There wolf! There castle!

I just finished up the final layouts for The Beast. Sweet Enemy went over them to see if my pacing was good. Since it took her a minute to go through the last six pages, I've decided that I'm not going to post any more until I've finished it. Trust me, you'll appreciate it; we're getting too close to the end for the cliffhanger syndrome. I'd like to have them up by the middle of next week.

By way of apology, here's a sketch I did while concepting Queeg's final form:



Listening to while posting: "Whispering Wind" by Moby

storage hog

So, no new finished works this week. However, I have been drawing every day for a while now, so I thought I'd post this week's sketchbook offerings.


A rear view of the Valkyrie suit. Designed by myself and AndreZero (15 Jan).




Since AndreZero is finishing up the script for the first installment of the Mr. Twilight story, I thought I'd brush up on drawing some of the characters. Here's Jackson Cort. And a hopefully thirties-esque airplane. And a random guy I made up who I think looks pretty cool. (16 Jan)


More Mr. Twilight. I'm trying to codify his look. I'm getting very close. It's nearly the same guy. I'm really happy with the expression on the right. (17 Jan)




While sitting listening to Sweet Enemy read Paula Poundstone's funny new book out loud to me. It was about midnight or so when I did this. I don't usually draw with a sketchbook in my lap, but these seemed to work out well.

A spacegirl! Yay! This was a bit sketchy so I worked it over at lunch. (18 Jan)



Another Twilight. Sweet Enemy says he has girl-eyes. So. He likes wearing a little mascara? He also packs a pair of M1911s. These weren't worked over, but done at midnight.



Also at lunch, I drew a little generic European car. It's an amalgam of many memories of 1930's cars.



The last lunch sketch from 18 Jan. I don't really draw a lot of guys, so I decided to try to draw Nightcrawler. I ran into the age-old problem faced by many comic artists during the years: how the heck do you show where Nightcrawler is looking? He's got yellow eyes with no iris!


Finally, here's an old picture of Jackson Cort. It was before AndreZero came up with the cool idea of having him in a cavalry shirt and Swinebread suggested rodeo gloves. It's even before I did research on Henry Rollins, J.C.'s inspiration. He's still pretty cool, I think.



Whew!

Listening to while posting: "the Pillows (Japan)" by Moon Marguerite. It was on my QuickList on Pandora.

Captain(s)

My first idea for this was huge. A gigantic Sergio Aragones-style cocktail party with every captain I could think of. My excuse is running out of time. We have a huge party on Saturday and guests from Atlanta right now.

So, here's what you get. A sketch:



After this, they are both going to enter the Silliest Boot competition. I thought about including the female Captain Marvel and having her saying something like "Cry me a river, cap."

Swinebread should recognize the silhouette on the far right. One of the unsung captains...

Listening to while posting: Crickets outside my window.

missing

I was going to take advantage of the this week's title to engage in some irony and forgo this week's picture and get busting on a comic I'm working on with AndreZero. However, I decided to do a quickie in Illustrator (about 45 minutes).

This is based on a true story. When I was at art school, I'd gotten a friend into mountain biking. We searched together and bought a nice used bike (it came with early SPDs and she gave them to me in return for some pedals and toe clips). One day a month or so later, I was walking down the street with Sweet Enemy and saw her bike secured to a post by its front wheel only. I'd told her how to correctly lock her bike, but the lesson obviously didn't stick. So, I though I'd teach her a lesson and I flipped the quick-release and stole her bike for her. As S.E. and I were walking to the school to put it in her studio she met us walking the other way. She was rather surprised to see me carrying her bike (sans front tire).



listening to while posting: Fibber McGee and Molly: Brisk Walk to Dugan's Lake

discovery

This was a pretty good topic, I thought. I had the basic idea on Sunday and sketched it out rough. Two more sketches later, I decided to attempt a scratchboard of it.

Result = failure.

Ah, well, can't win them all. So, in the need to get something up by Wednesday, I offer the third-round sketch placed in the semblance of an old-school sci-fi magazine cover. I would love to see this painted don't have much ability in painting. I actually entered art school hoping to be a painter, but sucked very much. I was so bad in fact that my instructor was so impressed with my progress from the fall to spring semester that the upped my grade from a C- to a C+. Luckily, I discovered type...

So, here it is. Just imagine that this was painted by Frank Kelly Freas or someone of his towering ability.



A used bookstore in town has a display of three items that the owner bought at an estate sale. Three pristine Fantasy and Science Fiction magazines and the original paintings of their covers! He has them displayed without price in a hidden area of the store. He showed them to me after I'd come up to the register with couple of 'golden age' sci-fi compilations.

Listening to: "Dawning of a New Era" by The Specials

Geeky

Four things:

First, about the title. It just didn't inspire me. It was the 'y' that did it. If it was 'geek' it would have opened up the field of ideas to at least include a certain type of circus performers. However, nobody ever refers to the guy who pounds nails into his head as 'geeky'. 'Geeky' just seemed, well, lame.

This dislike of titles seems to happen often to me. I must be less about the titles than what I want to get out of IF. I want titles that are rigid enough to provide direction, but open enough to allow depth. I'm not talking Hemmingway, but I need a title that whispers a story. What a title like 'geeky' feels like is just an exercise. Like, I should practice drawing a geeky person because a client might need a geeky person. That doesn't work for me.

Second, about the work. I didn't put a great deal of effort into this as you can see. I did a quite nice small sketch. However, when I transfered it and began inking, I found that the vellum I'm using, while good for penciling is terrible for inking. At least with a crow quill.

Thirdly the subject. This is a portrait, from memory, of a girl I saw in the grocery store a few weeks ago. She was about 5' 4" and had a small smile on her face that I completely failed to capture. I also failed to notice what was in her cart because I was *ahem* reading her t-shirt...

Here you go:



Four. This is selfish of me, but, if you've read down to here, you'd find that par for the course. I was really disappointed that only one person left comments on my work last week. It's got lots of problems that I would want to rectify, but I was hoping to get some comments on whether I'd succeeded in translating a story in a single comic page.

Ah well.

Listening to while I post: "Clubland" by Elvis Costello and the Attractions. (is it me or would the young Mr. Costello punch the old Mr. Costello in the face for being in ads for credit cards and luxury automobiles?)

Camoflage

Well, I rushed this one a bit and I'm still down to the wire. I'd hate to get lapped by IF.

I was out of town on Friday. Headed down to Mass. to visit my folks and to CT to go to a friend's delayed family wedding reception. It was a good trip. I 'discovered' a bunch of fabulous, purpose-built mountain bike singletrack off of a trail I've been riding for years (For reason of my own, I choose to call the "Queen Latifah Trail"). And, at the reception, I got to see my friend's 53 year-old-mom, my friend's wife and HIS best friend's lesbian partner do synchronized hip-hop dancing (it was his mom's idea). That and I listened to 10 hours of very compelling vintage sci-fi radio drama on the drive. Fabulous.

The drawing was done for IF, but it also wasn't. I had no ideas, so I hit my old sketchbook looking for something to get me going. I found the little robot guy you see. He started as an umpire-bot, but turned into a battlefield medic-bot. I built a little story-snipped around him and this piece is subtitled "Old Number 15". I think it'd be a great seed for a Wierd War Tale.

The inking was fun to do, but I blew off the shading and rushed the color to get this in under the deadline.

your paradise

I'm sorry to disappoint anyone looking for an illustration for this subject, but I'm abstaining from this topic due to it's crappiness.

It's the 'your' that does it. Just 'paradise' would have left enough open (Bosch's 'garden of earthly delights' but with robots!), but the 'your' makes it personal. My first reaction was to the cheesiness of it. The second was how simplistic it was. It ticked me off! How many of us really have only one vision of our paradise? And if we have more than one, can any one be the most important to warrant a drawing?

Me? I've got dozens; more recently since I'm trying to be more Taoist in my life. I have mini-paradises all through my life. I'd enjoy revisiting them all and all of them are too important to trap ineptly in a drawing. So, instead of a drawing, you get lots of words:

Gerry Dyer's lake house in the early 80's. Kids, canoes, swimming, playing jellyroll hopscotch in the dirt road and going to sleep on the screened in porch sunburned and happy.

Standing in the driving mist on the sea cliffs on the peninsula on the Coast Guard base on Kodiak Island, Alaska. The smell of the ocean and the sound of gulls in the fog and nobody else around.

Sitting in the door of a USCG HH-3f Pelican helicopter as a flight mechanic. Watching the Alaskan landscape speed by, swelled with the pride of knowledge and experience, ready for anything.

Pulling an all-nighter in the printmaking department at the Maine College of Art. Watching the sun come up over Casco Bay while using a lever press from the 19th century.

Every inch of The Flow mountain bike trail on that rare day when I'm completely dialed-in. Each turn melding to the next as though I'm on rails; smooth as silk, brave as a lion.

My fiance and I shoveling the driveway of our new rural house at midnight during the Valentine's Day Blizzard. Seeing her little ruddy face smiling from inside her parka as snow hisses on my hood.

My fiance's 6 year old cousin latching onto me at a family get-together and 'forcing' me to play strange, rule-less 6 year old games. The joy is in going with the flow and not trying to impose order.

Waking up at 6am on a Saturday, doing my warm-ups outside amid our trees and flowers, then crawling back into bed with my fiance. She stirs at my touch and rolls over to smile at me...

So. That's only a sampling of my 'paradises'. Kurt Vonnegut, Jr, once said that there was one thing that people don't say enough: "If this isn't good, I don't know what is!". I try to say it as often as I can.

Drawing soon, I promise. If not an IF, then something else I've been working on.

peace.

Signs

So, I'm going to apologize for this week's offering (SEE! The boring composition! CRINGE! At the terrible perspective! SHUDDER! At the terrible humor!). I have three reasons/excuses.

1) I tore open an old sketchbook and began working on something from it that I'd been meaning to expand on for a while. This took up most of my processor time.

2) All I could think of with this (nearly crappy) topic was The Worst Movie Ever of the same name (WITNESS! The fortitude which I display in not ranting about said film!).

3) I was house-sitting for a friend all weekend and spent a marathon session with their copy of the gigantic coffee table book that has every single cartoon ever printed in the New Yorker.

So, 2+3 - the energy spent on 1 = this:



Again. My apologies.

What I'm listening to as I post: "In the Bath" by Lemon Jelly from 'Lemon Jelly KY"

Non-IF: If anybody would like to critique a comic work I did for a contest back in March, I'd super-appreciate it. This way, please.

neighbor

Well, I actually had this fully drawn and ready to be inked by 9pm on Friday. Then the nice weekend, perfect mountain biking weather. Perfect weather for looking stupid by falling over from a standstill because of the new pedals and cleats I'd gotten to replace the ones I'd been running for four years straight. I was like: "No, really! I've been riding SPDs since '95! Really!". Since then, I'd finally gotten the bug up my wazoo to get cracking on a comic a friend and I are working on. I had one more page to ink to get up to date on the script. So, that took up all of my time until tonight.

Anyhoo, here it is. I feel I've been slacking. I haven't created a totally finished work for IF in a long time. By finished, I mean something that I'd have Sweet Enemy frame and stick on my wall. The piece is an homage to what is arguably one of the best animated films ever: My Neighbor Totoro. If you don't recognize the figure on the left, that's ok. It's supposed to be Fred Rogers. If you don't recognize the figure on the right, GO TO THE VIDEO STORE NOW! No, really. Go.

The title is based on the translation of the movie title from the Japanese. It means, roughly, My Neighbor Mr. Rogers.

Do I get bad joke points?

Remember

So. I actually had the initial sketch of this done by 1700 EST on Friday. Then it sat as I wracked my brain in an attempt to make the sketch something good. It simply refused to be expanded beyond the sketch, no matter how hard Sweet Enemy scolded me that it should be. But, I have sort of persevered. This is still sketch, but with the annoyances of my Micron starting do die halfway through and the far too many attempts at the shrugging hands, I'd reached the 'fuggit' stage. So, here it is.



I am quite forgetful, but only with people's names. When I was working at a bookstore a regular walked in. She was someone with whom I'd had many great conversations, but I could not remember her name! I called the boss over behind a card rack and asked her, in a whisper, what the woman's name was. The manager replied she didn't know. As we were laughing and commiserating about how embarrassing it is to not know her name and how it was too late to ask her, a smiling face popped around the corner of the card rack. "My name's Such-and-Such!" she laughed, "I bet you won't forget it now!"

And I haven't. I've since left the store, but she asked a co-worker to pass on the message that she hates me. You see on my last day she stopped by and I recommended that she pick up the first book in the Bartimeaus Trilogy by Jonathan Stroud. She's angry because now she has to buy all three of them, darnit.

Polar

This was an Okay topic. Almost a bit too restrictive, but since I got what I think is an pretty fun idea, I shouldn't complain. What I can complain about is the fact that I made a sketch, refined it, transferred it onto bristol board, grabbed my crowquill and then proceeded to render the bejeezus out of it, turning it into a pile of hierarchy-free little black marks.

Lovely.

Work, while not horrible, is a bit mind-numbing, so I could not dredge up the energy to make another attempt to render it. I will post the third-round sketch. If this feels half-assed, I won't deny it, but I'm sorry.

About the work: I intentionally neglected to do any sort of research on what polar bear or penguin really look like, even though I have some great books in my library(Including this fantastic, but out of print book: Animal Faces by Akira Satoh. If you ever draw animals, this is a book to find). So, the bear looks more grizzly than polar. Ah, well. Here it is:



I resisted the urge to have a reference to the bear being on Prozac, making him a bi-polar bear, but I thought that would be silly. Besides, the penguin is taking Zoloft, anyway.