Sketch Dump: Strangers in Paradise

I collected Terry Moore's Strangers in Paradise for a while.  I was attracted to the very clean and appealing black and white artwork.  Given the very feminist bent of the story, I assumed Terry was a girl, which he is not.  Strangely, I found some of the storyline personally relatable anyway.  Boy was that series end cringy though.  I'm not even the only one who thought that.  

Anyway, I liked the artwork and drew from the trades and issues I had.  I may have gotten rid of all them.  (I'm not writing this in my apartment.  I don't remember.)  I do definitely still have an anniversary coffee table book.  Everybody who sees it, immediately grabs it.  (It's way out of print.)  Katchoo was very fun to draw.  I think I still put little tick marks on noses now because of her.        

Who is the girl on the left?  I don't know.  She's probably from the comic.

This page was done in charcoal.  I think most of the rest of the drawings are in pen or in really dark pencil.

Here's one of Francine in charcoal.  She reminded me of a friend of mine.

  

Here's Wonder Woman with Katchoo.  Not an official team-up, just drawing two pictures on the same page.

Sketch Dump: Sojourn

I've mentioned Greg Land's work on Sojourn before.  Going through some more sketches, I don't think I realized how much I'd drawn from the one trade I own.  There may be more after this.  The girl with the short hair is Cassidy and Arwyn has the long hair.    

The girl on the left might have been in Sojourn or not.  I don't remember.

Sketch Dump: Random Cartoon Characters

We're taking a break from sketches of girls momentarily.  (This may be it for non-girl sketches actually.)  

I was a big fan of Bloom County back in the day.  (It came back a few years ago.)  I did a credible job drawing and inking Bill D. Cat. 

 

Check out this Binkley, Milo, and Wile E. Coyote sketch.  The paper is almost yellow.  So much for "acid free" sketch pad paper.    

I was also a big Calvin and Hobbes fan in the 90's.

Here's a couple of Looney Tunes characters.  There's a baseball theme because the images were from the Comic Ball cards.  Legendary animator, Chuck Jones, drew the cards.  I had the whole set at one point, except for maybe some special hologram cards.  I got rid of all of them shortly thereafter.  Never complete collections.

Lastly, I'm including this oddly mismatched image that I don't know what else to do with.  This is Werewolf by Night from his appearance in Moon Knight by Bill Sienkiewicz.  Those two werewolf issues he did are two of my favorite comics, and Bill became one of my favorite artists.    

 

Sketch Dump: Fan Strips

I've done some fan art.  It happens.  I was a fan of an online strip called Megatokyo.  I guess it's ended.  Maybe?  I doubt these strips will make much sense unless you were reading the strip in its early days.  In the first strip, I redrew the characters in a Peanuts style.

The next one continued on in that style and added an Evangelion gag.

The next one, I just went straight Evangelion parody.  

The next one here is a crossover between two online strips I liked, Sabrina and Staccato.  Sabrina is an anthropomorphic skunk and the strip has been going on for a long time and recently restarted.  Staccato has disappeared off the face of the Internet.  The character was an anthropomorphic hippo, if you can't guess from my drawings (which I'm sure you can't).  One of his friends was a talking basketball.    

I actually wrote out a little storyline where the characters and their friends met in a bar.  I illustrated the last strip and actually sent the whole thing to the guy who was doing Staccato.  He was nice about it and maybe flattered for the attempt.  Unfortunately, he hadn't heard of Sabrina, so no official crossover ever happened.      

   

Sketch Dump: Space Squid

This artwork was so epic, I had to make it a post by itself.  This is Space Squid Meets Skipper and Gilligan in Semi-3D.  Yes, really.  If you had the pages in front of you and had red/blue 3D glasses on . . . umm . . . it would look terrible, but would sort of pop out at you a little (sort of).  I should have thought that out a bit more I ran a pink marker over this.  Because of this defacing, I'll have to type out the text here.

This is the brainchild of myself and my high school friend, Kyle.  It's hard to believe this mature adult masterpiece was the product of two immature teenage boys.  Even more amazing, we did this on a whim one afternoon.  Can you believe that?  It looks like it must have taken months of painstaking work.  We attempted to incorporate a bunch of slang we were using at the time, yet somehow reads as though it were timeless.  Space Squid was a strange idea we had for a comic character.  Regrettably, he has not yet debuted in published form (yet).  Kyle and I shared the scripting and art duties, but it looks and reads completely seamlessly.

     

Page 1 Title Space Squid Meets Skipper and Gilligan

Panel 1 

Space Squid: Intense!  My engine blows big chunks!   

Panel 2

Space Squid: Bookoo!  A planet!  Bitchin!  [Censored text.  Too ahead of its time.]

Panel 3

Space Squid: This is like too active!

Panel 4

Space Squid: Crash and Burn, dude.

Panel 5

Space Squid: Civilization.  Babes and brewskies.  Intense!

Caption: Ginger?

Panel 6

Skipper: Have you gotten those coconuts yet, Little Buddy?

Gilligan: Just a second, Skipper.

Page 2

Panel 1

Gilligan: Skipper, I see smoke.

Skipper: Just hurry up with the coconuts, Gilligan.

Panel 2

Space Squid: Hey dudes!

Gilligan: Here it comes, Skipper.

Panel 3

Skipper: Boink.  Gilligan!

Panel 4

Space Squid: 'K dorks, my ship bricked.  I need some assis-tance.  [You have to say it with dramatic inflection in the middle of the word.]

Skipper: The Professor could probably fix it.  Booong!  [The Skipper takes off Gilligan's hat and hits him with his own hat.]

Panel 5

Caption: After the Professor repairs the ship

Professor: Now that we've repaired your ship, go get help.

The Howells: Is he rich?

Mary-Ann: What kind of haircut is that?

Ginger: What a stud!

Panel 6

Space Squid: Alright, pals.  I'll get some help, but I want the babes and a million bucks!

Panel 7

Caption: After receiving the Howell's money.  Girls' Hut

Girls: Ooh!  Ahh!  What a man!  Ouch!  You're incredible!  Ooh!  Oh, Squid!

Panel 8

Caption: Next morning

Skipper: Hey girls, where's Squid?

Mary-Ann: Afterward, he departed and he made us so tired, we couldn't pursue him.

Gilligan: Not only that, he left too.

Panel 9

Mr. Howell: My money!  My money!

And there you have it.  Sex, humor, pathos, a twist, action, adventure.  It's all there.  I've been sitting on this explosively brilliant concept for far too long.  I'm quitting the blog to develop the script.  If it doesn't work out, I'll come crawling back tomorrow with another post.

Sketch Dump: Manga

Pretty much all of this post's drawings were so old I had to redraw the lines so that I could scan them.  I didn't try to fix or "improve" anything.  Mostly I'm annoyed that I used to draw manga-style so much better.  I can't even really draw in that style anymore.  I once showed my sketchbook to my local comic shop owner.  He thought I was a crap artist, except he thought my manga stuff had some promise.  "Psst.  Like manga is ever going to get big in America.  I want to draw more realistically," I thought back in the 80's.  Yeah, I should have stuck with it.        

First up are a couple of old sketches from Marionette Generation from an issue of Newtype from the 80's.  I forgot the character's name and am too lazy to look it up.  

                                         

Here's some female characters from Area 88.  This comic about mercenary fighter pilots doesn't usually feature much in the way of women characters.  I forgot who Velvet was, but she did have two pet panthers.  Kyko was the main character's faithful, but abandoned fiancé.  

Here's Chun Li from Street Fighter in two different presentations.  The top was a realistic-ish version and the bottom was the manga version.

This is a montage page.  I shouldn't bother doing these, but sometimes you just want to make a little sketch.  Top left is Yoko from Xenon.  Bottom left is maybe Dawnstar from the Legion of Superheroes.  The other three are Death from DC comics.  Like every other comics fan in the early 90's, I was enraptured by the cute perky little goth girl.     

This is another sketch from a comic in an 80's issue of Newtype.  I have no idea what the comic was since it was all in Japanese.

  

She looks so familiar, but I don't know who this.  She's some kind of 80's singer from either a manga or an anime.

This is Mai the Psychic Girl.  I remember the scene in question.  She'd just lost her top and was pulling it up.  I get embarrassed drawing boobs, so I did this instead of showing her topless.

The girl on the left is an idol singer, who's picture was in Newtype.  They ran features on idol singers in the 80's.  I presume they still do.  On the right is Sonoko.  She was the protagonist's near girlfriend from Xenon.  I did the inking of the drawing at the time.  

  

Another montage.  That's Sonoko again on the top right.  (She was soooo cute.)  That's Yoko on the bottom left.  She was interested in the protagonist too, but never stood a chance with Sonoko as competition.  That's Death again on the bottom left.  The other two are unknown.  

Sketch Dump: Anime

Let's just call these posts what they are.  When I picked up an artbook in March and decided to start drawing again, I had to get my last unfinished sketchbook down from the closet.  I'd tossed it in a box with all of my old sketches.  As I herniated my back getting it down, I had the sudden epiphany that I needed to clean the thing out a bit.  

It's been painful on a psychological level as well.  At some point, I had apparently stopped throwing out bad drawings.  Some drawings are easy to toss, but others have sentimental value.  Some were good, but my tastes in quality seem to vary moment to moment while going through them.  Also, I had scanned out several drawings, which is what I've been posting lately, but I'd seemingly picked them at random.  I wanted to scan everything decent.  So, I'm in the process of going through drawings to toss, keep, and scan.  Some of the drawings to scan also need to be darker, either by redrawing and/or image processing.  And I'm still drawing new stuff.  It's been a busy process.      

First up is a sketch that was not in the sketch box.  This is Musica from Robotech Masters and is a copy of a comic book adaption cover.  Now to explain the medium.  I'd put a hole in my bedroom door somehow back in high school.  My dad put up a mirror over the hole.  To my parents' chagrin, I proceeded to draw on it with markers.    

Mirrors are not a good medium to draw on.  In fact, almost impossible.  You get a reflection on the mirror producing a double image of the lines.  Trying to photograph the image, you get the same problem and have to avoid the flash image in the picture.  All that said, I'm extremely proud of this drawing and photograph just from a technical aspect.  Of course, I don't have the actual mirror and the sketch is long gone.  

Who says I only draw girls?  Wait.  That's me saying that.  In any case, I have these two examples of Mobile Suits from a Zeta Gundam technical manual.  I don't have the book anymore.  It was all in Japanese anyway.  

What?  I drew a guy?  I think this was from a movie promo image.  I'm not going to say I was a big fan of the film, but I got the comics when they came out in the US.  Marvel's Epic imprint produced them.  They were in the prestige format, read left to right (flopped), and were in color.  I know manga purists would be horrified, but these were spectacular.  

Katsuhiro Otomo's artwork was finely detailed.  The coloring made the panels look like animation cells.  Each page was simply beautiful.  Akira #1 was a valuable comic even back in the day.  I'm afraid to look now, since I sold it in bulk with a bunch of my other comics.  It's basically the only comic I miss, but if I still had it, it'd be too valuable to ever look at.  Damn. 

I like this sketch of Dana from Robotech Masters.  I almost missed it, because it was drawn on the back on another drawing.  What was I thinking?

Ah, here's Minmei from Robotech Macross.  Annoyingly, it was probably my best drawing of her.  I say, "Annoyingly," because I drew this head on top of a swimsuit model's body.  I did a reasonable job on that too.  Unfortunately, the two don't match to the point where I'm not posting the whole thing together.  

Myung from Macross Plus.  I really loved that OVA series, but the distribution of it here in the US nearly did me in.  The first three parts were released in three months (I think).  The final part was released like six months later as the distributer changed hands.  I never got the movie version, which came out much later and wasn't dubbed.  I really liked Myung's and Isamu's voices in the English version.  [And in looking up the actors, I just found out that Isamu's was done by Bryan Cranston (!) from Breaking Bad and a bunch of other stuff.]  

  

Lastly, we have some confusion.  This character is from the cover of a Newtype USA (which I don't have anymore).  I don't remember the anime or the character's name.  The confusion stems from the character's gender.  I think I found out later the character was a dude.  Maybe I should have read the article before I started the sketch.  This is pretty accurate to the cover, so you can judge the gender for yourself.

Sketches: Personalities

This post will live up to that wide-ranging title.  I'm just lumping together women I've seen in various media of varying levels fame.

First is actress Amelia Warner from The Seeker: The Dark is Rising.  I'm not going to say it's a great movie, but it's a good Christmas movie just for the setting.

 

Here's Andrea Newman.  She's a Mexican stand-up comic that I used to watch on a music video show.  When I think back, I'm startled by how many different versions of music video shows I've watched over the years on Mexican and Spanish language television.

  

Debbie Harry.  Blondie is one of my favorite music groups.

The next three are of actress Jewel Staite.  I think I was somehow into her before seeing her on Firefly.  

Here's actress  Julieth Restrepo.  She's Colombian and I saw her on a novella late night on Mundo Fox.  I miss Mundo Fox.  It's no longer on in my area.  The reason I stayed up to watch was because the show starred what had to be the two best-looking women in Colombia.  Both of them left the show in season 2 and I immediately stopped watching. 

Kelli Snyder (?) was a sports correspondent for a season of CORR off-road racing.  I miss her.

This one looks familiar.  It's a passable sketch of Marilyn Monroe.  (Hopefully, I didn't need to say that.)

Actress Michelle Trachtenberg.  Perhaps she's best known for being on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but her best part would be from the movie Eurotrip. 

Lastly on this totally random list, we have one of the twin sisters from the band, The Veronicas.  They're identical twins, so I don't actually remember which one this was.