a translucent hired killer flees a plane in a street of Tokyo

link takes you to Heavy-Iron Blog to see more takes

Western Theme in Dentist's Office

I don't know how much time I'll have on Tuesday to post, since I'm off today tending to wife Julie who had a tooth pulled ... here is the sketch I did in the waiting room.

Oh, and did I mention that a few weeks back my first After Effects video was awarded $1K from Genius Rocket. It helped that of the two other entries in the contest one was more than four minutes long (when the stated limit was 30 seconds) and the other contained no motion graphics whatsoever ... It pays to be in the right contest at the right time.

Here is the link for the G.R. results: LINK

Venetian Birthday

For a dear friend.

My failure to properly document my visit to Tom Moon and the Sony Crew leaves me abashed.

Inked Version of Gun Nose

I met Johnny B. (Gerardy) at my son's school. We hit it off right away. He has inked for several comics ... I wrote 'em down in my sketch book last night, but that's downstairs and I'm upstairs. He's a terrific inker and a good artist on his own, too! I just thought I would share this inked version of my Gun Nose sketch with you fellow TAGgers. We'll have other work at our shared table in Artist's Alley at the Con (a first for me).

Inking with selection Lasso

I always set up a fill action on my photoshop. I set the hot key as f4 and make selections and tap the f4 button. I inked the image here using the selection lasso with taps of f4.

In Honor of Doug TenNapel and Catscratch

I'm not sure if I got these at Micky D's or Burger King, but in honor of the Doug TenNapel video on the previous posting (VERY entertaining, BTW), I put the two Catscratch figures I could find (Gordon and Waffle) in five minutes or less on my scanner ... AND HERE THEY ARE!! Apologies to Mr. Blik. He's around here somewhere, but the time ran out ...

;-)

It Was So Much Fun!

I'm obviously abusing this blog, because this is a very boastful post. Forgive me in advance.


DIE ALIEN SCUM!

Tuesday Doodle

I'll add an actual doodle by me tonight. Maybe I'll paint into the Cowzilla I've already menkeyed with.

Added an actual doodle. i'm still going to paint into that cowziolla image. The background ruins are from produstion stills from the first Godzilla if you're interested.

Cowzilla

So the other day at the office I was discussing Godzilla: Final Wars with a colleague. In the film a giant lobster monster is defeated by a group of super powered mutants. Quite naturally, the conversation turned to the thought of all of this amazing lobster meat waiting to be eaten. I was concerned that they may not have enough butter to dip the succulent crustacean flesh into… I speculated that the great minds at Toho would come up with a giant cow to generate all of that butter. How do you make a cow of such an enormous size? The same way you make anything big in a Toho film… use Godzilla DNA!

Speed Painting Fun

Click Title to see all the Heavy Iron speed paintings!

First the Concept idea generator produces this nonsense


" a nauseous warrior holding a flag tears a chicken on a bridge "

and then "art club" at work does a speed painting. It's fun to see all the different takes. Much like the Buncake deal at his place of business.

I didn't distact myself with color till the last second, concentrating on the grayscale. Probably about a half hour spent on it.

Grotesque Influence

My mom always asked me, can't you draw anything pretty? I've always veered to the grotesque. This little entry is an explanation for that and a reaction to Marty about over amped muscular character design.

Huge influence on me was buying (or stealing, my main klepto period was about this age) the book depicted back in 1966. In it are several artists doing the huge upper torso, dinky legs character types. Seeing this in the 8th or 9th grade steered me into a taste for alternative looking comix.

I was also a huge Frazetta fan and Creepy and Eerie were about to fire up their revival of ECish type of content. So while a lot of people were all about Marvel and DC, I was spending my coin on things like Cycletoons. In that was an artist named Hank Hinton who did Hogg Ryder. And his adventures with The Old Poop. I covered a lot of notebook paper with drawings of Hogg Ryder and choppers of my own invention. The paperback also included Hinton's work. The other scan you see with FratMan is Hinton (written by Joel Siegel?). Dinky legs, Big Torso.

Click the title to see Hinton's web page. It was cool to find this web page because I had done searches for him in the past and gotten nada. Wikipedia you get nothing. So it's kind of a kick to learn he's out there and right here in LA.

Go to my other Blog where I'll be posting more of the pages from this paperback. I got it on EBay about a year ago. It also features earliest example of Vaughn Bode and his lizards, early Gilbert Shelton Wonder Wart_Hog and some other crazy but not so good stuff. Kids in College in the mid sixties about to form all the "underground" comics.

Shel Dorf...Doing fine, so I hear.

`

Just an FYI. I got a voice mail last night from

someone saying he was a friend of Shel's and that he has been in a rehabilitation center recovering from his recent fall. He's doing well and is returning home sometime today.

I'll drop him and line tomorrow and check in on how he's doing.

Napkin Bar Doodle and More

If you click on the title, that's the hair I want Maude/myself to have.

Maude Macher and her best friend Joe Keats.


I want to learn how to do small comic type stuff. I guess I'll go study more.



Anyone see that new Jack Kirby book? It has some hilarious heads in it!

Monster Traps

and delts and biceps etc.

And a skinnier version for Marty



click title for a good lecture on time management. I enjoyed it quite a bit. Just have it run as a background stream. It's a man that has less than 6 months to live, pancreatic cancer. Telling you how to get the most out of your time.

TC's Take on Feng Zhu's Robot Technique

Click on the Title to go to my page.

When there, click on the frame and hit the space bar to advance. I think there are five or so robots that I sketched out when I was last at jury duty...

Fun technique!!

Page O' Faces ...

Most of these sketches were done in odd moments: during soccer practices, lunchtime doodles. A few got pulled up into TWITCH! ... I edited a few notes off of the page (emails, etc. ... to protect the innocent).

School Board Meeting

My Tuesday contribution... done during a recent School Board meeting.

Old Olive Tree

Great to see Ye Olde TAG Blogge firing on all cylinders while I've been away. We've been attending our Italian friend Carlo's wedding in Italia; it was way down in the south, where the trees are so old they look like rocks.

I think I'll be doing a series of posts about the wedding over at Brush Pen Breakfast (I don't want to clutter up this sacred repository of bloggy goodness).

And speaking of bloggy goodness: Kapital Koolness to see Kali posting here--we have been graced by a true art celebrity!

The Great Creature Maker is gone.

This is just breaking. AP hasn't even got it.

San Winston passed away of cancer yesterday.

The Geek wire is passing this news about.

Click Title to see him at the Gnomon workshop, either the day of or day before his death.

http://www.superherohype.com/news/ironmannews.php?id=7360

http://www.aintitcool.com/node/37106

Recycling An Idea

I'm going to take the junkyard split idea, paste all the old artwork into layouts and then redraw it with the layouts hopefully pushing me to nice finishes Somewhere in that effort I need to work in a nice character sheet.

Hey, I'm going to a Gnomon seminar this weekend. It's mostly old school illustration centric this time. not 3d or tech oriented. Are you going again Tom C?

Final Mission for Snake?

The real reason I bought a Playstation arrives today: Metal Gear Solid 4. Snake's finally here and every review I've read states this game is awesome in just about every conceivable way. I've been waiting on this one.

Just got back from a quick trip to Japan (if that's possible) to meet my in-laws and Snake was everywhere - Akihabara (no surprise there), Shibuya, you name it. This photo is from Shibuya.

How long have I been asleep?

Rick has three kids?

One of the last things I remember is him fainting at the church.

Oh, ... and there was something about an award-winning Zorro epic as well ...

Some Good (Personal) News

First comics credit, as a writer!!

P.O.D.: The Nexus ... I wrote it from a story by Mat Broome (some of you know Mat ...). I did it as a work for hire project but the process went so smoothly that Mat shot me a co-writer credit ... ;-)

Here is a link ... LINK!

My strongest memory from the project: The night before my family and I evacuated because of last year's wildfires I was taking the early shift listening to KPBS radio for fire updates, and concurrently finished writing the dialog for the second half of the book ... I finished, sent the email, and about an hour later we got the reverse 911 call to get the #$^% out ...

So, lots of fun since it'll pop onto the shelves just prior to the Con ...

Finally learning Maya. Yea Me!

For the last few weeks I've been taking classes from a place called the Pixleyard here in SD.

http://www.thepixelyard.com

It's run by a few guys who work over at Bottlerocket Games during the day and teach 3d several nights a week.

The bookshelf was my first project on the first week. Now I've been working on the temple scene. Not bad I guess for only 3 weeks.

Am I Too Late???

I'm new to this- thanks Ellis for the tip!

8th Grade Graduation! Yikes!

Yes, my oldest is going to be a High Schooler in less than 2 weeks! Holy Cats!

Tuseday

Great Video of Gorilla

Click the title.

Wait for it

Well Hello There

Nice to meet y'all!


Here's an important moment in history:

Muto

Click on the header and see a different kind of 3D animation.

Sorry Guys and Smokers of the Marvel Universe

So yes work has been pretty hectic. Showed the short to the new head of animation and now I'll be showing it to the new head of Sony Pictures Digital.

Okay so what about this? Click on the title for the link.

(less) Crap Building (UPDATED!)

UPDATED IMAGE ABOVE (poopier image below)


I am stinking on this building. Gonna redraw it (again). For the Paris book.

There will be text on the page, though I kind of like the emptiness of the image as it is here.

p.s. You'd think that's the American Library back there, in the cool Art Nouveau building. But it's not. That's the gag!!

Click to Pollock

Kali, first up in comments, did this commisioned caricature. Now I no longer fear the undead.

Graphic Novel Breakfast

I went to the publishing world's annual convention, Book Expo America, at the LA Convention Center Wed., Fri. & Sat. Saturday morning I sat in on the "Graphic Novel Breakfast" and did some drawings, as well as listen to Jeff Smith ("Bone" man) lead a discussion among himself, Art Spielgelma, Jeff Loeb (writer for comics as well as producer on "Heroes"--and ""Teen Wolf"!), and Mike Mignola, Mr. Hellboy. The audience was primarily book publishers and book sellers and librarians (! a big presence at the conference and an ardently courted and highly active buying segment).

The cool thing that I want to share with you guys about the breakfast, (the breakfast was fun but nothing really remarkable was said, tho' Mignola fans, read the below), was the INCREDIBLE non-comics industry's interest in "Graphic Novels" (Spiegelman did a great rant against the descriptor "Graphic Novels", as did Jeff Smith with his opening remarks, "We do comics--we don't think of them as Graphic Novels!"). Comics supporters within the industry have been trying for years to get the organizers to put on a G.N. Breakfast/panel like this, and this year they finally relented, and were totally blown away with the response--a sellout with lots of people trying to get in--we're talking about maybe 500 people? It was big--and remember, these are almost all industry people, NOT a ComicCon crowd.

SO let's get with it on those Graphic Novels!!!

ALSO, surveying the wares on offer on the convention floor, a lot of these G.N.'s are crap. We can do much better stuff!

The two noteworthy statements made at the breakfast: Spiegelman railed at comparing the visual language of comics to the visual language of films.

And Mignola said the only thing he's ever wanted to do, and the only thing he still wants to do, is make comics--he didn't come up with a character named "Hellboy" because he was looking for movie deals and mainstream success. And he is now chaining himself to his drawing board and going back to writing and drawing comics full-time.

(I talked to him for a quick second afterward [I just wanted to encourage him to go back to drawing--like he needs my encouragement, sheesh--and tell him that as good as the artists are that he works with now, their art really shows up how truly great his work is in comparison. Well, how did Big Mig take this? He was agitated and itching to get away--in fact, he was starting to walk out of the room when I caught him {a big line was still waiting for autographs from Art Spiegelman and Jeff Smith, but not M.M.}]. He did say he's got a lot of non-Hellboy stories he wants to do, and he's trying to figure out the balance between sustaining H.B. and creating totally new stuff. He kind of brushed me off, which I understand, but then again, I only approached him because he was at a public speaking engagement promoting hisself and hisstuff...[maybe he's read my previous criticisms, or remembers our talk at the Con a few years back where I criticized the HB Movie!] OK, there, that's all my "Comics Journal" reporting for this post.)