Let's Get it On...

...with Marvin Gaye. I cannot recall if this was the finished one or one of the WIP iterations I eventually submitted to DevArt, but later retracted.

Here it is anyway. Pencil, tombo marker, gouache, etc.

BAzerk! BAZerk! baZerK!

An alternate to this image. Son of Bazerk only made one album, and it is one of the hip hop genres finest hours. A tasty marriage of Public Enemy style production madness and the James Brown and Bootsy informed insanity of SoB and his crew.

Mutual of Scribblelogue's...Wild Kingdom.

So I am not Marlin Perkins, but sometimes I draw animals. The Hippo was just something that came up when I thought about being a kid and owning Hungry Hungry Hippos. The bird was from a failed attempt at a portrait of former DevArt staffer Yachtclub, who was also in the shot, but cropped out...because the only thing that turned out ok in the illo was this bird.

The hippo was done digitally, and I haveto say I am still a long ways of from being comfortable (or competant) drawing from scratch with a Wacom and software. I prefer real pencils, really. The bird is pencil, gouache and some digital tomfoolery.

Pictures at a Rekonstruction

So in another life I did a brief stint as the concept artist for a video game startup named Damage Studios. It was a good company with a great idea that unfortunately never got to make good on it. There was some brilliant technology being worked on, a great aesthetic and a decent storyline wrapping it together that was novel and fairly original.

A lot of art got done though. The founder and CEO, Tony Guntharp, has given me the green light to release this stuff for the public. Here is one the designs for a corridor. I know, not the most riviting stuff, but the more finished designs I am putting up at DevArt, like this and this.

I actually enjoyed the industrial design aspects of my tenure in video games.

New Blender

So, I just skimmed this Slashdot thread on the new release of Blender, which I had first tried a few years ago and had come to the conclusion it had the single worst interface in the bloody cosmos. Not just the look of the GUI, but the very logic, layout and naming of tools and functions. As interfaces went, it was akin to abstract performance art. And their documentation was abhorrent.

That finally seems to be changing to an extent, but reading the subsequent postings (read at a threshold of 2+ or be prepared for a lot of inanity) there is still a way to go. Opensource advocates have generally been willing to forgive some of its faults since it was the only cross-platform (but originally Linux native) 3D app of any consequence out there...but I have not been one of them. This may prompt me to at least try it again.

Vanitas

This was done a week or two back with a black Tombo marker while riding the train home late one evening (the overhead reading lamp allowed for a decent reflection).

Shameless self-promotion!

So for the second time in as many months, I have been selected for DevArts QC (Quality Control) Approved! Prints feature. While I would like to say it is because I am on staff at DevArt, I actually have bupkes to do with the prints system, and I get notified of my inclusion like any other user.

And like the previous honor, they picked an image of mine I am not particularly happy with. lol.

Be Enlightened

So I have been a Linux user since 1998, and have been partial to the Enlightenment window manager since 1999 (the whole KDE v. Gnome is largely a non issue for me, since I use apps from both under E and don't care about the conflict between the egos of the two camps).

This was a really random idea for an E logo I had back in those early days that I did with Fireworks and the GIMP.

It is crude but had some potential I felt, at the time. Of course, I never showed it to anyone and it sat on an old harddrive for years afterward.

Nobody Beats...

...the Biz. The Diabolical Biz Markie that is.

Truth be told I grew up in the era when hip hop was not the most overplayed dreck on the radio and the artistic merit of most rap/hip-hop performers was far superior to the gangsta-twits we have now.

I still like Biz Markie, Big Daddy Kane, DJ Polo and the rest of the Juice Crew.

This had a more fleshed out form that originally ended up on DevArt, but I never liked it really, so I pulled it shortly thereafter. I will most likely someday tweak it to my liking, but for now how about an early layout of what may be yet to come.

Comics the zeruch way, part 2

So here is another DCU character I wanted to overhaul. I still remember the first time I saw Red Tornado was in an Annual of the Justice League tied into Crisis on Infinite Earths (which also featured Zatanna in a really poor fashion period of her existence, as well as numerous other characters I would love to redesign).

I hate how I ended up making the cyclonic action below (I initially was just going to put the turbine portion I intended to make evident, but intent and result are often two totally different animals). The part that worked was the exposed android bits, which if I get around to redoing this will be kept. And I dig the hands.

Lula Likes Limas

I finished a final in the History of Brazil yesterday, and went looking back through my notes after the fact to see how badly I fared. I found this doodle of what I guess looks a little like current Brazilian head of state Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva , but IIRC my instructor was rambling about Brazilian food and feijoada, so I somehow came to this.


Ball point pen and 30 seconds of digital color after scanning.

Comics the zeruch way, part 1

And so here is a fragment of an idea that i am sure will get off the ground someday; a personal interpretation of classic (and in many cases obscure) DC Comics characters. This one is about four years old.

I always thought Mr. Freeze was given some stupid outfits, but dig the retro glass vacuum tube-helmet action.

I notice that lately he has been given a bit of a makeover, and while I now think the whole skinny Tim Burton movie extra look is a bit overdone, it is definately an improvement.

Home on the Strange

And because i need a filler post (no, I don't, but let us just say so for the sake of itself), here are a few shots of my studio/office space using my somewhat underpowered but useful Olympus Stylus Verve. It is only 4 megapixels, and its zoom is far from great, but the sucker has proven rugged an compact enough for my immediate use.

I really miss my Minolta Maxxum 7K. Still do not know what its fate was.

As is somewhat in evidence, i do in fact (or rather have) do large works. 4' x 4' is a preferred size, but I have wanted to work in larger, like 4' x 8' or larger. i simply lack the space and currently, time.

And yes, I prefer using rackmount machines to minitowers, and yes that is a cargo-grade travel rack on casters. I roll like that.

Logo badness...

Right around the time that Damage Studios (the MMOG start up founded by Tony Guntharp, and of which i was non-exec employee #1) was about to get off the ground, it was initially going to be called Konstrux Studios, and I spent all of about 15 minutes on his girlfriends Mac torquing around with logo ideas. Voila. Instant mediocrity! I still hate one-button mice. Love OS X, hte one-button mice. Really. They are an abomination. If you skull is too empty of gray matter to utilize more than one finger at a time...just give up.

Mechanical legs, mechanical legs...part deux

Another biomechanical thing from the sketchbooks. Rapidograph and tombo marker, it is probably the result of too much sleep dep, like so many other oddities. This is probably around a decade old.

And let's face it, when I started doodling this stuff (like I did with angels and pop art), it was long before the current trend. When I did it in high school and junior high, I was looked at like a mutant. Now, every schmoe with a pigma micron thinks they are going to be the next Masamune Shirow or Frank Miller.

You little buggers have it easy. Yes i sound like an old codger. No, I do not care.

You little weenies complain about how a few people don't like your "artz" (a term that makes me borderline homicidal), but the fact is that anime has become so commonplace it is largely trite. 2 decades back, it was a whole other story.

Mechanical legs, mechanical legs...

Yes, the title again refers to a line from a Kool Keith lyric.

This is from one of the dozen or so black hardbound sketchbooks I have in various states of development. I never fill one before getting another, an as a result I have none complete from cover to cover, but some with only a handful of scrawlings and others with the bulk of the pages with completed ink illustrations (there was a period when I drew straight rapidograph to paper) and a bunch of pages of scribbles with notes for oether projects.

When all else fails, I draw bio mechanical things. Maybe it is too much anime (I am of the age that I remember the original TV showings of Battle of the Planets , Voltron *, Macron 1, and Robotech**) and Transformers as a kid. Maybe it is my current interest in meical advances and nanotech. Or maybe it is my whole thing with industrial design and spaces. Who knows.

This bad boy is several years old, and at one point, like so many other loose ends, it just collects dust. So here it is.

* And I actually preferred the big vehicle Voltron to the 5 mechanical lions, which just seemed so stupid to me at the time. Now it all looks stupid, but I'd still get those old vehicle episodes if I could -- nostalgia, yo.

** And I actually think Southern Cross was just as interesting as the Macross arc, and more interesting than the Mospeada segment. Hovertanks. It is all about Hovertanks.

Checking for a Pulse

So guys, I have not dies, been abducted, or abandoned this account. Just busy. But last week I picked up a Caslon sketchbook at the UCD bookstore, along with a pair of Tombo markers and a 2H pencil.

Stuff will be coming fast a slightly aggravated this week.