Still more Bullfrog sketches. The ugly guy with the fly wings in Killer Fly, another villainous type who only existed as a sketch. No character had really been invented for the character yet.
More Bullfrog
Another sketch of Chef Sinister, the evil French chef. A headshot of Auntie Beehive who probably controlled hordes of bees. I’m pretty sure that the character’s name came first, then the sketch and I would have figured out what to do with her if we’d gotten to the proposal stage.
Bullfrog / Licking Toads
These sketches are for Bullfrog (or maybe Licking Toads, I forget exactly which) a series that I’m pretty sure never made it to the actual proposal stage. It was to be about a young woman who inherits her uncle’s superhero costume and powers. The uncle went by the name Bullfrog and he gained his froggy superpowers by licking the dried mummies of some unknown breed of toad.
The first adversary our heroine was to face was an insane French chef with an arsenal of food and cooking utensil based weapons.
Evolving Max
Max begins to look more like himself.
(This post imported from blogger. Was originally a stray draft.)
More Simplicity
Another page of stripped down cartooning. I was concentrating on doing simple character designs in order to animate them in Flash. Back in 1999 Nizzibet had been contacted by someone she knew who was working with an internet startup company. The company wanted to create a number of short flash cartoon series to be posted on the web. The plan was to generate a fanbase for each series inexpensively via the web and then sell/license the series to movie & television production companies. Nizzibet’s friend asked her (and therefore me and the rest of the Labor of Love studio) to pitch some series ideas to the company. The proposals didn’t have to come with illustrations attached – we weren’t going to be doing the animation – but I have a hard time writing for a visual medium without giving myself something visual to work with so I did sketches for each series as part of our idea generating process.
I don’t remember which (if any) series these sketches might have been for. It’s obviously one that I haven’t thought about in more than 8 years.
Simplicity
These sketches were done to see how simplified I could work. I have a tendency to add a lot of detail to my work. It seems more like a compulsion than a stylistic choice. I often have to decide ahead of time the limits of detail that I’ll put into a piece otherwise I can noodle it to death.
First Page
Second day of the new year and the first page from an old sketchbook. I’m pretty sure this book was finished in 1999. The lumpy thing at the bottom of the page is a sketch of one of Jeremy’s Germboys from the story Jeremy Loader Never Could Pick Up After Himself. I wrote the story back in 1992 or ’93 and it saw print in Asylum #3. Pia Guerra penciled it and I inked it.
In 1999 I was considering redoing the story with my own illustrations. Nothing wrong with Pia’s work (it was excellent), I just wanted to have a version of the story that was all me. I never got further than the sketching stage.
Happy New Year!
Say hello to 2008. I’ve got another sketchbook’s worth of posts set up that should carry us into February. Life is still pretty busy but with the Holiday jams passed by I think I’ll have time to keep up a daily rhythm here again.
Today’s sketch was done this month. It was intended for a future issue of Worlds of Cthulhu for an article on gangsters. The editor and I had some miscommunication and the job for illustrating the article has gone to someone else. No biggie, he was needing more illustrations than I can provide at the moment and has assigned me to a different article.
We Had a White Christmas
And the rain washed all away by this morning.
(Photo by Michael Byam)
Merry Merry
