Did a little something different today. My partner picked some of the (hated) forsythia from out back and put them in a vase. I looked at them and immediately wanted to paint them. Was going to use real paint, but I rarely use the Yiynova and all the custom brushes I've purchased for PS, so I went digital instead. The approach would be pretty similar either way, I think. This way I don't have yet another canvas stacked in the corner. So, this.
A couple from today. The more complex one took a few days, the grown up Mickey was sort of a break after that. The first is this year's card for my partner. Every year I do something just for him. It's something he looks forward to. This is one of his characters in space. Used a lot more layers than I usually do and had a couple of special effects. Lot of fiddling around. The other image is just my idea of what Mickey might look like as a grown up child star. A quickie in ink.
Morning warm up. Marcel (the monkey's name is Marcel, something I just decided this morning) in one of the goofiest poses I know; Speed Racer just after he's jumped out of his car. Marcel's meant to be a fun character, not at all self-conscious which is one of the reasons I dress him in such bright colors. Wish I could get away with such stuff. Being pasty, such colors don't work on me.
Just a little morning warm up, pushing Sharp's armor WAY over the top. I'd never want to have something like this if only because drawing and coloring it would take so damned long. Just a little fun as I hadn't drawn the bunny in awhile. Oh. Right. There's some kind of holiday going on today. Totally unrelated.
It does get this bad sometimes. Ahh, the life of a 'hipster;' to be interested in things almost no one else is, though in my case it's not BECAUSE other people aren't interested, which seems to be at the heart of what an actual hipster is, it's just that my tastes don't seem to parallel much of anyone else's. Had a long conversation with my partner last night about this, and one of his comments was, "How many people that are interested in the kind of cartoony stuff you do own a copy of Hockney's, "Secret Knowledge" and have read it more than once?" This doesn't make me a better artist or anything, it just points out that, unlike some of the younger folks out there who ARE making money in the industries in which I have interest, I have broader tastes and curiosity. Or something. And of course, all that self-study makes its way into my work one way or the other. He claimed that even my color choices were challenging, which I didn't really understand. Stuff like the Haaken the Elf comic and character designs don't seem challenging to ME, but then again, what do I know? Still, the final word on this is that I won't stop drawing. I might stop sharing it but I can't really stop drawing. It's not in me to sit back and be a total consumer. I honestly think my hands would twitch or shake, needing something to do, needing to grab a pencil, brush or pen at some point to make SOMEthing. So, this. Biography is meant to depict a moment, a fraction, not the whole. If I felt it strong enough to draw it, it usually means it's something I want to examine more or it's something I need to get out of my system. This one was the latter. Oh, and hi, Vince. :"D
A little experiment. I've been having fun drawing the skater twins lately, so I thought to revisit their origin, which was a throwaway appearance on page 55 of Tamino. Keeping the setup the same, I redrew everything in the current style. It was just a bit of fun. Then I added color to the characters to make them pop and to emphasize the shabbiness of the mice's neighborhood. To me, the coloring in this way looks a lot like old hand colored photographs, something I actually got a chance to try in junior high's photography club (a club I managed to be a part of without ever taking a photograph or owning a camera). I'm not sure this is leading anywhere, it's just something I like.
A friend of mine has made a huge offer to basically finally set up a site for my comics. What this has meant for me is that I've been spending a lot of time resizing and reformatting files and, in the case of Biography, putting them in actual order (which, because I am a total tool, was a huge pain in the ass). So soon there will be a proper site online where all my comics will be easily readable, there will be links to places one can buy downloadable copies, offer me tips, possibly a Patreon page (something I'm not really sure about yet) and likely an actual Kickstarter for a hard copy of Tamino. She's very persuasive. In the meantime, after all the fiddling about, I did this tonight. The black and white version was going to be the last but my partner came in and said that while he liked it, he preferred color. So I added some desaturated color while trying to keep the original contrast scale in tact. So, these.
Smatt and Terry are an example of me mining my old stuff and making something out of nothing. The twins were in one panel of Tamino, didn't even have a line of dialogue. They were just two skater mice in a lousy neighborhood. Then I used them in the C+C origin comic where they spoke only in graffiti. There's some background with them, too; they're from a much larger family and all the members look the same. If I were to do some kind of comic with them, it would kind of be a race of clones. It's only their personalities that differ. Smatt's the angry one, Terry's more laid back, but neither of them is very nice. Anyway. -I- like them. I might be alone in that.
