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.

Holiday Post

A comission for the holidays, featuring a very one-sided battle between two famous stop-motion arctic monsters: the Rhedosaurus from "Beast from 20, 000 Fathoms" (one of my favorite Harryhausen movies) and the Abominable Snow Monster from the Christmas classic "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Raindeer." Whose to say the Beast didn't make a trip to Santa's Village before swimming down to New York?

I hope everyone who reads this blog is having a Merry Christmas (or a Happy Hannukah, but that's been over for a while, hasn't it?). Mine was pretty good. I got a copy of the complete run of Xenozoic Tales by Mark Schultz, which I can't wait to dig into.

cover art by Mark Schultz

In my opinion, any Christmas when you get a book whose alternate title is "Cadillacs and Dinosaurs" has been a pretty damn good Christmas!

Vegiteam and Snakulons Project

Members for two opposing teams I had to design for a fictional PSA on nutrition. You can pretty much guess who's good and evil.

In the Lead Carrot I was influenced a little by Sonic, Super Saiyans, and the Scrubbing Bubbles. Then I made the Female Carrot a bit like Sailor Moon, and the Baby Carrot... I just tried to make look cute.

I don't know if he really looks like a blob of gravy. I was inspired by Cthulhu and more than borrowed from a certain Godzilla monster...

Palm Springs oils

Can't believe this actually turned out decent, being an oil painting and all. The best one I've done all year, considering that I'm posting it here! Another palm tree painting is coming up, but it will be in acrylics next time.