Somewhere on the external hard drive that I use for storage there should be a finished version of this illustration. I originally did it for my Epilogue.net gallery but it was rejected. I no longer remember the exact reason. Too blurry?
Eh. Whatever. At the time I was pretty annoyed. Now I pretty much expect my submissions to get rejected. Even ones that were commissioned and accepted for publication. Most get accepted but I’ve learned not to expect it.
Here’s the pre-photoshopped art for A Burrabb Bead Crafter.
The Monster of Piedras Blancas was a big shocker for me as a kid. It featured a creepy looking monster, at least one onscreen severed head and a dead child. I’d seen other movies with creepy looking monsters but I’m pretty sure this was the first I’d seen with a severed head and a kid killing monster. In the past if monsters killed kids it was accidental i.e. the kid got stepped on while the monster trashed the city. Usually children survived monster attacks.
This is the pre-Photoshopped version of my revision of the creature. The final version can be found in my Epilogue.net gallery.
Here is another of the original illustrations I did to build up my gallery at Epilogue.net. This one is a new interpretation of the alien from The Thing from Another World. Since the creature is a mobile sentient vegetable I wanted him (it) to look, well, look like a sentient mobile vegetable. As I wrote elsewhere at the time –
My reworking here was fairly easy. The original monster looks a lot like the Universal Frankenstein monster and it’s supposed to be a kind of ambulatory plant. The biggest thing I had to think about was why a plant would wear clothes. And what would they be made of?
Alien spider silk. With the spiders still in residence. They even repair the outfit when it tears – take a look at the group working on The Thing’s right arm.
And it wears the silk to retain moisture during its travels.
I’m a fan of both versions of The Thing. I don’t really consider the 1980s version a remake. It’s actually a more faithful adaptation of John Campbell’s original story Who Goes There?. Both films use the story’s idea of a thawed alien menacing an isolated base but the 1950’s version chances the nature of the alien and therefore the nature of the story. The final illustration can be found here.
In 2003 I set up a gallery at Epilogue.net. Of course, a gallery isn’t much good unless it’s got art in it so I got to work creating new illustrations to post. At the time I didn’t have much work that I thought would fit. I had a lot of sketchbooks but most of my finished work was either comics or Labor of Love designs or so old that I didn’t want to post it.
This is a scan of the original art for A Hot Dry Hunger, one of the illustrations in my B-Movie Re-Imagination Project series. BRIP is my occasional foray into redesigning the monsters of old, usually low budget, movies. I try to retain as much of the original design of the creature as possible while letting the design evolve in ways it couldn’t originally because the original costume had to be created cheaply and fit on a human actor.
This illustration is from an environmental education project that Labor of Love put together in 1999 for a major mining company. I have no idea how much of the project was actually implemented. The budget we were given to work with was pretty darned small. We did a series of posters and handouts designed to educate and remind employees of safe practices in handling hazardous wastes. I think this illustration was part of a test packet. Testees were to circle all the negligent practices or trouble spots they could find.
I’m not sure of the vintage of this piece. Like most of the sketches I turned up it’s undated. I’m guessing it was done in 2003 when I was thinking of doing a site of regularly posted illustrations set in the Sentient 39 “universe”. I’m guessing that more because of the size of the illustration than the subject matter. I don’t know what’s going on here.
Moving may be a pain but there’s at least one thing that I can appreciate about this one – I now have access to a bunch of my old art that was stuck in boxes. That were buried under other boxes.
One of the other tricks about living in a new place (and working at a new job) is rebuilding habits. I forget how much I rely on my habits to get things done until I have to come up with new ones. Posting here is one of my habits so I’m glad to finally be able to be doing it on a regular basis.
This sketch is undated but I’m guessing it’s from 2000 or so. This fellow looks like a character from the early incarnation of King Roach – a military operative assigned to capture KR.
Normally I’d wait until a book is closer to publication before I posted the cover art but since Adam Crossingham, the editor, has already posted this at Yog-Sothoth.com I figured it was okay for me to do it here. This is illustration is for Lost in the Lights by Jeff Moeller. He outlines the book here.
We’re in the new apartment. We’re done with the old apartment. I’ve got wireless hooked up on my computer. Most of the books are still in boxes and probably will be for months. There’s all kinds of recycling that needs to be gotten rid of as well as a table and a dresser that died in the truck on the way over from the old apartment.
The business for which I’ve had a day job for the last few years was officially sold today. I’ll be helping the new owners figure out how things work throughout January but mostly I’ll be doing my new job. Which is a lot like the old job only more chaotic. I’ll probably go into it a bit as time goes on and I get more organized.
I also got a cover done for Sixtystone Press. It was a rush job that turned out much better than I expected. I’ll post that tomorrow. Over Christmas Nizzibet mentioned to someone that I would have 3 books coming out next year. There will be at least that. I expect to be pretty busy at the drawing board.
And, sooner or later, I’ll start posting here again regularly.
See you all in 2010!
