More caricature

Some more of my favorite movie stars with cool looking heads. Morgan Freeman, Robert Mitchum, and Robert Ryan.

War heroes

3 masters of comics art, Bernie Krigstein, Russ Heath, and Mort Drucker, cover by Heath I believe, 1973.

Kurtzman War

Can't say enough about Harvey and his unique approach to all kinds of comics, magazines, art; the man is a true master, particularly the war comics in EC. Just stunning, startling, sensational and add your own adjectives.

Big sale

Just to remind you: The new Freehead CD "The Blew Album" is coming to a web near you and there are still barbarian prints on sale, at slashed prices. Get them here or at Hyaena Gallery and House of Secrets comic shop in Burbank.

Milt Gross

Fantastic piece by the great Milt Gross which you may have seen, full of great stuff - perspective, composition, characters, it's all there. And it's funny too!

Girl studies

Character development drawings courtesy of Katie Rice, 2002.

Caricature Friday

Robert Mitchum in Night of the Hunter mode. John Wayne in the Searchers mode.
First row: Joe , Tom, and Tony from the band Joe Baiza's Congress.
Second row: Some friendly abuse from the Sardo's Happy Bottom Riding Club and Caricature Society. Ted Blackman and Steve Nicodemus nailed me (in a manly way).

Girls

Some early sketches of Females for the Chestaclese animatic 2002. To see it go to December 2007 on this blog.

Merch to be promoted

Illustrations for a cd by my friends Anthony Cossa and them. Sonic madness and rhythmic glory combine to form modern progressive ear food.

This job taught me things about illustration in general in today's tech - digital and paper. I like to start with a quick thumbnail sketch and a little marker color. Most of the time the thumbnail is the best version due to the inevitable downgrading as it goes to finish. This is where I go off the tracks, but with work it looks decent. The key is to stay faithful to the thumb and push it without losing the first flash of inspiration (See the John K. blog "All Kinds of Stuff") which we know is very difficult for knuckleheads like myself. The rough layouts were done mostly with marker and pencil plus a little black felt marker, then scanned and tweaked in Corel Painter 9. Using a small Wacom tablet, the colors were saturated and the inking was cleaned up. Found and created images were scattered about like Waldo. I love doing stuff like that - it's a collage! It gets tricky when the various images are very different sizes, leading to resolution problems. I usually do it the hard way and just slog through to the end, scan and resize, delete, resize - rescan and so on.

Art for Christmas

My special holiday babe post, Merry Holidays!

FEARLESS DAWN #1 SPECIAL EDITION IN SHOPS

Frank, over at Asylum Press sent these over. he tells me Steve Mannion's new book FEARLESS DAWN is in comic shops as of last week. Here's a sneak peak you pervs!!!







AND HERE'S A SNEAK PEAK AT 2 PAGES FROM FEARLESS DAWN #2--

Ripping Storyboard

Storyboard from Ripping Friends episode "Stinky Butt", 1999-2000.

Thumb to cel

As you can see, I did this bassackwards. It looks nice to have the pretty colored picture at the top.
At bottom below is the initial thumbnail almost a doodle, that shows the attitude/design of the character, then goes to a storyboard sketch much like the thumbnail. Layout artist turns it into a full-sized rough drawing which becomes the model basically. The animator brings it to life with movement, and also separates the arm and body so the head can talk and move independently. Animation is cleaned up, painted on a cel (back in the days) with background painting underneath, camera goes click! and Voila! You get a beautiful image of perversity and disgust. If only it were so easy.
Note: Sorry I lost the comments when I reposted, thanks to all who posted. I didn't do it right the first time. The missing piece is the desk on an OL/UL.

Behind the Scenes

Building of a scene from thumbnail to animation.

Animation Art

3 layouts and 1 animation drawing from Big House Blues, for sale cheap.

Book illustration type Drawings

From a book written by Jennifer Waters aka Jennifer Blowdryer, The book is about famous last meals. (brush-tip marker type pen on white stationery.)

More fom the Ren and Stimpy stack

First image is rough layout from Space Madness.
Second and third images are layout and rough animation, Big House Blues.