Heya

As I promised…over a year ago… I’m continuing to pull together drawings and projects exclusively for posting here in the TRDL Updates section of R3… some of it is old drawings and doodles (TomFoolery, seen) some of it is concepts and such, and some of it will just be personal projects not being shared with the world on the TRDL Illustration Site.

Here’s one of those: a fun portrait of Wifebot(tm) done for our one-year anniversary. Granted, I’m in there too, and granted, she actually hated it* but I like it nonetheless and wanted to give you all a peak.

Enjoy!

*It’s not that she didn’t like the drawing or the effort, but was wierded out that it wasn’t a caricature enough of her specifically… I drew this in more of my normal comic style… I’ve done more person-specific caricatures of her and others before, which I think she liked better. But she LOVED the monkey, so I gave her a second version focused on him (me)… contrast this with the portrait of Lung and Hotwife(tm) which is both ON the TRDL site, and actually looks kinda like them…

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I’m venturing into dangerous and exciting territory… lettering Finit-e! While the comic is done in Photoshop for compiling and rendering, the word balloons and other similar effects are being done in Illustrator.

Of course, I haven’t used Illustrator in maybe 10 years.

So I’m studying up!

Anyway, found a GREAT word balloon resource for those of you working on comics fo your own, or even needing to spice up your jam pics, etc.

Balloon Tales (from Comicraft)

http://www.balloontales.com/tips/

While I’m researching how to make the balloons the way I envisioned them… any of you have tips of your own to share?

t

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Hey y’all

I was interviewed by small press creator and writer Sherry McCarty, for her blog, dedicated to interviews with other comics creators outside of the mainstream. Very cool opportunity to talk a little bit about my comics background and why i like to spend so much time drawing people in costumes.

http://sherryinterviews.blogspot.com/

Incidentally, it was to be the first public announcement of Joao Marques joining TRDL, but the post was delayed, so I moved forward with the ‘press release’ first. But there it is, in print, so it must be true: ‘superstar’!

If you have time, go check out the interview and post a comment if so inclined. I’m sure she’d appreciate the evidence her stuff was being read. I know I do!

Ha

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This is another character design developed for my sci-fi/fantasy writer client, who’s previous characters I did were The Admiral, Cherie and Uncle Julius. This time, it’s Toni, whos’ very much a spiritual sequel to Cherie. Toni was originally conceived as being a cybernetic humanoid, with a youthful appearance, who’s blood was a living symbiotic synthetic liquid metal construct, from which large metallic wings were generated, much like the X-Men’s ArcAngel had after his run as a Horseman of the Apocalypse. We went back and forth over the design concepts, and worked out that the wing-forms themselves, while allowing flight, didn’t actually have to physically function like wings in a mechanical sense, ie. with a hinged endoskeletal mechanism as we see with birds. What I’ve done is portrayed her with a wing-form shape, comprised of hundreds of razore sharp globs of the metal substance that serves as her circulatory system, secreted and conforming to the offensive blade shape. They hover and dart and cluster around her, serving as a defensive shield, an offensive weapon, and for me personally, cool visual interest. Also, her more traditional cyborg aspects have been redesigned as a synthetic skin appearance, with circuitry and power lines tracing along her body. I wanted them to be just barely visible, not so obvious as to look like a tattoo or surface applique.This one took a loooooooong time.

You can see this illustration herein the TRDL Tribute Gallery.

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Warning for the small-screened among you, these are larger than normal, for your viewing pleasure. Expect some scrolling…

Here’s some autobiographical strip work, for kicks and boredom. A slice of life from my college days… this one being circa 1993…probably summer quarter between 2nd and 3rd year of architecture school…

I’m still Tom here, and was until 1999 or so, when a most grevious corporate email error committed by a high-ranking principal allowed another employee, with similar initials, to receive TO BE FIRED report intended for me… and thusly, I changed to Thom to avoid that error (In Outlook, you can type a few letters of the first name, and a few letters of the last name, and it looks up the user. So the change meant I was a ‘th ch’ instead of a ‘to ch’…

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I find myself in the position of needing to create my own website. The last time I did that was more than 10 years ago and basically created tags and format stuff by hand (ie, notepad).

I’ve got Dreamweaver and have just started using it. So far I’ve managed to edit some content on the template webpage I created (using my hosting site’s tools). However, I have a looooooong way to go. But it’s a live site and the changes are happening.

My first questions is:

- any recommendations for tutorials? I’m about to start into the built in tutorials.

Second and more direct:

- creating new pages, linking them through thumbnails, and uploading. How you do that?

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Friends, Fans and Filesharers,

About six months ago today, I invited the overwhelmingly talented Portuguese art-hero João Marques to join me as part of Third Rail Design Lab, and he took the plunge! João is not just a TRDL artist, he’s my co-creator, writing partner and collaborator, who has been designing new characters for the TRDL superhero universe, working with me on new projects, and helping to develop the roadmap for the future of the brand. Over the years, I’ve written an extensive amount of backstory for these characters and groups, but the history of the TRDL universe has never been drawn or publicly presented, due to time constraints and other commitments. João is working with me to bring some of these stories to life, in various media formats: prose, image sets and sequential art. His illustration style has been a close fit to my own, and more importantly, his design philosophy, not only in character design, but story content and theme, has proven to be aligned with mine, and our partnership has been yielding some exciting results for me personally.

We have been working on a catalog of unreleased material, which we will be releasing, generally on a weekly schedule, initially including new characters and stories from the TRDL universe, as well as projects featuring mainstream franchise fan art. I hope you will help me welcome João to the Third Rail Design Lab world, and enjoy some of the new work we’ve been doing. We will be publishing to the Third Rail Design Lab illustration site first, as usual, and sharing some of the new content with the artshare groups in which we participate, so I encourage you, if interested, to visit us at http://www.thirdraildesignlab.com and see what’s cooking! As always, you can comment on the work we publish … Read on for more awesome…

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