Painterly Aspirations

Concluding my recovery of images from my old Freeservers site, here's some color work that I thought was worth sharing. Most of what you'll see here was done in acrylic, although I sometimes use watercolor for backgrounds and will occasionally enhance with india ink.
First, here's an old favorite of mine, coming out of my love of horror films. The piece is titled "Devil's Cinema" and includes images taken from a variety of horror flicks, from the 1920's through to the 1980's. A free cookie to anyone who can name all the films (I doubt if I can after all this time).
This piece is 15" x 20" on illustration board and is currently for sale.



This portrait of "Evil Ernie" is a contest entry I did for a Chaos Comics trading card set a few years back. It didn't win, but I still think it was a fine piece of work.
The original of this is actually watercolor over a photocopy, mounted in black matboard and is currently for sale.



This unusual image is a color rough of a painting done for a friend of mine who's keen on vampires. The unusual shape of the piece was borne of my love of giving my framer fits.
The rough is colored pencil on bond paper and is currently for sale.



This piece was inspired by David Mack's "Kabuki" and Masamune Shirow's "Ghost in the Shell". It was done just for the fun of it.
This piece is ink and acrylics on illustration board at (approx.) 4" x 16" and is currently for sale.



The following is another color rough for a painting that was done for a wedding gift. It is based on Mozart's "Magic Flute" opera, and unabashedly steals designs from P. Craig Russell's graphic adaptation of that opera.
This piece is a composite of two sheets of 11 x 17 bond paper, painted in watercolor. The bird in flight is a separate piece of paper fixed to the main page. It is currently for sale.



Finally, just to show that I do paint things other than the fantastic or horrific, there's this country sampler piece. A friend challenged me to do a piece of art in this style, and this was the result. It's not quite as two-dimensional as most pieces in this style tend to be, but I think it came off well. On the original painting, that rusty colored border is gold ink and the double doors on the house open to reveal an Xmas message inside.
This is scanned from a color photocopy and I do not have the original art for sale. If anyone wants to donate the $10 it would cost me for shipping, I'll gladly package the copy and send it to them.



OK, so now that I've put all these images out there, it's time to get back to my scanner and my filing cabinet and get some of my other work online. Also, I've got several new projects in the works that I hope to be able to share soon.

Art...What a Concept!

I know I promised some color work, but first I wanted to show off a commission piece that I just completed. Instead of simply relying on words to tell me what she wanted drawn, this person gave me a concept sketch from which to work, like so:



With a little bit of additional detail, I was able to turn this into the following:


Finally, with a few minutes on the mouse, I was able to give it a rough color job, so that we ended up with this:



See what you can do with just a little concept art? Sometimes if you can't describe something in great detail, it helps to be able to do a quick sketch.

OK, next time, color work. I promise. No, really.

Take a Trip With Strip Trip!

First off, some news. I've gotten a good response to the sketches I'm selling (thanks to all contributors!) and have had some fun, interesting jobs to do. I'll be continuing to do them for the foreseeable future, unless somebody pays me a ridiculous amount of money to do otherwise.
The good news is that thanks to learning a bit about the costs of packaging and postage for these things, I am able to give you more for your money! Originally I was offering a 5 x 7 sketch for a minimum $10 donation. Since then, I've found that the easiest way to ship these things is in a standard comic polybag with a backing board, wrapped in a padded envelope. The cost for this is minimal and will hopefully help ensure the drawings arrive in good condition. The result of this is that it allows me to make the drawings comic book sized, about 7 x 10, which allows me to put in more detail and opens up some layout possibilities. This is one case where bigger really is better and size does matter! Click the link on the right to donate and order your custom sketch today! (Quantities are limited. Some restrictions may apply. Void where prohibited by law. Not valid in conjunction with any other offer. Contents may settle during shipping. >:^P)

Now, on to the art....
This time around, I'm really digging back into the past, back into my university days. In the late 80's, a close friend and I created a weekly cartoon strip for the university newspaper, The Muse. The strip was called "Newhope In Learning" and concerned the life of student Rick Newhope at "Memorihell University". Much inspired by the likes of Garry Trudeau, the strip had a lot of left-field humour, and was at times controversial. So much so that we eventually ended up withdrawing the strip because the editor (a now famous name that I won't sully further) censored our work in response to hate mail we'd received, and more that he expected.
After "Newhope" ended, I was a bit of a pariah at the newspaper, but I still had ideas I wanted to get published, and they were the only game in town that would run my kind of material. So, I created a new strip of my own that I took to submitting under a pen name, "Paladin". The new strip was called "Strip Trip", and was designed as a parody of other popular comic strips of the day. So secretive was I about who was doing the strip that I had a different person deliver the finished strip to the newspaper's office each week, and never used the same person twice. So for anyone who remembers or may have worked on The Muse at the time, yes, Strip Trip was by the same person that did "Newhope in Learning". Now you can sleep better, I'm sure.
Strip Trip, by all reports, was well-liked, although it did draw its own hate mail. It was certainly fun to do, as I enjoy aping the styles of other cartoonists when I get an excuse to do so, and I think I did a pretty decent job of it. What follows is a collection of the Strip Trip pages that I could find. I think I may be missing a couple, but this is most of the short run of that series. Click on any of the images for a larger view.

The first, introductory strip was a sort of collage of characters. Maybe you recognize someone?


Next up is one of my favorites, a Garfield parody that addresses the character's megalomaniac tendencies a little more openly than Jim Davis ever attempted....



From cats to dogs, we have "Marmamutt". Marmaduke is actually not a bad strip, for a family strip...but that didn't mean I was going to show it any mercy.



Of course, I couldn't NOT parody everyone's favorite strip, "Cathy". With all of these, I pictured the strip I did as a sort of "end result" of the characters' typical behaviours, and I think with this one, I got it dead on.



Another old favorite went under the parodical knife with this "Dennis the Menace" parody. I suspect a strip like this one might not fly in print anywhere in today's sensitive environment.



The following are the strips that drew one reader's ire, although I'm pretty sure the poison pen letter I received was itself meant to be humourous. "Calvin & Hobbes" was one of my favorite strips in its time, and remains one of the best of the daily strips....right up there with "Bloom County" and "The Far Side". I especially liked the strips where Watterson would draw Calvin and Suzy as grown-ups, and once conceived of a horror story in which a grown up Calvin was pursued and eventually killed by an imaginary tiger whom he had long since abandoned. These strips are as close as I ever came to actually visualizing that story.





Finally, there's this piece that was the last "comic" in the series. It was obviously done just after the death of Jack Kirby and was a response to the way so many artists were "reviving" his characters or his ideas at the time. What can I say...I'm not always know for my "balanced" viewpoints. The art was published in black and white, but later painted in watercolor for my own enjoyment.



By the way, the original of this last piece is available for sale if anyone would like to make an offer. The piece is 11 x 17 on bond paper, mounted on foamcore. It's in ink and watercolor and has held up remarkably well after all this time. I won't be letting this go for $10, but if you want to make a reasonable offer, drop me a line and we an work it out.

That's all for now. Next time, some color work and paintings.

"Found" Art

Well, not so much found as "rescued". I figured it's time to recover some pieces from the portfolio I had at my Freeservers site. These are pieces I did for a variety of projects over the last few years, and while some of them make me cringe now, I think many of them still hold up.
I'll start off with my black and white work first, and later I'll post some comic strips and color work.
I should also add that I'll be selling some of the originals of these through this site; just look for the tag "for sale" in the categories to see what's currently available. If you see something that interests you, just send me an email and we can work out the details.

To start off, here's a piece I did for my older daughter's birth back in 1998. This was used for birth announcement cards, and there is an oil painting of this piece in her room now.


Next, here's a drawing of the Peter Pan statue in Bowring Park, St. John's, NL. Some friends and I attempted a series of postcards with drawings of local architectural highlights. Unfortunately, the project never took off, but some good work came out of it.



Next up are a pair of pieces I did for a calendar created as an Xmas gift for some friends. To this day, I still get ribbed about the fact that after all the work I put into this, I misspelled one of the key words wrong on the cover of the damn thing.
This one's David Mack's Kabuki character, a favorite of mine:



And this one is a rather racy drawing of Billy Tucci's Shi. There's just something about ninja chicks that works for me, I guess:



Unfortunately, none of these pieces is for sale, as I no longer own the originals. Still, maybe they'll give some readers ideas for custom pieces they'd like to have done for themselves.

That's all for this update. Next time, I'll post some comic strips from my university days.

I'm In the Pictures!

Well, in webcomics anyway. I may be wrong (correct me if you like, Ian), but I'm pretty sure that's supposed to be me reading the sentence to Maledict in the latest strip at Bruno the Bandit.
This is not the first time I've appeared in Ian's strip, nor I'm sure will it be the last. It's always fun to see yourself "pop up" unexpectedly like this.
Ian's been kind enough to help out by linking to this blog from his site and send some prospective sketch buyers my way. I know from the stats that there's been a huge spike in traffic this week from a few other sites as well. While you're here, why not take a minute and stop in at Ian's site and enjoy some great webcomics. You might just discover a new favorite.

Character Studies

Here's a few phone doodles with pretentions....

Sad to say, this one's less of a creation than it is a life drawing. You meet the most interesting people riding the bus...



I don't know who this guy is, but I'm pretty sure he doesn't like you...



Finally, who says haste makes waste? This was an experiment in speed coloring, drawn and colored in about 1 1/2 hours total time. A lot of time was saved by finding a nice rust texture and applying it to the main image, then layering a photo background over a dark yellow wash. I love it when a plan comes together.

The Sweet Sweet Taste of Dragonberries!

This site has been added to the listings at Dragonberry, a web directory of all kinds of wonderful comic art things. Go there and discover eye candy galore!

From the Drawing Board...

Here's one of the first sketches I've sold so far. This one is from an excerpt from a novel by Rick Higginson, a fellow NaNoWriMo participant. Rick's had me do a couple so far, and earns many thanks for his contributions.



Of course, being who I am, I ended up taking this one a little further than expected. I couldn't help but think in terms of color when I drew this, and ended up doing some digital color work on the piece in what I laughingly call spare time. Below is the color version I did...a little rough, but it got the gist of what I was trying to do with it.



Remember, it only takes a $10 donation to buy a 5x7 sketch. Now where else are you going to get a piece of original art for 10 bucks? Of course, you're welcome to donate more. In fact, I heartily recommend it. There must be an eccentric billionaire out there who's willing to pay me horse-choking gobs of cash for a tapestry sized drawing of Halle Berry doing a Josephine Baker impression on the back of an albino elephant at the Grand Ole Opry while the Flying Wallendas execute a tricky triple somersault in the air above her, isn't there?
(OK, maybe that one's for me alone...)

Best...Price...Ever!

Don't forget that tomorrow is Free Comic Book Day. Here's a chance to grab some great reading material at a fabulous price...free! Comic shops everywhere will be giving away free comics, including such noteworthy titles as "Bongo Comics Free for All" (a Simpsons comic), "The Umbrella Academy", "Comic Genesis" (aka Keenspace, host to The Journals of Simon Pariah), "The Unseen Peanuts" and "Amelia Rules" (great kids comic). If you're a collector, there will be a few nice items to add to your treasure trove here, but even if you're not a reader, here's a great chance to try something new at the best possible price. If you're lucky enough to be in a major centre (like Halifax, whee!), you might even be able to get some books signed by the creators.
So find your nearest comic shop and nab some freebies, then sit back with a self-indulgent snack of your choice (Tandoori Doritos and a Diet Coke is my current fave)and treat yourself to a good reading session...on the house.




Quick side note: once you're done with the comics, I've found a great thing to do with the ones you don't want is to save them up for Hallowe'en and give them out to the trick or treaters. I've been doing it for about 10 years, and now when I open the door, I often hear, "Is this the place that gives out comics?" The kids love 'em, and you're sneakily getting them to read something without them knowing it's good for them.

Time to Pass the Hat!

These sketches are fun, but they're not paying the bills...yet. That's where you come in (I hope, I hope, I hope).
If you'll look to the right, you'll notice that I've added a Paypal Donate button to the blog. I'm not looking for something for nothing, but I'd I would like to start earning a few of your hard-earned shekels. The process is simple: Donate at least $10 or more via Paypal, provide me a snail mail address, and I'll send you an original 7x10 sketch done to your specifications. You want a Supergirl? Send me 10 bucks and it's done. You want Spider-Man? Donate. Done. You want the entire cast of the 1932 Zegfield Follies ice dancing in Central Park as Glenn Miller's Orchestra plays "In the Mood" with the accompaniment of a troupe of harp seals on souzaphone and glockenspiel? Well, I may have some trouble with that, but donate anyway...you never know.
All sketches will be inked on bond paper, unless you particularly want one done in pencil. Larger sketches can be requested in return for a larger donation (say, $25 for 11 x 17, for example...but I'm negotiable).
Buy one for yourself, buy one for a friend...heck, buy one for all your friends. I'll draw Donald Duck or Daredevil all day long as you're willing to pay for it. Be imaginative, be daring, and most of all...be generous.
If you would like to buy a sketch, but don't use PayPal, please send me an email, and we can work out the details.

Moon Over Vegas...

Seeing this, I suddenly have a craving for McDonald's. No idea why. Go figure.

DLG Test Page

Finally, I got permission to post one of these. I've got others out there, but they haven't responded yet, so I'm assuming they're not keen on having me show off the work I did on their pages.
This is from a submission I did for a book titled "Daddy's Little Girl" (I'll post a link as soon as I find one). I didn't get this job, but apparently it was a close call. This was an interesting art style to work on; I wouldn't mind trying more like this.

Still Here...

No, I haven't been devoured by brain slugs, or captured by Nazi frogmen. I've been working on several color pieces as job applications, and haven't gotten permission yet to post them to the blog. I'm burning my creative fuel here, but it's going into the ether. I'll post something new as soon as I can.

Guest Artist Time!

Here's a piece by guest artist Raven Dominic. This is one of her first manga style drawings, and one of the first she's finished with Photoshop. Not bad, considering she's still 8. I think she's got a bright future....

Showin' Off...

I need to get a few more portfolio pieces up here. Bear with me while I let my colors fly for a bit...
Click on the smaller image to see a full-sized version, obviously.

First, here's my work on a Frank Cho Avengers piece. Frank's one of my favorite artists and I'd kill to be able to duplicate his linework. He's also one of the best artists to color because his work is so clear and his shapes so interesting.



Next up is a Captain America piece, taken from a piece of art by "chriss2d" at Deviantart. This guy is a hell of a colorist in his own right and it's worth checking out his gallery.



Finally for today, here's a repost of the piece I did for Digital Webbing last year. Inkthinker is another Deviantart artist who has some fantastic line work that is a joy to color. I haven't had this much fun with color since I got my first box of 64 Crayolas (with built in sharpener!).

Look! Up in the Sky!

Here's a tarted up version of the Supergirl sketch I posted a few days ago. The color was a bit rushed, so I'm not completely happy with the end product, but I had fun playing with the lighting effects and a few new brushes, so it's all good.

Wonder Woman! All the world is waiting for youuuu......

Here's a slightly more traditional Amazonian, insipired in no small part by Darwyn Cooke's "New Frontier". The color work on this one was enjoyable. Fun with Gimp plugins.

Super Women!

A trio of superheroines this time around, again from my workday sketches.



Supergirl is always a favorite. The iconic design of Superman with that curvy feminine shape makes for a great mixture.



Then there's Power Girl, a character who I've always thought was underused. I like the way Giffen wrote her in Justice League Europe, but didn't care for the costume design, even with Bart Sears art. The traditional white one-piece always worked better, in my opinion.



Finally, a dark Themiscyran. Just a rough character design from a story I'd like to write sometime. I know the "evil Amazon" story has been done in Wonder Woman before, but I think I could do something interesting with it, neverthelss.

Doodles Aplenty!

More stuff from the bottom of my filing cabinet...this time, some different considerations for my webcomic character Simon Pariah.
First off, here he is in the garb of a Roman foot soldier...



Here's Simon in a winterworld kind of scenario. I don't really have story to go with this one; just a scenario I imagined, loosely based on the Robert Altman/Paul Newman movie "Quintet". It's a strange, little known sci film from the late 70's that's worth a watch if you ever get a chance...



Finally, here's one that looks as little like Simon as possible. I have some ideas for doing a manga-style story, just to experiment with the art style. Shows like Hellsing and Vampire Hunter D have a nice visual approach that I'd like to play around with....

Random Stuff From the Top of My Head and the Tip of My Pen

Odds and ends once again....

Here'e Merv from The Dreaming in a rare moment of rest....



Stardancer...no relation to Silver Surfer or Spider Robinson.



Meanwhile, this jovial T-Rex about town is submitted as proof of why I shouldn't let my mind wander too far while sketching...

Back to the Drawing Board...

I started doing some housecleaning of my file cabinet a couple of months ago, and as usual got distracted by something shiny and didn't finish. Time to get some more of this stuff out of my way, so here we go....

First of all, here's a very old one...from sometime in the 1990, more precisely. It's very rough, and my sense of form still needed a lot of work here. Still, it was fun to do at the time. I'm working on a color version of this piece that I'll upload another time.



More on the same theme, and from about the same time. I was really getting off on Giffen and Maguire's take on Justice League at the time, and this piece shows it. Even now it remains one of the funniest comic books I've ever read.
Interestingly, this is also one of the first pieces where I realized that my left-handedness was causing me a perspective problem. Anything I drew with a vertical composition had a tendency to lean to the right as it went up. I shudder to think how many right-leaning drawings I inadvertently did prior to realizing this. I've since solved the problem by starting any drawing with ruled lines showing the visual and actual centers of the page or panel.



Here's a much more recent (within the last two years) take on the big three of the JLA. This one takes some inspiration from Alex Ross. One of the things that strikes me about Ross's work is that he's one of the few painters I've seen who's not afraid to paint with black. I was always told that true black shouldn't be used in a painting, but I suppose Ross's success shows that rules are made to be broken.
The trinity of DC icons holds a lot of intrigue for me, above their individual stories. I once wrote a paper for a literature course that theorized that characters like this have achieved a status as true modern myths, and I still hold to that idea. There's clearly archetypal ideas behind these characters that provide them a sort of immortality that transcends artistic interpretation or sales figures. Some artists, such as Ross, are better than others at capturing that quality.

Happy Hannukwanzcandlemas!

A Parting Glass

A few parting thoughts on NaNoWriMo, now that it's all over but the shouting (and cake...gotta get me some cake):
A 24 Hour Comic in October. A 30 day novel in November. It's like I'm dead set on proving the Law of Intention.
Actually, I'm dead set on doing away with all my excuses for not getting the creative work done. My usual rate of output for the past few years has been about 1 comic story per year and a short story in about the same. In the past two months, I've blown both of those limitations out of the water.
Surprisingly, I found I still had time for a generous amount of reading and the occasional game of Starcraft and Literati.
It seems to me that a creative endeavor is like going to the dentist...the worst part of it is the anticipation. With all the thinking and planning and "research" that goes into a project, you can talk yourself right out of doing it, or waste so much time in the preparation that you never get around to actually doing the job. That's why I find that quote from "Finding Forrester" so apt, and that's what this past month has taught me...the only way to get it done is to sit right down and do it. Worry about the details afterwards. It's easier to edit your work after you've written it than it is to "plan" it before you write it. That's what second drafts are for. And third drafts. And umpteenth drafts.
One thing I have noticed since I took on these projects is a jump in my general level of energy. Far from being caught in the typical dull routine of daily life, I've found that I'm eager to keep moving forward, and the things I found dull previously have only become waiting periods until I can get back to work on my projects. If nothing else, I guess NaNo is good for a mental boot in the ass that we all (especially us pretentious creative types) need from time to time.
I'm hoping that when I walk away from the effort of the last two months I'll be able to maintain a more realistic balance of creativity and productivity. I don't have any hot projects on my plate right now aside from editing the novel I've just written (and hoo boy, does it need it!), but I've got a ton of stuff that I've started and not finished, so maybe now's the time to get some of those things off my plate. I'm looking forward to the months ahead.

A few liner notes: The Daily News article ran on Thursday instead of Wednesday, and they didn't run my interview or my excerpt, so I guess I didn't get much publicity out of that one.
Thanks go out to Jaymee Goh, the Municipal Liaison for NaNo in Halifax. She organized the Sunday write-ins and the publicity, and introduced me to a great new cafe where I can hang out with the beret crowd and pretend I'm a grownup. All praise to she of the brilliant T-shirt and promises of cake yet to come. (And now I can say I know one of those people who use cute little anime characters for their avatar.)

Right now I plan to do this project again next year. Unless I make a gajillion dollars in the meantime and can finally build that underground bunker and begin training my horde of robot zombie ninjas to fulfill my plan of world domination. Whichever comes first.

Victory is Mine!!!!

Done like dinner! And with hardly an adjective to spare. Now comes the fun of editing this lump of radioactive rat droppings and trying to beat it into some kind of shape so I can begin to think about considering possibly sending it to a publisher and start collecting rejection letters.
This has been a great exercise, and if anyone has ever thought about writing, I heartily recommend it as a great way to get started. You never really know what you can do until you put your back into it like this.
Now go away...I've got work to do, and reading to catch up on.

Fit to Print

Looks like the Daily News's writeup of NaNoWriMo will be in tomorrow's edition. As far as I know right now, they plan to include an excerpt of my work in progress. To all my "peeps" outside Nova Scotia, I'll see if I can get permission to blog a scan of the article if they don't do an online edition. Otherwise, like the CBC interview, it will be available upon request only.





Technorati Tags: nanowrimo

Nearly There

Well, just about done. Less than 5k to go, and I don't see any reason why I won't make it.



For anyone who missed the CBC interview, I have an mp3; if you want it and have not received it already, email me and I'll send it to you.

Also, I was interviewed last Sunday, along with several other writers, for the Halifax Daily News. Looks like they'll be publishing an excerpt of the novel. More info as it becomes available....

Lost Weekend Ahead

I'm going to be offline for the weekend, but I WILL be writing. I just won't be doing it online, so I won't be able to check my wordcount until I get back sometime Sunday and do some typing. So if you don't see my wordcount go up for the next couple of days, don't think I've lost steam or abandoned the project. I'll just be somewhere out in the boonies safely hidden from my wife's Xmas Shopping Kickoff Weekend. Probably scouting good locations to build a yurt after the bankruptcy.

Halfway Home!

;

It's the midpoint of the month and the novel is ticking along just fine. It's no great work, but I think it's readable. I haven't heard from the peanut gallery yet, so either no one has any complaints, or no one wants to be the one to tell me it sucks. Either way, it's getting finished. I passed the 50% mark last night by a hair's breadth, and the story still has plenty of steam in it.

This past Sunday, I had the added pleasure of attending a "write-in" at PaperChase in Halifax. A small group of NaNo writers got together to write, exchange ideas and offer suggestions, and generally socialize as much as a group of distant semi-intellectuals can. It was an enjoyable session, and it's almost worth taking on the project just to get a chance to do things like that. Thanks go out to organizer Jamie for putting the thing together.

Once again, I'll point out that a copy of the work in progress is available at any time to anyone who wants to drop me an email. I'm glad to share it, and would enjoy hearing any comments you may have to make, good or bad. I'm also STILL in need of a title, and will consider anything at this point. Drop your suggestions in the box and take a complimentary mint on the way out.





Technorati Tags: nanowrimo, novel, writing

Enhancing Performancing

Not a spam post...just testing the latest build of Performancing for Firefox. Nothing to see here; move on.