Gator Fan

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The following three images are stages of an illustration I did for a friend of mine who is both a Man-Thing and a Gator fan. I did this drawing in October of 2010. I’d been working a lot at the Day Job and hadn’t been at my drawing table in quite a while. It was the first drawing I’d finished in months.

The first stage is the final inked drawing with the contrast adjusted to get good solid blacks.

The second stage is the scan of the final, marker toned art.

For the final version I combined both the first and second versions in Photoshop and set the layers to “multiply”. This gave me both the solid blacks I wanted and the variety of the marker tones of the original. Someday it might be fun to color this too.

Fantasmic Four

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This was done for the most recent redesign challenge at Whitechapel.

The Instructions –

You are an artist/designer. You have to put together the cover for a comic called THE FANTASTIC FOUR. It is issue 1 of this book.

You have been told that the comic is about four people who steal a spaceship, fly into space, get heavily irradiated by cosmic rays, and return to earth weirdly altered by their experience.

And that’s it. The bastards haven’t told you one more damn thing than that. Not a clue. They might all be women. It might be about the Indian space programme twenty years from now. For all you know this is a JG Ballard story, for christ’s sake…

It’s up to you what kind of company you’re at. What kind of comics you make. How you translate that description of The Fantastic Four. What era you’re in. Who you are, even. Go nuts with it.

So I decided I was a stoner artist doing underground comics in 1971 who very liberally reinterpreted the description of the contents of the comic. I did the basic artwork while I was waiting for Nizzibet at the dentist. And because my brain tends to keep working on an idea for days (or weeks or years) once the seed has been planted I’m finding myself coming up with stories I could do with these weirdos. Sigh. If I had all the time I needed to execute all my ideas (stupid or not) I’d live forever. Ideas are easy. Having the time to execute them is the real challenge.

Anyway, there are a lot of cool reinterpretations of the FF at the other side of that link above.

David Lynch’s Spider-Man

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This was done in November of 2010 for another redesign challenge at Warren Ellis’s Whitechapel forums.

INSTRUCTIONS:

You must design a poster for a movie called SPIDER-MAN directed by David Lynch. This is all you know.

That’s it. You have one week. Begin.

I’m not really a fan of David Lynch’s work. I really like some films. Others don’t really do anything for me. Looking at his IMDB listing I see that I actually haven’t seen most of his films. So this probably wasn’t the best challenge for me to take on.

Spider-Man was the first comic I regularly read as a kid so I felt compelled to try anyway. This was another case of not having a lot of time available. I did the illustration elements during a lunch break at the Day Job and then did a quick colorization and type treatment that evening.

Go to the first link above to see the work of a lot of other cool artists.

New Worlds Relaunch

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This was a quick design done for one of Warren Ellis’s redesign challenges over at his Whitechapel forums. The basics of the challenge were –

You are an artist/designer.

You have to put together the cover for #223 of something called NEW WORLDS.

You have been told that NEW WORLDS is the most groundbreaking, forward-looking, ambitious and original science fiction magazine in the world.

And that’s it.

This was back in May of 2010. I was being kept really busy at the Day Job and I was mostly exhausted by the time I got home. Getting a new illustration done, no matter how fun the project, was just not going to happen. So I cheated. I grabbed an old piece from my Epilogue.net gallery, colorized it and did a quick type treatment for the logo.

I like the results but there are many, much more impressive pieces to be found on the original thread.

The Oz Squad

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Simpler is often better, or at least easier, when it comes to cover designs. Especially when it comes to elements of cover designs. Compare and contrast these two sets of Oz Squad portraits.

The top set is richer in colors and tones. Each portrait tells (or at least suggests) a story. I like each one individually. As a group, however, they don’t really work. Each has elements that clash with at least one of the others. With Nick’s portrait the amount of action in the background makes that picture really stand out from the others. With the Lion’s portrait the lack of a background makes it seem a bit unfinished, like it hasn’t gotten the same attention as the others. Dorothy and the Scarecrow’s portraits go together pretty well. The lack of any human figures in their backgrounds make those backgrounds seem more harmonious even though one features a tornado and the other a sunlit field. A human figure would tend to draw the (human) eye to it so by not having a human in that background the figure in the foreground stands out more. That very harmony between the portraits of Dorothy and the Scarecrow makes Nick and the Lion’s portraits clash more.

The second set of portraits are, individually, less exciting than the first set but they definitely fit together better. They use the same background colors. They feature approximately the same portion of each character in each portrait. For the purposes they’re going to be used (elements on the cover of a book and not the main elements) they work pretty well.

Just for the fun of it I’m tossing in one more compare and contrast set.

And here, because of the simplicity of their design the portraits of the Scarecrow and the Lion go together best. With Dorothy and Nick the exciting backgrounds in the first portraits makes the lack of backgrounds in the second portraits really noticeable.

Anyway. Hopefully this lesson will stick with me the next time I work on a complex cover design.

Coloring Oz – Nick 4

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I quite like how this turned out. As an individual illustration I think the color and the composition work well. I like the tin Nick in the foreground and Rebecca, Amy and meat Nick acting out their destinies in the background.

Unfortunately I’d intended this portrait (and those of Dorothy, Scarecrow and Lion) to be part of a composition on the back cover of a book and this illustration doesn’t work with the rest of the art at all. The portraits of the other characters work okay but this one is just too darned busy. There’s too much action and the red in it clashes with the reds in the rest of the cover.

It looks like I’ll need to do new versions of these portraits. Keeping them simple this time. And working with the colors already established. Sigh.

Coloring Oz – Nick 3

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It’s not that I don’t have anything to say about Nick and the process of coloring this illustration. It’s that I’ve got a lot of paperwork to fill out in order to make sure I get into the spring classes at Seattle Central Community College. The paperwork from the college itself is minor – it’s the financial aid forms that eat time and kill the brain.

Coloring Oz – Nick 1

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Nick Chopper could be considered a tragic figure. He’s a man who, piece by piece, had all his human parts replaced with tin substitutes. A witch enchanted his axe and it chopped off his parts. A tinsmith fashioned replacements for the missing limbs. Eventually all of Nick got excised and he became a completely tin man.

In the original Oz novels Nick is pretty satisfied with that. He felt the lack of a heart for a while but the Wizard gave him a suitable substitute. There’s no tragedy to that version of Nick. He and the Scarecrow hang out, often congratulating themselves that they aren’t subject to the need to eat or sleep or breathe like ordinary meat people.

The Nick in Oz Squad? He’s had a few more bumps than the Nick in the original novels. He doesn’t seem to miss being human much more than the earlier Nick did. At least not most of the time.

Coloring Oz – Lion 4

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And here is the final colored version of the Lion for the secret Oz Squad project. With the other character portraits I’ve done in this series I’ve put some scene in the background that refers to that character’s past. Except for a little bit of green, suggesting the forest, I didn’t do that for the Lion. Partly that’s because the Lion’s past isn’t described in any detail. (I could have draw him pouncing on Toto but I honestly didn’t think of that until just now.) Partly I wanted him to fill up the illustration space to demonstrate his size. The Lion isn’t some little Earth lion. He’s huge, the size of a horse. Not a creature you want to mess with.