new poster

Another poster for the Brewcity Bruisers roller derby team. I couldn't resist running with a theme from Love and Rockets - our heroines in a police lineup. I thought it would be a perfect fit for the outlaw/cuteypie image of roller derby. Above is the initial sketch.


Step two, the refined drawing, is always bittersweet. I end up with a nicer product, I gain a lot in terms of neatness, details and other accidental/experimental elements but I lose a bit of freshness and spontaneity.I like the colored version. It's all a bit arbitrary, but I went with generic colors eyedropped off photos of the various teams. I'm a bit rusty on coloring in Photoshop since my recent move plunged my already chaotic existence even deeper into chaos. I need to scan some sketches and experiment.

The almost final version without a couple logos and some missing info but you get the picture.

the crying messiah

While watching a show called Hitler and the Occult, I sketched out this image. The first was the man standing, inspired by the guy who was all into the occult who essentially gave Hitler the idea that he was the messiah. Then the fat man as the messiah sprang up and I couldn't help but think of Glenn Beck so I added tears. While I haven't been looking for a character like this, I think he'll come in handy for the comic I'm putting together for next year's Stumptown Comics fest. How can you go wrong equating Glenn Beck and Hitler? You can't.

barbarians at the gates

Between reading Frank Thorne's Ghita of Alizarr and Gene Wolf's Book of the New Sun series, my thoughts naturally turn to swordplay and barbarian babes. Unfortunately, these are things I'm not particularly good at. The picture above is a great example. The pencil sketch is an attempt at a bad-ass barbarian, but she looks more like a bad mannequin than a slayer of men. The women on the left are an attempt to make the women appear to be made out of other than plastic and or fiberglass.

In close up you can see my experimenting with a different approach to drawing the mouth. The nipples are a work in progress.

This is the first pair I drew after the pencil sketch and while I think she's fleshier, I had to move her eye in photoshop so as not to appear wall-eyed. The original is in the top picture.

Here I am getting to my Playboy roots. I saw my first naked woman in a Playboy and it has forever warped my thinking. Here's a sketch of Azizi Johari from a picture I found on the web. She had an amazing body but her face was a strange mix that I didn't bother to try to capture here.

J.G. Ballard is dead

I was scribbling on this last night while watching The Big Lebowski. That's just a fact and is in no way intended to imply causality. I was also penning this in the moments before I read that one of my favorite authors, J.G. Ballard, had died. While I would be hesitant to imply causality, I can't help but want to make the connection between what I do and being a fan of Science Fiction in general and Ballard specifically.

These days, sci-fi authors love to gripe about how our modern world resembles fiction more than their writing does. They decry how impossible it is to conceive of anything as strange and convoluted as our tech-saturated society and culture. Fuck that. Ballard's Sci-Fi was the fiction of five minutes from now. His work wasn't about black holes or space travel, but about the way the world we live in offers up infinite possibilities in the way we see it. It was about High Rises, Car Parks, and our sexualized relationships with our cars. An empty swimming pool was a portal across dimensions, disused t.v. antennae a harbinger of doom. He saw the surrealism in what we take for granted every day. In may ways his work more resembles John Barth and Robert Coover, or William S. Burroughs for that matter, than it does Philip K. Dick, Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov or any of the sci-fi giants that were his mentors and contemporaries.

His great works were behind him in many ways, but it is still sad to see one of the all-time greats pass away. Thankfully, his books will still open the portals across dimensions.

I am having a problem with the sexiness factor. There's something just off about her face. Not bad, just off and not what I was trying to achieve.

morning sketch

At breakfast this morning I decided to sketch a couple sitting in front of a large window. I hadn't done this kind of sketching in a long time and I am definitely rusty.

the mix tape is dead

If I lack an arrow in my quiver (Let's pretend there's just one missing) it's my reluctance to use a lot of black. I generally say to myself that I'll fill them in later, but in a sketchbook, really, there is no later. This is an attempt at a remedy and, if anything, I still think some of the fill is a bit timid. On the other hand, I really like the results. The silhouette effect makes the figure much more solid and heavy than lines alone could. I will post this again with color if I get around to it.

Comic artists tend to pencil in the blacks or, if they're a big area, mark them with an X. I tend not to do that so much as I indicate shading and wing it when I ink. Here, I fully shaded the black areas which is a departure for me because patience is not one of my virtues.