Rough zoo studies

Alligators make great subjects because they almost never move over the course of a few hours.

 Same with iguanas.

More Godzilla

Godzilla vs the Daleks from Doctor Who in a match I'd love to see happen. I don't think I did the idea much justice, as I may have rushed tp get this done in time for G-Fest, the Godzilla convention in Chicago I go to every year.

Speaking of G-Fest, I doodled this there.

Godzilla and Gamera: Surf's Up!

Sorry I haven't updated in a long time!

I decided to make this after I saw an old picture I drew of Godzilla surfing on Gamera and decided it was a good concept but I could do better. I'm going to try to make a few more giant monster-related pics for G-Fest this July, whenever I have time off from my summer job.  

Jump-scare

For Payne's class, where we had to come up with a peice that could be installed somewhere, like a mural. I chose to do a sci fi mural involving aliens whose designs were inspired by old pulp covers. I was especially influenced by Frank R. Paul's surreal designs. Bug-eyed saucer men aren't around much these days, and those were always what scared me as a kid the most. I may work on these guys a little bit more. I like them.

King Kong sketch

Need I say more?



Self portrait... and more portraits

Tarzan of the Apes

Third in the Burroughs series. Tarzan joining the apes for the Dum Dum ritual. Not sure if I'll post the fourth one though, since I don't know if it's good enough or not.

Mahar's Stare

"Still the girl advanced, chained by that clammy eye."

Second in my thesis focusing on the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs, this time focusing on Pellucidar, the first series of his I read. I was in the 6th grade, I think. Leave it to Burroughs to make the idea of telepathic pterosaurs sound awesome, in the same way a giant jet-powered turtle is awesome. The Mahars were kind of like steampunk Skeksis in a way. I even enjoyed that movie from the 70s with Peter Cushing, of course Caroline Munro helped.

John Carter of Mars

So yeah, this picture pretty much took my entire weekend to produce. It's the first in a series of pictures for my thesis project in figure drawing class. We have to come up with four pictures that followed a theme, so I chose the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs, one of my favorite authors. The next three will focus on Pellucidar, Tarzan, and a fourth which I haven't decided on yet. I'm thinking either Venus or the Moon Maid. I'd do Caspak if I weren't already using that story for another project.

Here we see John Carter and a Thark about to engage in some good ol' fashioned Martian diplomacy while Dejah Thoris looks on. Is it just me or does John Carter look like Doctor McCoy? "Dammit Jim, I'm a doctor, not a swordsman!"

I think the only problem I have with this picture is that I have Dejah just standing there without giving her anything to do. I was originally going to have her cowering but I didn't know if I had enough room.

I'm still proud of this picture because I think I've advanced with my cross-hatching and drawing of people.

Mo portraits

Best of Portrait Drawing

Update: extra portrait!

Two sketches from my Portrait Drawing class that I went over in pen and posted.

I don't know why I decided to make her hair look like a Tron grid, but to me it looks interesting.

Drawings like these make me happy becaude they show I'm actually making progress :)

Dog sketches

Just some sketches of my dog I did over winter break. The only time I can draw him is when he's lying down, so I'm lucky that he likes to lounge around the house.

Here he is thinking about squirrels.

Characoal Portrait

My dad was the model. You can tell I don't do characoal much:(

Just your standard street fight between a cop and an eldritch horror

Done for figure drawing class to give the teacher an idea of what we can do. It had to incorporate the human figure in some way, otherwise it was completely open.

I'm not too proud of the cop because I don't feel like the way the arm's bent looks too realistic, nor does the face under it. And I'm not too keen on the shading of the girl's arm. For me what shines is the monster in this piece, as does most of my work. This is also the first time I've tried to draw hair highlights on the computer.

Originally I was going to make it one of the Elder Things from H. P. Lovecraft's "At the Mountains of Madness" but I couldn't figure out how to fit one in the composition, so I just opted for some random tentacles. Maybe one day I'll draw the creature these are attched to if I come up with a good design.

Roundhouse Flipper to the Face

Okay, this one takes a bit of explaining. So for C. F. Payne's class we had to make an illustration for a hypothetical article in a children's magazine about a random fact. I chose "dolphins sleep with one eye open" because I had the idea of crossing it with an old Chuck Norris joke which said the same thing (although now that I think about it it might have been "Chuck Norris doesn't sleep, he waits"). So yeah, it was only funny for about ten seconds, and after a while I was like "fuck this." To keep me motivated I put some of those prehistoric ceolocanth fish in the background, because prehistoric things make me happy. I'm weird that way.

Art Dump

Well I promised I'd post some shit, didn't I?

Last thing I did in landscape painting the previous semester, the second to feature palmtrees.

A nude from figure drawing this semester

a hand and foot

"Xenozoic Tales" Review

It's been about a week since I finished reading Mark Schultz's "Xenozoic Tales," so it's high time I posted a review. Well, let's see, where to start? I mean, God damn, what fantastic artwork! How fantastic you say? Well let's just say that whenever I get done working on Crocazill, if my artwork so much as looks like something Mark Schultz scrawled on a bathroom stall then I can die happy. Seriously he had to have sold his soul to the devil or something because his artwork is flawless. The only person working today that can even compare to him is Frank Cho. Sure in the beginning stories you can see he's just starting out and taking cues from earlier artists, notably Milton Caniff, and the dinosaurs don't look as impressive but that's quickly remedied a few issues in, in fact the change hits so fast that I found myself constantly going back and trying to find where it set in! I think I noticed it around the story where they meet the Grith, creatures resembling the Dinosauroid which communicate through Scrabble tiles.
And that's just one of the trippy things you'll find in this book. Never since the original "Land of the Lost" has there been such a unique spin on the lost world story, let alone the post-apocolypstic narrative. The human societies that sprung up after the mysterious cataclysm even has their own names for the dinosaurs. Pteranodons= Zekes, T. rexes= Shivats, etc. These days comics either great art or a great story, but never both. Though like the art the main narrative takes a while to get started as well, but you could also argue that that works in the storie's favor since it introduces you to the characters of Jack Tenrec and Hannah Dundee before they embark on their adventures.
That brings us to the only con of this book, the spoiler being that there are no spoilers. As of this post Mark Schultz has never completed "Xenozoic Tales." I'm not sure exactly why, I read somewhere that he just stopped one day. The final page of the last comic named the title of what would have been the next issue, but none ever came. From interviews I've read Schultz says the art is partially to blame. By the comic's end each page had become so saturated with detail that he finally needed a break in the same way that illustrated version of Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein" burnt out Berni Wrightson. It's a shame too because it stops right when the characters recieve the call to action and your brain says "Alright here come the thrills!" But then you end up getting the shaft. So Mark, in the off-chance that you've stumbled upon this blog by, I don't know, Googling yourself, hurry up and finish that "Storms at Sea" novella and get your ass back to finishing "Xenozoic!" I'm sure there are people who have been waiting since the 80s for you to do it.

art by Mark Schultz

By the way the video above was from a short-lived cartoon adaptation of "Xenozoic" which ran under the more popular title "Cadillacs and Dinosaurs." Also, I apologize for not posting any art lately. That'll be remedied come Tuedsay!

I wish I had these kind of dreams more often.

In the dream I had last night a friend and I were walking down this weird section of Columbus which we had never seen before. It was much more beautiful than the real city, with wildly different styles of architecture from all over the world. But it wasn’t the same type of eclectic style that dots tourist attractions like Disneyland or Vegas, the place we were in somehow did it with more… dignity. Like it didn’t try to recreate actual structures but made instead new buildings out of certain design influences. There was function behind the form, I guess you could say. And they weren’t necessarily new, like they’d obviously been there a while, it’s hard to explain.  Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis” did the same thing but this was scaled down to Columbus level. One building I remember kind of looked like Angkor Wat in Cambodia with the same weird spires which always looked like ears of corn to me. Another mimicked Ancient Greece or Washington, DC if you want to go more modern. It was glistening white with towering columns. Whether they were Doric, Ionic or Corinthian I could not tell. Then arching over everything was something like the Roman Aqueduct, only shorter. We went by a large church which I wish I could describe but I don’t think words can paint a proper picture, but I think it combined the styles of both the east and west. I just remember it was so beautiful that I turned to my friend and joked about living there some day.

Soon we arrived in more familiar territory, the area around Broad Street near the dorms where the Byer’s used to be before CCAD bought the building and made it into classrooms. To our surprise construction crews were working round the clock trying to make it like the place we had just been in, but this time it seemed like they were just adding on to old buildings instead of making them from scratch (except for these little arches that looked like the ones made in Central Park by Christo and Jeanne-Claude. Once building near the State Auto insurance building already has these). For example, there’s one bridge farther down Broad Street which is used by trains, only in my dream it was much closer since dreams seem to like to compress landmarks. Anyway, construction crews seemed to be layering more bridges over it like blocks. Oh, and the same crews were unloading bales of hay and leaving them on the corner of the sidewalk. I remember wondering what the hell they were doing, and then I remembered some sort of parade was going through town. The circus? But what sort of event was so magnificent that they’d need to dress up entire buildings for it? Anyway, that was pretty much the only abnormal part of the dream, besides the fact that it was t-shirt weather in the middle of winter and we were carrying bent pieces of metal, using them as canes and trying to imitate the walk of the gang from “A Clockwork Orange.”

My dreams often feel like the last place that capture that sense of wonder I had in my childhood. Movies come close but dreams have the added bonus of putting you right in the middle of things even more than “Avatar” ever could. Could James Cameron boast that he can duplicate the warmth of sunlight on your back or the feeling of movement in your legs as you navigate your surroundings instead of staring at a screen? I don’t know why I’m being philosophical, I just wanted to get my memories of my dream down before I forgot them.