Excellent Traveling Volume #7

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Some time ago, I did some cover art for James Maliszewski’s ‘Empire of the Petal Throne’ zine, “The Excellent Travelling Volume.” I just found out that the volume with my illustration will come out next. This portrays some poor sap about to get probed to death by a couple of evil creatures (I can’t remember the name of these villains). I was pretty pleased with how this one came out.


Sinister Sutures

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This one is from Goodman’s “Sinister Sutures of Semptress” by Michael Curtis, out now in time for Halloween!


ice giants

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work in progress; as I was drawing this I was thinking of David Trampier’s 1970s era artwork for “Glacial Rift of the Frost Giant Jarl”


Octopus (2)

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The Cube (4 page comic)

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Monster Illustrations

These are from an as-of-yet unannounced project. More details in the future.

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ale ooze

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book worms

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cannibal

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magman

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mangler

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mudman


Pusher

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Another panel from my autobiographical short comic, “The Cube.” It’s about work. The guy in this panel who is pressing down on my head in this panel is not a member of the KKK – he is wearing a ‘capirote’ (a pointed hood worn by people doing penance for their sins). I haven’t had time to work on it but I can still snap a quick picture and post it.


Recent Work

I was recently asked to do a book cover. The client had some ideas and wanted me to reference this wonderful painting originally done for the Ballantine Books edition of Lord of the Rings:

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So I started with rough sketches and we finally agreed on something like this:

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The blue line indicates the edges of the cover. The client asked me to free up space in the sky for the book title and get rid of the lizard head in the lower LH corner so they could put their logo down there as well as some other small things… so I got to work.

Here is a shot of the painting in progress:

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This isn’t a very good photo but you can see that it is a color version of the drawing above. While it fulfills the original assignment, it just looks a little weak to me. The snake people look OK, but the humans look like a bunch of dorky mannikins… and they are too small. I hated to give up on it, having already invested time in this version, but it just wasn’t working… so, after agonizing over HOW to fix it, I started making clay models of the figures and arranging and rearranging them to try to get what I wanted. I previously tried one of those wooden ‘artist model’ figures but just couldn’t get it to hold a good pose so I went with plasticine clay over wire armatures. I think I got the idea while watching a documentary about the animator Bruce Bickford.

Here is one of the photos I took of the models:

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This seems better to me.  The reptile men are practically on top of the humans… the fighter guy with the sword better get chopping or they are going to get eaten!

Using this, I began to work on a new version. It now looks like this (I added a fake title and logo in the corner to get a better idea of what it might look like in use):

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Sub Attack

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Those lousy Krauts are gonna sink that ship!


Back Home (NSFW)

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Here is another 2 page spread for the Shaver book that I was working on a little over a week ago and just recently scanned… this is from chapter 2 or 3 and is intended to illustrate the horrors of the Dero as imagined by Shaver — I think after the editors at Amazing Stories got done with them, the sexual sadism was more implied rather than explicit. But I wanted to try to tell this story as Richard Shaver saw it, so the nasty stuff stays in.

I’ve been away for almost 10 days and it is good to be back. While visiting family and friends, I had the opportunity to try to describe this project and I found getting people to understand why I thought the Shaver story was interesting was easier now than it used to be — I think working on editing the comic and going over the source material I have been reading/looking at really helped solidify it in my mind and made explaining it easier.

Next I need to do some more Goodman work. Unfortunately, because of dayjob issues, I just figured out that I will not be attending Gencon this year. I was supposed to be a guest of Goodman, but maybe next year.