Sketchbook Doodle

Kirby is an impossible act to follow, but...

My work ID

At least it is better than my drivers license.

Double Kirby on his 97th

Now I really do feel small and insignificant.

Kirby Double Page Spreads

Bonus special interest link for Gorham.
Tumblr decorative miscellaneous

JMG added. My Kirby addition:

Plus The SILVER SURFER ENCOUNTERS THE CELESTIALS. Stuff like this just blows my mind. Jack was really one of them you know. Had to be.

Shot me right in the canteen

Looking around for a link to horse drawing tips. 

Found this.

Doing some more inking on TROPHY. Wanted to cheat a couple of bkgrd things.
Got a pretty cool effect by continually sharpening these photos in Macs Preview program.
I'll make brush presets of these, reduce them to small size in stamp form. Should look like something that was inked.

Attacked By Bees

A gang of renegade bees have been terrorizing Blair and me for the last two days. First a few dozen snuck into the house thru a vent yesterday afternoon. We called "The Bee Man" and they seemed to get it handled....this morning the coast looked clear, but like any good Lee Marvin-style biker-gang movie, they were just massing for another assault.

About lunchtime, they began SWARMING into the house.

I was working upstairs--I kept my cool for about 15 minutes, ushering as many as I could out the  balcony door (they all seemed like they WANTED to leave thru the door--and those that could, did)...but very quickly the room around me began to vibrate with a loud, many-winged BUZZZZZing that was truly unnerving. It wasn't so much the few dozen bees I could see, it was the thought of all those many more bees as yet unseen that must be making the racket.

I grabbed my crap and got us out of there.

The Been Man came back and cleaned the place out. Kept us out of the house for most of the day, so we wandered over to the local Mexican food joint...I downed a couple drinks, which helped a little. Back home now and the situation's much better....But this whole ordeal's left me seriously rattled!

Seriously, I'm kinda freaked. Unstung...but freaked.

And I'm pissed because I couldn't finish what I was planning to post for today.

Here's me and Blair, jetting away from the danger in a Jack Kirby world.

p.s. on a positive note, the text in this Kirby panel comes from my very own home-made comic font, created using Ellis's Paintfont.com site. Thanks, Elz!

JMG Added" At least they weren't this BIG!

JMG Added: THE BEE MAN has your number Marty!!!! LOL

Post It Monster Drawings

Pretty incredible

Blair Witch sumo doodle

Really has been good for me to dabble with sumo brush with zero expectations of myself.

I think it is upping my photoshop game.

The Lathe of Montag

If you wake up some morning and things aren't quite right, check the Blog for anything Ben Montag was recently complaining about.

Affinity - Free illustrator alternative

Scan from the Van

The haunted swamps of youth

Another SUMO doodle. 

I believe this is the people that had the (same named?) program that Ranjo and I used to do  a few sketches.

Jeff having the most popular with several nice robots. 

Much more limited but easy to use.

I think it's them.

Digital Inking. 3 Pages to go

Went quick.

Had to make up a little bit as I went along.

Will still do some tones etc.

Bah! Now THIS is a HORSE!

A pox on the computer age

Social media is very buggy on my IPad one (4 yrs old) so I can't reliably respond and gush over the stuff being posted. Great things recently.
My hard drive crashed. It was under warranty so it will only cost me $70 to get a new disk with most of my data recovered. I am backup deficient. This very week my Adobe subscription finished. They wanted to go from $30 to $50 a month. With a price point like that my wife expects results, so I thought I'd live without the upgrades and support. Now I've got nothing. A few posts down is a free adobe alternative and I'll review the blog for others. If someone wants to make a list... Why isn't there  a Google Vector?

A Short Filler Cosmic Theatre Vignette

 

A Micro-Story using more minimalist, monochromatic art.

(I moved the Kiva Plank entry down below Marty's Teen Ellis.)

SUMO ! Photoshop lite- in your browser!

My first sketch with it.

Using the mouse.

Pretty dang cool. Layers- opacity- I've barely scratched the potential.

I don't know about downloads. I did the sketch above just by hitting TRY.

 I colorized it a bit. Very photoshop like. I believe the big deal is it has to limit your resolution and keep you sane on how dynamically it digs in on the pixel manipultion.
But still. Free and a click away from bringing it up on a browser tab. Great.
FORGOT TO LINK IT. Here's the program. Try it. 

 My second doodle with it. Great as something that does what it does without a photoshop hogging of ram.
Drawn with a mouse in about 15 minutes.
Big brushes to little brushes.
That never got very little.

My Tue contribution

Another sketch....this time in color. I kind of went overboard with mixed media on this but I started it and let in go forward. Paper didn't cooperate with the Tombow markers and the Tech pen india ink but I rolled with it. Had been going through my art supplies trying to figure out where everything was and just came across a handful of stuff and just started messing with it. Oh well.

A Man and His Map

Elz, let me attempt to elevate our spirits with a humorous panel from my current work-in-progress.*

Ain't nothing gonna keep that Teen Ellis cat in the dumps!

I listened to the yr last guest spot on the "Better Than Fiction" podcast. Let me say again: THEY NEED MORE ELLIS. I had to back the "tape" up and call Blair over so she could hear yr explication on "Robinson Crusoe on Mars" for herself.

"...(He's) on Mars. Hasn't encountered any life whatsoever...(but) he's got this little monkey named Mona...who's obviously getting drinking water from somewhere. So he tracks Mona down to this big underground cavern where she's getting all her water, but as a bonus there's this aquatic plant Mona's also been eating. 'Hmmm, let me see that Mona,' cuts open a sample for himself, 'Yes, this is good," without even a little note that YOU'VE FOUND LIFE ON MARS--!! Up to this point Mars has been totally lifeless-- next second you're eating it."

You can't beat Goodson as raconteur.

*the town of Fume in no way resembles any real town, living or dead.

Nick and Grandpa Tom Building With Kiva Planks at the Reuben H. Fleet Science Center

Posting this because I'm counting this as a piece of artwork. :) Took an hour or so to reach the ceiling.

When you got your health...

I win

I had a search I regularly did for the woman that evicted me a year and 7 months ago.

She is now dead. She has no more property and I need to get on with life, the 10 or so creative years I may have.

I'll never get back all the pleasure I gave her, being crushed like a bug.

But I can live a better life that equalizes that low.

I'm Learning

 

 

I've done printouts of some of my stories and made them into book signatures.  Being able to hold the pages in my hand as physical objects has affected my view of them.  I can see now that as a book, there are too many full-page, full-color drawings one after another.  The eye needs some variety and some relief as one pages through a book.  So I've started doing little minimal drawings that will fall between the longer, more elaborately drawn stories.  And I'm working on some very short, limited-color sequences as well to give the reader  visual "breathing room".

 

Oh, and Marty, since our discussion about picture size some weeks back, I'm trying something different.  I have enlarged the picture on the page, reducing the white space as compared to the printout you saw at my house.

Chalk one up

Smeared about

Line drawing versions on Tumblr

 My big experiment wasn't rocket science. I kept the original from above at the ready to paint back into the painting as I experimented with various mask layers.

 I started by cropping a bit. And then Thinking I should crop it to the proportion of a magazine. And you see the result.

Tonight and Tomorrow

Did this for a guy in the Okie Comic Creators. He didn't ask me to. He's a huge Aquaman fan.

Also working at refining the pose on Rocket Raccoon that Marty said he liked.

(UPDATE from Marty:)
THIS one, Elz:

(...it feels very personal modifying someone else's post...invasive, even. My apologies....)

Inhuman-sized Printer

UPDATE: More Inhumanity (I can't help myself):

My new scanner/printer arrived yesterday.

The Epsom WF (for "workforce," not W(T)F??) 7610. Under $200, it has a scanner-bed that's 12" x 17" (tho' it scans a little under that), and can print up to 13" x 19". THose are two 8.5" x 11" sheets on there--scanned simultaneously. I'm impressed.

It was a breeze to set-up. And now I'm not only printing and scanning large-format style--I'm doing it wireless-ly. Wow, the future.

I celebrated with a Kirby Inhumans study. They never get old.

Kirby Leprechaun story- Creepiest part

I think it's who Kirby had in mind.

His art is absolutely at its peak with that strip that Marty linked to in the

comments to his 60s model sketch.

HEY
 -Weezner alert!

I just approved a comment of his. Should be related to the previous Vectorman discussion.

Almost Midnight

I tried.

Must post or it won't be Tuesday in Oklahoma

 better measure. I wanted to return to it and make sure I still had chops at recording. As Marty said on his post, the temptation to do correction in photoshop is pretty strong. Here I've done just a little smudge erasure.