t engaging. The punchline of each strip is Nemo waking up.

So I find myself picking up my Nemo collection, reading a strip and putting it down again in frustration that there’s … not … something more? It seems silly to complain that something is just a pretty piece of art but I read comics for stories and I never feel like I get a story.

So, every so often, in my copious spare time, I think about doing a version of Nemo that would have the weird dreamstuff that is so attractive and feature a story that engages me at the same time. The image about isn’t related to any of the ideas I’ve had so far. None of them are distilled enough yet to be represented by a single image. I just knew I wanted to contribute to the challenge so I let my subconscious go to work and that’s what I came up with.

A pretty image with no story behind it. Sigh.

Warren Ellis is no longer the master of the Whitechapel Forums but some traditions remain. This is my contribution to the recent Remake/Remodel challenge – the Crimson Clown. I’d hoped to make a more detailed contribution but time and other projects make me keep it simple. Now that my internship is finished I’m intending to contribute more regularly. It’s good practice to execute an idea as quickly and simply as possible.

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.

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.

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.