Category Archives: Uncategorized

Origin of My Obsessions

Posted on by

Amazing Spider-Man 103Amazing Spider-Man #103 is the first comic book I ever bought. It’s also the both the first story and the first comic I can remember reading. In all likelihood my mom bought it for me but I know I bought each subsequent issue myself. My brother and I got small monthly allowances and most of mine went to buying Spider-Man each month. The date on the cover is December 1971. Since magazines post dated their issues by about four months that issue was probably on the stands in September. I would have been a little more than seven years old. I’d obviously read other stories prior to this one – after all, I knew how to read. But this is the story that made its mark. If you look at the type of things I draw and the sorts of stories I read then Spider-Man #103 looks like a big sign post pointing me toward those interests.

I might have known who Spider-Man was before I read this comic. The Spider-Man cartoon series had played on television from 1967 to 1970 and it’s possible I saw episodes of it. I don’t remember. I do know I hadn’t read a Spider-Man comic before this issue.

It’s a strange one to have started with. Most of Spider-Man’s previous adventures took place in New York City where he fought various super powered criminals. This story (running in issues 103 and 104) removed Spidey from his usual stomping grounds to the Savage Land, a Lost World in Antarctica inhabited by dinosaurs and other prehistoric beasts. There he encounters a giant monster, the survivor of a crashed alien ship. It’s a sort of a retelling of King Kong without the final act of Kong getting dragged back to New York. I hadn’t seen King Kong yet so the story was new to me.

After this story Spider-Man returned to fighting supervillains in New York. I kept reading his adventures until sometime in the 1990s. I read a lot of other comics about a lot of other superheroes but Spidey remained my favorite. He wasn’t so powerful that his victories came easily. He was smart. He was poor. His enemies were weirdos – the Green Goblin, Doctor Octopus, Hammerhead, Man-Wolf, the Vulture, the Sandman and so many others. Eventually I gave up reading monthly comics. I no longer had the budget or the time to get to the comic store on regular basis so I didn’t miss the latest issues. I haven’t bought an issue in over 15 years now. While I occasionally look at collected editions of recent Spider-Man stories at the library I don’t pay a lot of attention to the character any more.

I’ve still got that first comic. I haven’t read it in years. I’m almost afraid to read it again. It’s unlikely to hold up as well in reality as it does in my memory. It’s in one of the 18 long boxes of comics that survived the culling I did of my collection back in 2004. Did so many of my interests start with that comic or did it just embody them?

I already loved dinosaurs. This story had them. It had a lost world where they still survived. It had ape men and ruined temples. It had jungles. It had a misunderstood monster. It had a giant monster. It had mysterious aliens. It had a jungle man and his faithful saber-toothed cat. It had a superhero who couldn’t fly. For some reason, very few of the superheroes I’ve invented can fly.

It didn’t have examples of all my obsessions. It would have been a really messy story if it had. But that’s okay. It would be sad if I had developed all my obsessions before I was eight.

 

Three Smiles, No Winks

Posted on by

Three SmilesThis creature and the Muck Thing from a couple of days ago were drawn last month – December 2011. I have a group of friends that likes to get together every few weeks, have lunch and draw. Some days I just do random sketches. Some days I manage a finished drawing or two.

When I’m working for publication I usually like to ink the work with a brush and maybe use a pen to fill in details. My brush and inkpot don’t travel well so, when I’m away from home I ink my work with Sharpie and Micron brand felt markers. I use the Microns for the line work and the Sharpies to fill in large areas of black. The main lines are done with an .08 Micron. I use .05, .03, and .02 for variety and finishing details.

A Muck Thing

Posted on by

Muck ThingI have a fondness for certain specific types of monsters.

Giant Monsters. That is, any type of critter that’s 15 feet tall or taller. I’m not very discriminating about the bigger monsters. That size range covers everybody from the original King Kong to the Fifty Foot Woman to The Deadly Mantis to Godzilla. Screw the cube square law. I love over-sized monsters.

Fishman Monsters. The Monster of Piedras Blancas. The Creature from the Black Lagoon. The Humanoids from the Deep. The residents of Innsmouth. Any critter that’s an unholy cross between man and seafood makes me happy. (Except traditional mermaids. I’m not sure why. That top-half-human, bottom-half-fish arrangement just seems silly to me. I know that makes no sense.)

Frankensteins. My love for Frankenstein comes later than for the previous two categories. I had to read the novel before I really became interested. Since I’ve read a lot of sequels to/alternate versions of Mary Shelley’s novel and I’m working my way through various movie versions. I certainly have fun drawing versions of the creature.

Lovecraftian Things From Beyond. Not just the Cthulhu Mythos. Science fiction horror where the horror is a thing that exists outside human understanding? I’m not really sure how to describe it.

Sasquatches. I’d love it if there really is a Bigfoot, Yeti, Orang Pendak or other upright ape still wandering the earth. There aren’t a lot of good bigfoot movies but I’ve got a small library of entertaining novels and non-fiction books on the big fellow.

Muck/Swamp Monsters. Which finally brings me to the subject of this post. Fishmen and Sasquatches often hang out in swamps but they aren’t the same thing. A good swamp monster is at least part plant. There aren’t a lot of examples. Most of them are from comics. The Heap. Swamp Thing. Man-Thing. And … not a lot of other examples. In prose there’s Theodore Sturgeon’s It. In movies – bad adaptions of Swamp Thing and Man-Thing. There was a swamp monster in an episode of The Night Stalker.

I’m not really a plant person. I don’t have a green thumb. Give me a plant and I’ll show you a bunch of dead sticks in a pot a few weeks later.

I’ve never read any Heap stories. As far as I know there aren’t any collections of the old comics available.

I love the look of the Man-Thing but honestly I haven’t read many Man-Thing comics. The poor guy is mindless. It’s hard to root for him when you can’t even play fetch with him.

I read the original Swamp Thing series when I was a kid and a good chunk of the second series when it was being published. Those were good comics but it’s been a long time since I read any ongoing comic book series.

Yet I count Swamp Monsters among my favorite night bumping things. They’re green. They’re quiet. They usually don’t want to eat you. They like to play in the mud. They can’t drown. And they’re fun to draw.

The Monster Men

Posted on by

This will be your only warning. I’m going to post images of naked people every now and then. I don’t expect to post any deliberate pornography or erotica but there will be folks without clothes. If you were a regular reader of the Skook sketch blog then you probably won’t be surprised.
It’s: Frankenstein in the Jungle!

Or maybe: Thirteen Frankenstein Monsters!

Or perhaps: Frankenstein vs Pirates!

Or: Mad scientist attempts to build the perfect mate for his daughter!

Tarzan meets Frankenstein with Pirates! Maybe?

Any way I describe it, The Monster Men by Edgar Rice Burroughs sounds like fun. And maybe, if you hadn’t read Frankenstein or Tarzan, you’d think it was a rip snorting adventure. It’s certainly got a lot of action. Unfortunately, for me, there was far too much running-around-being-chased-by-pirates action and not enough mad-science-monster action.

The idea behind the novel is more interesting than the novel that it inspired. One of these days I’d love to give the book a rewrite. There’s actually a lot that I think works. I just think it needs to be crazier than it is. The monster men don’t get nearly enough page time. And the ending is a cop out.

Perhaps I could start by doing an illustrated edition. In my copious spare time.

The above sketch is a version of Jack, the 13th Monster Man. Behind him is Virginia Maxon, the daughter of the scientist who creates the Monster Men. And behind them both is another one of the Monsters. Burroughs leaves most of the creatures undescribed. That leaves a lot of opportunity for an illustrator to have fun.

At The End of the First Week of the New Year

Posted on by

Thanks to the instructions at Mamablogga I’ve transferred all the old posts from the original Skook sketchblog. I imagine that there will be some clean up to make sure that they all work for this site but that’s going to be a long term project. I’m posting larger images here than I did on the old blog so the older entries look a little puny. WordPress (which is what I use for this site) has post identifiers of both “categories” and “tags”. I’m not sure what the difference is but all my older blogspot post tags come through as categories. I’m not sure what if, anything I’ll do with that. With seven years of posts to go through, any revising done will take … more time than I want to think about. If you happen to find any posts that need fixing please post a comment or send me an email to let me know.

I’ve also been adding links over in the sidebar. I started with sites I visit regularly (that is, at least twice a month) and now I’m added sites that seem interesting. I’m open to suggestions. I tend to get stuck in patterns of subject matter and it’s refreshing to be pointed in a different direction now and then.

In physical world news I’m back in school after the Holiday break. I’m taking English Composition, Introduction to Computer Hardware and Introduction to Database Design. Without a math class (and the attendant homework) this quarter  I’m expecting the work load to be lighter.

To compensate for the lighter school schedule, I’ve signed up for Codeacademy, a free online coding program. I could use extra practice writing code. I attempted the first lesson yesterday and choked up before I was able to finish. I’ll give it another try today. Practice. Practice.

Over at Oz-Squad.com we posted the first chapter of Lizzie the Girl Knight. We’ll have a new chapter for you on the first of every month. Stay tuned!

Little Red: Detail Work

Posted on by

Once areas of flat color have been laid down I can work on adjusting the details. If I don’t like a color I can adjust it. I use the colorization feature of Photoshop to change tones and shadows from their original grays to whatever hue fits best with main color of that area of the illustration.

I’m not quite finished with this illustration. I have a few small areas where I need to add or adjust colors but it felt done enough that when Nizzibet asked me to send her a copy I was happy to do so. Little did I realize that she ulterior motives. She used it for a present for a friend’s birthday.

New Hat Cup

I think it turned out pretty well. Any further adjustments I make will probably only be noticed by me. And any changes I make just make this cup more of a unique object.

Little Red: Flat Color

Posted on by

Laying down flat colors is the least interesting part of creating an illustration. Sometimes it’s fun but mostly it’s a matter of making sure that you’ve filled in all the little spots where you want a certain color or made sure that all the large areas are outlined properly so that you can use the paint bucket tool to fill the middle. I put all the colors on a separate layer than the black and white art. You could do your coloring on the original art layer but making any changes if you make a mistake would be next to impossible.

Little Red: Shadows and Tones

Posted on by

I Needs a New Hat GraytonesI prefer to finish as much of an illustration as possible on paper and save the computer for touch ups and special effects. I really like having a flat file filled with with completed drawings. I’ve used gray tone markers to shade the ground and Little Red’s skin. I used a B pencil for the fur and her dress. If I were intending this illustration to be black and white I might consider it done at this point.

This is a color piece, however, and color means Photoshop. I’ve got a shoe box filled with colored felt markers that rarely get a work out. I save them for the illustrations that I plan to give to people. When I’m creating an illustration for print or the web I do the color in Photoshop. It’s not because I think the program is better at color than the markers. I use it because it allows me to change my mind.

Tomorrow: Flat Colors

Little Red Inks

Posted on by

I Needs a New Hat InkedYesterday I posted the pencil drawing/sketch of this illustration. Today I’ve posted the inked version. I sometimes do illustrations that are just pencil drawings but, for the most part, I like to ink at least part of the drawing. Ink gives good strong lines and areas of black that pencils generally don’t. That helps define the illustration and give the rest of the art something to react against.

If I were doing a simple black and white piece I’d ink in a few more details with a pen and be done but this is a color illustration so there’s a lot more to do.

Tomorrow: Shadow and Tone