I don’t have any new art to post at the moment, though I have been generating some. I’ve been plugging away at those t-shirt designs (all the while learning cool new Photoshop tricks to stream line things), which I hope to have done…sometime. I’m looking forward to having a good smattering of designs for sale and art I can add to the gallery here. I’ve spent some time working on a logo for a youth leadership program my cousin and his wife are heavily involved in. It was very different from what I normally do, but another opportunity to learn new things and use my skillz (yo) to help some people I care about. Today I went back to that summer camp logo I posted last week and added some color upon the request of my fellow Cub Scout leaders. I’ll post that version once I hear some feedback and make any changes.
Now, on to some new old stuff.
“Hi, I’m Sociopathic Smurf”.
This is Ostogri, a character from Wilhelm that’s more plant/tree than human, despite how he looks in this very early version. Ostogri’s people are very human-like and mobile in their “sapling” phase, traveling the land until they reach a certain age and find a suitable location, at which point they take root and metamorphose into sentient trees. Their purpose is to re-treeify ™ the earth after the apocalyptic events preceding the story of Wilhelm. There’s a lot more to their story, but I’ll leave it at that for now.
The unpainted picture.
This was yet another example of my attempts at combining traditional media and digital. The original drawing was graphite and charcoal with a sepia-ish acrylic midtone wash. The charcoal bled a little and it looks a bit messy, but I thought it added some interesting texture to the overall image. I had originally scanned the drawing in two parts, which left a lovely line straight across the middle that I never really managed to smooth over with my Photoshop skills at the time. I tried to hide it, but it’s still apparent in the color version. By the way, this is another instance of the only colored version remaining of this image being a print out, the digital file is MIA. Many years later, after my scanner was no more and digital photography was much better, I took a digital picture of the original art with the intent of printing it out and hand painting it (there were a slew of concept art pieces I was going to do that with, like the Spirit of the Earth image I posted a while ago, as well as the flying whales I posted last week-ish). I never did get around to this one, but that’s okay because Ostogri looks much different now…
Ostogri now looks more tree-like…which also means he looks more Groot-like, even though I had no idea who or what Groot was back when I designed him this way.
Although I liked the original blue skinned and orange-tattooed version of Ostogri, it didn’t really make much sense for him to look like that if he was mostly tree. I gave him a visual update in a cameo appearance he makes on page 2 of Revery (which I will get back to soon…anyone else sick of my saying that yet? I mean it, though.). His look was inspired by the beach trees in my yard, which have this awesome corded, muscle look to them. This is likely not the final iteration of this character (especially since the Guardians of the Galaxy film, he looks a bit too much like Groot, even though I had never heard of him when I redesigned Ostogri), but it will likely be in this ballpark.
Speaking of Revery page 2…
This is the rest of the unfinished page 2 that the latest incarnation of Ostogri appears on. It’s meant to be a flowing, subconscious, dream montage that finally clears a little into a very specific dream sequence to start the story of Revery. The initial dreams are all based on actual dreams I had, which were pretty fun to draw. Aside from color, this page is missing some other random dream elements, as well as a fog/mist that ties everything together before clearing into a specific dream around that lower right hand corner. In case you’re wondering, yes, that’s Plunger Monkey heroically bursting through a door floating in nothing (the door being a reference to a failed comic book project collaboration with Bill Gauthier and Jorj called Infinite Portals), and yes, that is me with a cat on my head…and yes, the cat has apple slices for fur (don’t ask me, ask my brain why it dreamed it one night).
Please let me know what you think, it makes my brain happy.