I dunno, another Twilight Zone thingy

All Adobe Illustrator. The black in the window and window frame is unbalanced, Have to darken something else.

Teen Ellis in "MAN-STANDING"

This is to be the centerfold of my in-progress comic book.

A Teen Ellis centerfold....

What an appropriate subject, too, 'cuz we're celebrating Ellis's GOOD NEWS tonight!! Congrats, my Oklahoma buddy!

p.s. please share any suggestions, criticisms. etc. Ben, yr suggestions for "An Itch In Mind" have been implemented--thank you! Tom, yr spellchecks...still working on 'em...

Another Kindle Success Story

This came in the mail today.

Better than a letter from the IRS.

I consider it a good omen going into my interview tomorrow with SERCO.

Tinker AFB contractor.

Always great to get the occasional, actual interview.

Lighting Streak Makes Its Debut ... at TAG.

This is the brochure for the game I recently posted about: Lighting Streak. Those are my graphics on the sides. Originally the graphics were only the Lighting Streak logo floated over red, but the red of the decal and the red of the cabinet were impossible to exactly match. All the while I had a character from my old Cinematronics days -- 1985?? -- originally done for an ad promoting Mayhem 2002, but never used (when I showed the rough to Dan Viescas, he basically vomited all over it ...). Well, someone rescued that drawing from the files and gave it back to me while I was working at Inerplay and I kept it in my portfolio. Because he is carrying a ball and Lighting Streak involves a pinball mechanic, I resurrected the character, cleaned him up (a lot), and put in some other graphical touches (the lightning from the playfield above, but curved and fuzzed up) and floated everything on pieces of clean or corroded metal. The result is what you see. Last Wednesday the group got approval to begin production on five test units and to begin promoting it to major distributors, etc. The brochure you see above started off when I saw what the engineer behind the cabinet had developed at his workshop in Utah ... it looked like engineer art. So I redesigned it and made it look clean. The result I've published is in response to the top sales guy saying the original was "more colorful ..." thus I added a lot of color (to some effect). To see really bad video of the game in action, merely search for "lighting streak" on YouTube. Two vids are there.

I can't wait to read everyone's feedback!!

Inktober beckons again

Coming up

I think I will do blue marker under drawings as my personal style rule this time.

Hash tag inktober. Start now and get ahead.

Weezner liked it

Comments awaiting moderation. Glad I noticed that.

Great description of what I arrived at style-wise with TROPHY.

Didn't have room for the Monomyth in that one. 

Or maybe we did.

Board game - Heroes Journey

Not a bad idea

 I'm going to read a little Campbell Monomyth and then do some writing and creativity toward revisiting my JUNKYARD SPLIT- carton dog story. It will be my first attempt at a finished web comic. For my new, specially designed Blog I was showing off earlier.

 

Had a headache. Scanning this and putting tone on it helped. It's cropped. It has a whole bunch of loose linked ideas off to the left of the sketch. 

Color added. Just goofing. What I did that was useful was make some great notes.

I'm going to make sketches of modular junkyard parts. Junk brushes so I can quickly populate backgrounds. And a lot of character notes.

FYI

Pro registration for ECCC has begun!  I'm looking at you Tom Moon and Ellis Goodson!  And of course anyone else who wants to come up and see a great comic con!

Testing

OK.

I plan on doing a tutorial on how I do a GIF in photoshop.

Probably tonight. After my nap.

Look forward to that.
Tutorial Complete
How I do it

Revising Gore Hole- Back cover- Better pix?- better layout?

What do you think?

Go ahead and word it better, supply a better picture. 

Happy to use any and all before I dig back into Lulu.

In case you didn't know, Beata is not on the Gore Hole back cover.

Marty is. Tom Moon is. But they were never at Denny's.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Tom says, "Who was never at Denny's?"
July 25/26, 2009

JMG added: Here's some pics I took from that night.

Is It Still Tuesday?

Made the word balloon smaller. Maybe a small measure of extra humor created by the smallness?

Hitchcock Presents- Late Tuesday offering

Saw a TCM interview with Sydney Pollack. Good interview. Talked about a lot but veered at one point into his early acting. Showed a clip from Alfred Hithcock Presents- The Contest for Aaron Gold. These sketches are from watching that segment on Youtube. Netflix streaming stops at seasoon 3. This was from season 6. He was one skinny, wiry guy. The other sketch up top is the other actor.

There was a great device in the story. Pollack's adversary in the story is the swimming coach. Who is shown once, extreme long shot, making a high dive. We have no details about what he really looks like, sounds or anything. It's up to our imagination to create the intimidating picture.

 I was also wrong about no shot of the "bad" guy. He has one long shot where you kinda see him. But he has a bullhorn in front of most of his face.

Here's my Tuesday contribution:

A flier using other people's artwork.

75% TAGsters.

My Tuesday Offering

A collage of sketches with some Photoshop enhancement

Rose City Pix

Had a good time, met some nice people, saw some good stuff--but didn't sell much at all. We did get to sit near the Batmobile, tho' sadly this did nothing to boost sales--even when I added in an Adam West caricature. Dang!

Copyright!?

Unlikely the powers that be will use this for badge art for comic fest.

Instant Villain

Got together with some people at Speeding Bullet comics and did INSTANT VILLAINS.
Link to largest image file. 
Hot link was bogging down my load time on the blog.

You pick randomly from 3 envelopes. 

One power. One item. One weakness or flaw.
I got Teleportation, A sword, and cynicism 

The Beginning

I'll do the ending next

Using my Skullmonkey concept art and Idle Hands sketches,

Jammed together to tell a random story.

Using my new, uber clean, blog- where all images are formatted letterbox.

THE END

It would take a long time to do the middle so I probably won't.

Refurbished Old Art into New - Nothing Goes to Waste

The masks

Photoshop manipulation of screen captures, select and remove the midtones, print out on gray paper, work up detail and contrast with oil pastels, scan back into Photoshop, blur, burn, dodge, sharpen, paint, texture layer, and mask.

"The CARTOGRAPHER'S DILEMA"

There's still stuff that needs fixin' in this--and maybe the jokes misfire. Maybe they're offensive. No offense intended. But it is 1966 we're talkin' about.

As always, any comments/criticisms are more than welcome--they're requested.

Remember our Fr'Goom page of last week or so? He goes searching for specimens to mind scan and finds the traveling cartoon historians Mit and Mal? That's the lead-in to this....

Not sure on the Gorham character's name yet...it's "Chick Griesman" here, but something about the gruffness of "Chick Grist" appeals to me....

Of course the Chick Griesman/Grist character is not meant to represent Jim in the least. Any resemblance other than physical is coincidental. Obviously.