The artist is IN! I am currently available for commission work of just about any variety (artistically speaking). Pencil drawings, ink, di...
Here's a sample from a coloring job I recently completed for a book titled "Stormchasers". This was a fun page to do, just because I got to pull out my Hajime Sorayama references and have some fun with gradients and metal textures.
The pencils are by Jay Dee Rosario and the inks by Bobit Nacila. The book will be published as a digital download soon, and I'll post a link here when it's available.
I submit that as of 12:20 Atlantic Time, 12 May, 2008, I am the first comic book artist to have his name sent to the moon (feel free to challenge this assertion in the comments). This was done by submitting my name to be included on a list of names to be carried aboard the Lunar Reconaissance Orbiter, to be launched before the end of 2008.
NASA, through the Goddard Space Centre, Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory and the Planetary Society, is offering the opportunity to submit your name to be included on the list. If you want, you can have your name included here and find out more about the LRO Project here.
This is real science fiction coolness, guys...the kind of really cool thing that the Internet could be used for, instead of ads for Viagra and upskirt shots of Emma Watson, so treat it with respect and don't do a Bart Simpson on the site, please and thank you.
The hot idea on the street today is "Draw Yourself as a Teen", a meme started by Davario at his LiveJournal blog. Never one to pass up a good idea, or an opportunity to talk about myself, here's my contribution to this net sweeping phenomenon....with slight apologies to Alex Ross and Vin Diesel.
Headbanger? Me? You'd better believe it. I won't tell you when this was, but if you look close, you can probably figure it out from the context.
In case you're wondering, the numbers in the background are the tab to the the opening riffs of Iron Maiden's "Number of the Beast".
UPDATE: Another facet of this challenge seems to be that artists are comparing their teen selves to their current selves. In the spirit of that, here's my somewhat subjective interpretation of what that old-school rocker looks like today:
Don't forget that this Saturday, May 3, is Free Comic Book Day! Run, don't walk, to your nearest comic retailer and grab some good reading material, and maybe discover a new favorite. Or rediscover an old one.
If you're in the Halifax area, the best place for comics on ANY day is Strange Adventures. Not only do they have an incredible variety of books, games and paraphernalia throughout their store, but they also have the friendliest and most personable staff I've seen in any shop...No pretentious Simpson's comic book guys here, but interesting folks who'll gladly help you waste your time and money in a mind-broadening way.
I'm finding that the ol' blog is looking a little too cluttered these days, so it's time to simplify a bit while I rethink the basic design. I don't think I'll break anything TOO seriously, but if anyone suddenly has problems with this page, please drop me a line.
This week, I've been working on some web banners for Derek Pegritz, author of "City of Pillars", one of the freshest stories set in the Lovecraft mythos that I've read in quite a while. From the information I've been given, "City of Pillars" is only the beginning, and he has a much larger tapesty of work planned for this projects. What he's published so far is very much worth reading, and what he intends to publish is worth watching for.
Derek found my work through my recent post "Things Go Wrong At Guantanamo", which was inspired by his work, and has asked me to create some art for his website redesign. Naturally, being the Lovecraft acolyte that I am, there was no way I could refuse. Not all of his banners will be my work, but keep an eye on his site and you will see my work there. Meantime, here's a teaser of one of the images I've completed for this project.
The source for this image is a photograph by deep sea diver Jim Lyle, used with permission. Jim is an excellent photographer; check out an impressive collection of his work at Scuba Diving Magazine.
Here's another recent piece, a test page completed for a job audition for Tom Stilwell's book "Honor Brigade" #5. The character is "The Suit" and the artist is Brad Bowers. Shiny.
Thanks to Tom, Brad and Spinner Rack Comics for letting me repost their art here.
Here's a piece completed recently for Scott Story's Johnny Saturn pinup book. If it gets published, you'll see the final work in greyscale. However, the original was completed in color, and I'm rather proud of the finished product. You can see the other entries for the book at Scott's Myspace page.
I won't try to hide that this piece was inspired by Alex Ross...that much is obvious. I've just finished reading "Mythology" and am more impressed than ever by the artist and his work. I can't take too much credit for the background; that's courtesy of NASA.
One of the motivators behind my plan for my never realized website "Doodulz" was a collection of caricatures that I did in my university days. I think at some point, I had aspirations of being an "underground" cartoonist, judging from the obviously Crumb-inspired nature of some of these drawings. Each was based on something I either saw or experienced while attending classes at Memorial University of Newfoundland in the 90's. After all this time, I still find them charming, and hope you will as well.
I think we've all sat through lectures like this one...
Coming from a small town as I do, I have an instinctive fear and mistrust of the excessively liberal. It's one thing to keep an open mind, another thing to let your brains fall out...
I can relate to this one even now. Usually by 11 am.
Sadly, I can also relate to this one. Usually between 8 - 10 am.
I think we probably all knew this guy, the skeevy professor or teacher who was always grinning at some joke only he knew, and could usually be caught at least once a day trying to peer down someone's shirt. I swear I had one of these from about Grade 4 on.
And finally, the guy you don't want to be, and certainly don't want to be around. He "knows" it all and is more than happy to share every...single...bit...of...it at the merest indication of interest. This is probably a personification for about a quarter of the internet, those parts of it that are not spamming, trolling or looking for nude pictures of Amy Winehouse.
I've got a few more of these that I'll post once I scan them. Feel free to use any of these on a website if you like, but do me a favor and throw a link back if you do.
When I was still actively updating my webomic, "The Journals of Simon Pariah", I was toying with the idea of doing a sister site called "Doodulz", just because I have folders full of odd little sketches and character drawings that I really can't use anywhere else, but I can't bring myself to throw away. That idea didn't really fly, but it seems that this sketchblog is just as good a place to show off these little oddities.
Starting off, we have a trio of comic book characters that have interested me at one point or another.
First up is Morpheus himself, aka Sandman. This is an easy character to draw, what with chalk white skin, messy hair and a voluminous robe. Like a dream, the character gets amorphous, which conceptual drawings like this one.
Next is that ol' webslinger, Spider-Man. This is one character I can honestly say I hate drawing. I've always suspected that the reason the black costume was developed was because whoever drew the character at the time got sick and tired of trying to figure out all those weblines. Nevertheless, I wanted to play with a Frank Miller-esque effect on the bricks behind him, and so came this....
Finally for now, one of my old favorites, Lobo. I love Giffen's work on this character; it's always cathartic and fun to read, especially when Bisley is on his game, as he was in the original miniseries. I recall one rather Douglas Adams-esque line from that series that states the Czarnian meaning for "Lobo" is "one who devours your entrails and thoroughly enjoys it." Here, the Main Man seems intent on living up to his name...
I've got a lot more of this sort of this...some of it very rough, some of it very weird. I'll be sharing it all, for better or for worse, over the next few weeks.
Found via Boing Boing this morning, the creepiest/funnest/most startling evolution yet of those sprites that follow your cursor.
Click the link and prepare to be...amazed? Amused? Weirded out? I dunno.
Later today: art. I promise.
I'm wandering a bit from the topic of the blog with this one, but I couldn't let this bit of geeky fun pass without sharing it. Cracked online is running an article on "30 Error Messages You Never Want to See". There's some really good ones there, reminiscent of Something Awful's "Photoshop Fridays" back when it was funny. However, this one really got me going:
If you need a chortle, go read the full article.
And if anyone else can tell me what TV show that quote is from, I'll give you a cookie.
Having mostly finished up (for now) the project I've been working on, I find myself with a little spare time, so I'm free once again to do some drawings for interested readers. As always, my email address and Paypal link are there to the left, and the rules are pretty much the same: anything you want in b&w for the minimum price, with anything larger or more complicated (i.e. color) to be negotiated. Now's the time to get your request in for...oh, I don't know...a character design, a custom birthday card drawing, some tattoo flash...a cartoon of Herve Villechaize wearing a taffeta dress while tap dancing to a Gilbert & Sullivan musical. Whatever your deviant imaginations can contrive.
What's "up" is of course my price. With time constraints being what they are, I find that I have to raise my prices a little to make it worth my while to continue to offer custom sketches, hence the $5 increase per page*. Still, I have to say that many of those who bought have been more than generous in donating more than the original $10 asking price, and the extra is very much appreciated. I hope everyone who's bought has found it worth the investment and I look forward to doing many more of these.
*If I've already agreed on the $10 price with you, that still holds true, lucky you. I never change horses midstream
The news today is that one of the last great masters of science fiction, Arthur C. Clarke has passed away at age 90.
Honestly, Clarke is one of those authors permanently on my "must read' list, but whose work I rarely get around to. I've read "2001" a couple of times, as well as "Childhood's End" (my favorite Clarke work to date), and some of his shorter pieces, and heard several of his stories dramatized as radio plays, but I've never really gotten around to the Rama series, "The Ghost of the Grand Banks", or any of his many, many other books. Still, his presence was always felt in his influence on other writers I have read, especially "hard" sci fi writers.
I suppose the good news is that all that work is still out there for me to discover. Meantime, the world at large, not just science fiction, has been enriched by Clarke's vision. Like Heinlein and Asimov, he was one of those writers whose influence extended beyond his genre or his medium towards the shaping of reality. I'm tempted to make some analogy about his being a monolith to a bunch of hairy apes, but I wouldn't want to sell the species that short...yet. Nevertheless, in many ways we're still proving the truth of his statement that "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
With this, and Dave Stevens in my last post, this blog is starting to get a little morbid and a lot off topic. If this world can keep from killing off any of my literary or artistic heroes for a week, I'll see about getting some lighter fare up here real soon.
Anyone who reads anything connected with comics knows by now the sad news that artist Dave Stevens died two days ago of leukemia.
There are a lot of comics artists that I like. There are fewer that I consider great. There are a very few that I consider a strong influence. They're the ones whose art would always arrest my eye and force me to linger and admire. The ones who would cause me to buy a book on sight, even if they only did the cover. The ones who I would gladly pay for the privilege of working with.
Dave Stevens was one of those artists. Best known perhaps for his creation The Rocketeer, nearly as much so for being instrumental in the revival of Betty Page fandom, he was also, in my opinion, a driving force behind the modern pulp revival. Growing up as I did in the company of Doc Savage and The Shadow, it was no wonder that his work caught my eye; every line of his work was everything that was good about the golden age of pulp. He was, with Olivia de Bernardinis, the latter 20-th and early 21st Centuries best heir to the idea of "cheesecake", with a sense of form and clarity of line that were second to none.
Like the recently deceased Steve Gerber, I always thought that he did not receive the respect he deserved among comic readers, mostly due to the fickle ways of popularity. As artists with lots of flash and little substance came and went, Dave seemed to be continually refining his own instantly recognizable style, surfacing occiasionally with the odd book or issue, but seen more often in his influence on the work of others.
I don't need to say he'll be missed. The tributes to him I have been reading all day are proof enough of that. Saddest for me is that, as I continue to hone my own craft, I know that he's one of the greats that I'll never get to meet or work with.*
Still, here's my small tribute...a little color job on a very low-rez sample of Dave's work. I don't know if this is kosher to use the piece this way, but frankly, I don't care. This is as close as I'm going to get....
What with Mike Wieringo, Steve Gerber and now Dave Stevens all within the past year, this is happening too often. Just stop it now guys, OK?
*FYI, if anyone's interested, some of the other big names on my "wishlist" are:
-Frank Cho
-Dave Sim
-Brian Bolland
-Bart Sears
None of whom need any help from me, but hey, you gotta dream big, right?
Update: For anyone who's not familiar with Stevens' work, there's a fantastic gallery of his art online at "Golden Age Comic Book Stories". Go check it out, and while you're there, check out the massive gallery of pulp and comic art that this blog's author has collected.
Has anyone else noticed the resurgence of popularity of H.P. Lovecraft's work on the internet lately? Like some elder god rising from the depths, his stories ascend through the chthonic miasma of the digital age, bringing him a popularity he's not enjoyed, I suspect, since the first run of Weird Tales. Whether this is due to the emergence of much of his work into public domain, the culmination of popular works by authors such as Brian Lumley or Neil Gaiman, or some bizarre alignment of the stars, I cannot say, nor dare I predict what ineffable doom it spells for our benighted plane of existence.
He's been celebrated as a dildo cozy on Boing Boing, parodied in a webcomic at the Unspeakable Vault of Doom, celebrated by the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society, and represented in his many aspects at Ectoplasmosis (whose "Cthulhu Cthursday is must see internet every week). Leave us not forget that the internet almost collectively wet its pants at the possibility that the monster in Cloverfield was going to be Cthulhu. And you know you've really made it to the top when Tori Spelling stars in an adaptation of your work.
Don't get me wrong, I love a good squamous horror as much as the next being; I just wonder why and how it's come about. Time was when only the most hardcore of nerds or horror fans even knew the name of Lovecraft, now he seems to pervade the net like the shadows that haunt fabled Arkham.
So, if you can't beat 'em, join 'em, I says. I for one would like to welcome our tentacled masters, and here's the proof. Inspired by reading Chapter 2 of Derek Pegritz's "Footnotes to the Human Species", here's my interpretation of how things might play out after dark at a certain well-known prison.....
Apropos of nothng much, other than the fact that I went to see Spiderwick with my kids yesterday. It's an OK movie, although darker than you'd think, considering the market. If you're thinking about taking kids to see it, read some reviews first.
This is an FYI that the first volume of drawings from the "100 Artists" project is now up for auction on Ebay. It's got a starting bid of $500, so make sure you've got a few shekels socked away if you're going to bid on it. If, like me, you find the price tag a little too steep, you can still see the drawings contained in the book, including my own contribution, at the 100 Artists Flickr page.
Personally, I think they've set the starting bid a little high, considering the fact that it's been up nearly eight days and hasn't had a bid yet, but I'm hoping there's a few high rollers out there who'll get into a bidding war at the last minute. I'd love to see them make a bundle of money off this and do more of these projects. Considering where the profits will end up, it would be a worthwhile investment for anyone who's got enough cash to jump in the ring.
Found via Metafilter, via Mark Evanier, the news that Steve Gerber has died.
Who now, you may ask?
Only the creator of Howard the Duck, that's who. The foremost writer of Man-Thing. The creator of Sludge (for Malibu Comics). A 40+ year veteran of the medium, working, according to his blog, up to almost the last minute, on Doctor Fate.
Gerber had a spotty history in my mind. He was never a "first-rater" outside of Howard the Duck, not because he wasn't talented, but because he never seemed to receive the respect he deserved in the places where it mattered. Proof positive is the movie version of "Howard the Duck" and the legal battles surrounding ownership of the character. Still, I think he is one of those people who will be remembered as a sincere creator and inspiration in the field. Mark Evanier's keeping Gerber's blog alive for now, so it's a good time to reminisce about some of your favorite comics, and see what he was up to recently.
Goodbye Steve. Thanks for the duck.
Another odd search term that's turned up in my SiteMeter reports recently is "sketches of ears". Some part of my subconscious took that as a signal to do a Wolverton-esque figure drawing, and so I give you:
Ears McGillicutty, the world's most successful paranoid. Blessed with Brobdingnagian lobes, Mr. McGillicutty knows for a fact that people are talking about him behind his back, because he can hear every word. He's not worried, though..he's too busy working too jobs (radar technician and dog whistle tester) so he can keep himself in Q-Tips.
Seeing as how my last sketch took me to the number one spot in Google search for "rat dropping illustrations", let's see if I can match that feat by making myself #1 for "sketches of ears".
Yes, here at Paladin Freelance, we're all about ears and rat droppings.
Update: And just like that, I'm #1 in the search listings. I guess the secret to topping Google's rankings is to specialize in categories that no one will ever search.
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