Communication

Ah, this was a bit of a tough one. Very open, but narrow at the same time. I love it. I had three sketches and this was the best idea.

While it does not depict an actual moment in the lives of Sweet Enemy (my fiance) and I, it sort of boils things down to our romance in art school. I'd been... let's say, in a long dry spell before we met and we'd become good friends before we started romancing. I was deathly afraid of mistaking her signals and screwing everything up. It took her giving me a series of pretty much unmistakable signals before I realized what was going on. Lucky, lucky man.

I hand-lettered this, still mastering lettering. Trying to remember to draw the letters and not to write. Also, trying to get the hang of the Alvin Lettering Template. Very tempermental device. I drew us as a bit more (intentionally) cartoony than my usual work. In my head, it looked like Bannister's work in Flight 3 ("So Far, So Close"). It doesn't quite live up to that fine work. So, buy Flight 3, it'll be worth it. Heck, buy all three and wait for number four!

Here you go, Communication:

Gravity

Man. This was a great topic. Vague enough to be interesting, but specific enough to inspire. I can't wait to see the variety of stuff on IF (I generally don't look until I post).

There were so many ideas to choose from. I had trouble deciding to define gravity as the attractive force or as dignity or sobriety of bearing. I decided on the attractive force. Here you'll find four characters of an incipient comic created by myself and Kick Enemy Men. We're waiting to finish the introduction story arc before beginning posting (rather than waiting for my skills to rival those of Alan Davis, which would take longer). All I'll tell you is that the characters are: Trik (bright yellow hair), Murray Lopez (small guy), Mickey Finley (beard) and Athena (african). This particular frame was done just for IF and has no bearing on the story as of now.



As to the mistake with the previous illustration. The HIFR port is on the starboard side of the aircraft below the main cabin door. In the illustration the nose of the aircraft is on the right of the frame. The helo is inverted, so the HIFR and main cabin door should not be visible; the side towards the viewer should just have the avionicsman's window. As I said, you have to know what to look for. Check it out here. As I look at it now, though, I should have had a bit of transparency at the waterline where the helo fades into the water. Ah, well.

Crash

Since I've been working on my Coast Guard-related comic, I thought I'd do a Coast Guard-related illustration. It depicts something I only thought a bit about when I was in. You can't think of it too much or you'd find a safer career.

I only thought heavily on it once: We landed our HH-3f on the water and the pilots did a rotor shut down. Not a normal procedure, but we all thought it'd be cool. That is, until the helo started bobbing around and the pilots had to look in the flight manual to find the proper procedure for re-starting the rotor on the water. I looked down to find that I had my hand on the toggle that activated the Underwater Escape Rebreather in my vest. I looked up to see that the navigator had HIS hand on his own toggle. The pilots eventually figured out how to start the rotor and when they released the rotor brake, the helo spun over 90 degrees with the torque. The thing is that helicopters tend to go inverted when they crash on the water. It's the fact that most of the weight (rotor, gearbox, engines) is on top. The H-3 floated even without the emergency float bags, but I didn't want to see how much I remembered from egress training.

I decided to depict the aftermath of a relatively controlled crash in the manner of The Raft of The Medusa by Théodore Géricault. I thought about doing it at the same scale as the original, but I couldn't find enough bristol board. As it was, I feel I cut some corners. This is because I give myself a deadline of Tuesday night for IF. Come what may, I have to post by then. Those in the know will notice a few things missing or changed or just dumb. Some things were changed to suit the composition of the painting, some were accidentally left out and one major screw-up that I only noticed as I finished coloring. Whoever can tell me what that mistake is will win some sort of dumb, cheap prize.

So, here's The Wreck of the F/V Medusa;

Sprout

First this is easily the grossest thing I've drawn since the eighth grade (when I read Fangoria regularly). I don't mean that I usually draw pink chibi stuff all the time, but this is pretty gross. Last weekend Andre Zero and I were talking about comics as usual and I lamented that there are no longer any horror anthology comics like EC stuff anymore. I don't really like blood and guts for their own sake, but I just really love those old comics.

For some reason, I'm skittish about putting this up on IF. I'm not sure why, except that I don't really see a many people inspired by Berni Wrightson, you might say. But, then, not many people seem to be looking at my stuff enough to leave comments anyway.


So, here's my take on an old horror comic in all its grossness*. Let's see what happens...






*I couldn't bring myself to have tears on his face. I thought it would be a bit much.