more USCG-ish stuff

When I came up with the rescue craft in Death of a Friend, some might have thought I'd modeled it after the Samson from Avatar.

However, while I was modeling it after a previous design, it wasn't James Cameron's, it was mine. In 1994 or so, I started what was then an ambitious project: a 16" x 20" gouache illustration. It was meant to depict Air Station Kodiak in the near future and in the starring role was a SAR rotorcraft I designed, the HH-90d. I never got farther than transferring the image to illustration board and painting the cockpit, though. I only mention it today because, while cleaning up our 'library' I found the 16-year-old sketch (sadly, the unfinished painting is lost). Embiggen it, it's bigger.



Overall, it looks pretty good, but there are a few things wrong with it. Most obvious is the lack of true perspective. Each item is on its own plane almost as if I was using the ancient Egyptian canon. Also, was my lack of futurist vision. As of 2003, the building you see in the background is no longer the helicopter hanger; I'm not sure what it is. It's been around since WW2 and there's no real reason to think it'd be around in another twenty years. My retcon is that it's not the future, it's an alternative 1994! Trivia: I had a friend take a photo of me in my flight gear standing by a fire bottle for reference.

I'm considering seeing if I can make it work, but the perspective may bug me to much.

listening to while posting: Sweet Enemy using the vacuum cleaner on some sort of dirt.

Happy Coast Guard Day!

I had to be reminded of this by a former Marine. Sheesh.

That's a photo to commemorate the day. It's of the "Helo Side" night shift at Air Station Kodiak, Alaska (c. 1992). The helicopter (or "helo" (HEE-low) as we called it. Never 'choppers or 'heli') is a Sikorsky HH-3f. It was introduced to the USCG in 1968 and retired in 1993, much to my dismay. The replacement, the HH-60j was smaller and made me airsick. Man, I miss that bird.

I'm not in the photo, but I was stationed there and this was taken in the last week before I rotated to USCGAS Traverse City, MI. I was an Aviation Machinist Mate (fixed engines and rotor systems) and a Flight Mechanic (the guy that works the hoist and directs the pilots over victims). Man, I miss that job. The stories were always more interesting to other people than my graphic designer stories.

The guy on the left on the ICS (the headset attached to the helo), was my best friend "Murray Lopez". He was an Aviation Electronics Technician then and he's the one who invented the name 'Arkonbey' and allowed me to co-opt it. He's still in and is a Chief Petty Officer now and is nearing (or has past and is ignoring) retirement age. We're the same age, btw. All you have to do is your twenty.

The photo was taken by a good friend who, in a poem he wrote for me when I left Kodiak, described himself as 'my elusive friend'. He was a very interesting guy, almost a beat and he seemed out of place as an Aviation Machinist Mate. His name was Ron Klassen and if anybody knows him, please have him shoot me an email. I'd like to buy him a beer and tell him I still have the copy of "The Prophet" that he gave me as a going away gift. I hope you're doing well, Ron.

Now, since I must post some art, here's a piece of fanart I did last year. It's a sappy little thing dedicated to my favorite New Mutant, the much under-used and ill-treated Wolfsbane. She's chilling with her BFF Mirage



listening to while posting: The end credit music to All Creatures Great and Small running through my head.

citrus

Oh, what a crappy topic. I was tempted to use my anti-crappy-topic-protest-device, but the early daguerreotype-ists already did suggestive soft-core with round fruit.

How this illustration relates to 'citrus' has a bit of a story behind it (I'm not feeling particularly adept at writing, so bear with me). Pictured is a scene from my real life. Kodiak Island, Alaska c. 1990. I was a SAR helicopter crewman at the US Coast Guard Air Station and, as most young men will, bought a crappy beater truck to bomb around the island in. This was a 1970 Bronco and I named it 'Fear'; as in 'we rode in fear' and 'I drive in fear'. You see It had many frightening aspects:
> the original owner replaced the large truck steering wheel with much, much smaller one from an MG;
> the rubber bushings that supported the axle within the truss rods were rotten, so the axle would occasionally drift back and forth;
> at high speeds on washboard roads, it would drift sideways as though on ice;
> there were only lap belts until I installed an old set of helicopter seatbelt/shoulder harnesses (sans interia reel);
> a friend putting in a new floor for me punctured the auxilliary gas tank which would leak into the cabin when full.
> the three-speed on the column would suddenly pop out of gear, often at speed

But, what you see here was the truck early in my ownership. The original owner had, for some asinine reason, coated the entire back bed with roofing tar. Roofing tar! Since I lived in the barracks, an old USCG friend of mine was a petty officer on the CGC Storis and lived in town and had a driveway. He let me park in front of his crappy apartment and spend two days scraping out the bed. His roomate suggested gasoline. But, since I didn't feel like being flamable, we bought a few gallons of...
Wait for it:
Citrisolve to clean out the bed. Two days of hand-cracking orange-smelling liquid and backbreaking labor we found we no longer stuck to my truck's floor. For all its fear-inducing antics, we drove that thing all over the island. Hunting, fishing, camping, paintball, plinking, mountian biking. We used t he heck out of it. We didn't die, but we were often scared.

Here we are:



For the record, I payed $700. I sold it to a friend for $200 and didn't feel ripped off.

Oh, the dog? He lived nearby. His name was Bear and he was a huge Newfie, only with the extra drool package installed. He was super friendly, but when he shook his head, it was like a sitcom.

NEW FEATURE:
What I'm listening to as I post: "Style It Takes" by Lou Reed and John Cale from "Songs For Drella"

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;

HELP!

This is my first ever post for Illustration Friday. It is also single panel from a comic* I'm working on. It's tentatively called "Dead-evac" and is based on actual events in my life. SInce discovering graphic design and typography, I haven't done much drawing other than thumbnails for the past six years, but I decided to start up with a vengence. This comic has been pushing my skills to their limits but I've found that drawing is a bit like lifting weights: if you do it every day, you'll see results. While I'm not ready to submit to Flight yet, I can literally see imprvements since this summer (this was started two weeks ago).

I wasn't planning on scanning any of this in until it was entirely inked, but I wanted to post on IF. I plan to make this my IF web presence (I refuse to say 'blog'; a word for which my abhorence is only surpassed by 'webinar'). So, without further delay: