Aquaman!

First of all HAPPY HALLOWEEN everyone! Halloween is actually my favourite out of all the holidays. I love all the monster movies on TV, giving out candy, and especially costumes. I love the dress up!

All of my Halloween loving does nothing to explain todays post. Why am I putting up a picture of Aquaman? Sure, his costume is the colour of a pumpkin but is that any good reason? I say it is. So, in light of the fact that I don't have any other suitable Halloween images I give you Aquaman on monitor duty in glorious orange and green!! Also, here is a picture of my dog and his new favourite chew toy. :)
best,
j.
p.s. Incidentally, I switched my blog to the new beta set up. What that means for bookmarks and such I don't know...we'll find out soon enough.

Savage Sword of Wonder Woman!

Here's a slightly more serious take on last post's cartoony version of Wonder Woman! The costuming here is based on Diana's warrior garb from Darwyn Cooke's New Frontier! Before the book even came out there was much discussion about Wonder Woman's weight...which is (in a roundabout way, no pun intended) where my recent drawings are coming from. I like the thought of Wonder Woman as a husky gal. One who eats and drinks, has some meat on her bones and who loves a good fight!
And I much prefer the beefy gal as opposed to the skinny-minny she's become in recent issues of certain DC comics OR the muscled super-woman she is as drawn by certain artists. Actually I'm really enjoying the recent version of Wonder Woman as drawn by Terry and Rachel Dodson. They're sort of doing a Lynda Carter which is ALWAYS okay with me!

Ever yours,

j.

WOTTA WOMAN!!

I believe I will let this post run without much commentary from me. I could go on for hours about my love of Wonder Woman, how my focus is mostly on the memory of the Lynda Carter tv series and not at all any of the comic books (because I don't care much for how she's been done in comics). I could address the plumpness of my drawing and the heaviness of her bosom. I could say something about the odd little graphic thing beside her. But I won't do any of those things because it's dinner time and I'm hungry.

j.

Universal Horror!

Today's entry is one of my favourite projects from my college years. The assignment was to choose a topic and create four illustrations -- one each in the styles of two illustrators and two fine artists. I think I'd just recently seen a bunch of the Universal films and most definitely was already in love with the Invisible Man and the Creature from the Black Lagoon. So my topic was the Universal Horror monsters. And because I loved comics I opted for two comic book artists as my illustrators.
Mike Mignola, the creator of Hellboy, had just worked on the Dracula movie adaptation (based on the Coppola movie...I own a page of his art from that series). The Invisible Man is my attempt at Mignola's style rendered in goauche. I really wanted to re-create the scene of the Invisible Man standing in front of the window in his rented room. Una O'Connor is fussing around him, procrastinating so she can get a better look at him. At the time I lacked the ability to work out the perspective properly to really do the scene right.
Frankentstein's monster is done through the style of Egon Schiele (the white outline and hand touching himself are two things I took from Schiele). I don't think the face on the monster turned out all that well but even years later I love how the hand looks. Look up Egon Schiele to see some real art!
Bill Sienkiewicz (no, I didn't look up the spelling) illustrated a comic book version of Moby Dick. It has lots of gorgeous water colour painting and underwater ghostly images of the Whale. I wanted my Creature to look like Bill's paintings but lacked the ability to really paint in water colour.

The Bride of the Monster is done in the style (and I think directly ripped off composition) of a Gustav Klimt painting. All that gold and the pose of the Monster are definitely Klimt. In a way this is also another Mike Mignola piece because Mike used the same Klimt painting I based this on in a page of Ironwolf.

Halloween's coming up quick...hope you've all got your costumes worked out. I know I haven't.

best,
j.