Desperation Post

I haven't had the opportunity to do a thing the past few days! Frustrating! I'm busy at work this week and had a harrowing time of it last week (I survived the latest round of layoffs, which is -- at best -- a temporary relief, but any hope for a brighter future as an artist/graphic journalist is a moth-eaten, battered, burnt-faced, one-eyed, legless, featherless hope. Don't get me started on that!)
...I had been doing well, BLOGically speaking, and to find that I have dramatically fallen off my pace has brought on a small panic. I am working on something this morning, but it's too hideous to share at the moment. So, I've looked in the archive for something that is marginally presentable. Thus:

This is a photoshop study of a Rubens painting from about 4/5 years ago. It appears I had recently discovered the texture feature and laid it on pretty thick-- I tweaked it a little, as best as I could, to tone down the enthusiasm on that; otherwise I didn't mess with it.
Newer stuff, soon. I hope.

THE END
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Girls and Robots!

It can be fun to take a quick, dumb sketch and spend way too much time polishing it up-- and it was.

...I do most of my work in a panicky rush. On the job-- even if there appears to be plenty of lead time on an illustration assignment-- other projects and the daily grind destroy the cushion, leading me to frantic finish after frantic finish. At home, weekend chores and the accursed commute can make a fragmented wreck of my art-time-- I seem to finish most of my "for fun" drawings in haste before setting off to work.

...With the chosen theme of "Girls and Robots", I did the black and white sketch in just a few minutes. I scanned it, and I was going to color it simply and let it go, but I started rendering his head and I was swept up in the challenge of the thing. I decided to commit a couple hours to it and just have fun.
...I wasn't terribly creative with the original drawing of the girl, and I was considering erasing her out of the picture; but, as I began fleshing in her legs, I started liking her better. I thought of her as a plastic action figure. She can bend slightly at the waist, and her arms and elbows can bend. I put a seam around her neck so she could turn her head, probably all the way around. It made her more interesting to me than she was.

The End.

A doodle!

Quick little character sketch. Any resemblance to actual people is cool, but probably coincidental.

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Pencil, brush, pen, p-shop.

The End.

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Brute, Ironjaw, The Bat-Man

Did four quick drawings yesterday and colored two of them just now. Pencil roughs and brush inks. Some pen-work thrown in there after the ink dried.

I've been picking up cheap copies of the ATLAS line of comics from the early 70's. There's some terrible stuff in there and some terribly GREAT stuff. Too bad the company didn't make it-- then we'd all know who The Brute and Ironjaw were.

The End.

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The Green Guide Revisited

I drew this back in April; it's a goofy little illustration I did in a rush to fill an empty page in "The Green Guide" special booklet we published way back then.
...I've had this drawing in draft mode since April and lost track of it. I wasn't very fond of it and I couldn't think of anything nice to say about it, I suppose. It's been buried, and maybe I should leave it there, but several days have passed since I've posted anything and I'd like to keep my little hot-streak going.
...This is one of those "Find 10 things wrong with this picture" kind of things, but it might not have been 10 things and I don't remember what they were. I'm pretty sure it was about environmental faux pas found around town in Berkeley but I'd probably embarrass myself by trying to list them.
...Back on track with newer stuff, soon.

The End.

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Happy Halloween!

This is the cover for this week's "Preview" section. I put this together in less than a shift in Photoshop. I like the rough-hewn quality. I didn't have to do any design here-- purely a stolen image-- so I was able to stand back and hurl paint at the canvas. Good fun for me.
... The topic?: Horror movies you might want to watch during this, our most bizarre of "holidays."

...Several of our writers picked their top five horror flicks, but I'll just vouch for my favorite:

1. Frankenstein! Can't beat the best monster movie ever! If you can pretend you've never seen it before, and if you try to ignore its pop-culture pervasiveness (is there a more famous image than Karloff's monster?); if you can get into character, if you can method act and grasp the the mind-set that people had, in 1931, when they walked into a dark theater to see a black and white horror film for the first time... whoa. Awesome, scary movie.
...And then, at the end, you're rooting for the monster! Suspense, horror and tragedy. It's perfect.

"Poltergeist" was pretty good-- good movie poster, at least. I liked "The Shining," too. Oh, and "Tremors."

The End.

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VOTE!

This is a photoshop drawing/painting for a story about what players for the Warriors think about the election. It looks like it might be a pretty interesting read. Stories like this give me hope because-- although we percieve these guys as dumb, arrogant, selfish-- we often find out that they're really much more pensive than they appear. It's all the screaming, chest pounding and whining that distracts us from the true souls of these men.
...Sometimes they're genuinely unpolished young fellows, to be sure, but we hope for the best.
...This illustration will run tomorrow-- Fri., October 31st-- in the sports section, and what you see may not be the finished piece. I'll update this post if it changes significantly.

The End.
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p.s. New record for posts in a month!

Closing In...

Okay, two days to go and I've tied my record for most posts in a month. AND I've got two more waiting in "draft" mode, almost ready. This is me celebrating and skipping and taunting before I cross the goal line, I know, but I've always suspected that I would be the type of guy to let success, however humble, go to my head. Take that, June 2006!

...Today's contribution:

This is a scan of another comic test-run. I inked on cheap tracing paper over a very rough pencil sketch-- I like the way the paper buckles and warps; it can drive you crazy if you let it. The trick is not to notice, not to care and just let the accidents happen. (And then try to cover it all up with color in Photoshop.)
...Colored in P-shop.

The End

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Heads Heads Heads

First, I drew that stack of five heads on the left, in pencil only. Then I thought, I should really draw from reference more often, if only to make sure that some of those skills (such as they are) haven't been buried under all the other make-believe nonsense I do here. To address this concern I created the portrait of French engineer Louis Larent Simonin; he's the large, obviously referenced drawing. Not too bad. It came out sort of looking like him, too. Bonus.

I felt good enough about Louis that I decided to go back to my usual head-doodle routine. I roughed in featureless head-shapes all over the page, filling up the space. I did varying degrees of tightening up in pencil and my intention was to scan it un-inked; it would be a page of pure pencil drawings!
...I was listening to an old Gunsmoke radio-show, and I was really focused on it-- William Conrad as Marshal Dillon, John Dehner playing an old friend of Dillon's, Harry Bartell playing a bad-guy in this episode; great stuff-- but, as it ended, I came back to attention and noticed that I was inking a head. Dang! And I had already inked three others! Double dang!!
...I really wanted to finish this page quickly, but I was in a groove and having fun. I gave myself one more radio-show to ink as much as I could and then just let it go. So I did.
...And coloring? Well, I couldn't stop that either. I fear posting some stuff in naked black and white. I tried to limit the color work to 5-10 minutes a head, and I managed to stain the whole thing in about 2 hours, cheating a little bit with those pink and blue heads.

The End.
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p.s. As a show of courage, here is the uncolored scan

Freestyle Doodle Improv

First, I drew a box. Then, I sketched the guy on the right. I put a hat on him, and I dressed him in a fashion to quietly compliment the hat-- he struck me as a bloke who would frown upon a gaudy dissonance of appearance. He looked like he needed a girlfriend, so I made one that I thought he might like and tucked her under his arm. I'm not sure he's all that crazy about her.

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I put in the blind-folded guy over on the left and, by the time I finished drawing him, he was being driven by a little monkey. That was surprising! He looked lonely over there but I didn't think he'd be the type to attract the chicks. Instead, I gave him a friend who is like-minded, although I think #2 is more interested in the first fellow's girlfriend.

...The red figure in the background is the lady with the helmet from two previous posts (just scroll down a few, you can't miss her.) She wanted to be in the picture but she's been hamming it up, so I asked her to stand in the background.
...I roughed in the buildings, not really knowing what any of it is, but it didn't look bad to me at the time. I inked everything and I thought it was finished.
...The two people behind #14 poked their heads in. I shooed them away, but it was too late. I inked them too and proceeded to scan and color the whole shebang.
...I wonder what it all means?

The End.

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