This weekend, at a collective birthday party for my wifebot(tm), her father in law, and his grandson, I was once again handed drawing duty to [attempt to] entertain the now precocious 4 year old boy. While previous iterations of this exercise involved his shrill, stuttering demands for different variations on the theme of power tools using power tools, this time around it was focused on animals, as he had recently toured a farm. In order to buy myself some time (to eat dinner) I made a deal… for every drawing he did for ME< I’d do one for him… after dinner. So, he promptly scribbled out four glyphs and then began demanding his from me. Mine were, as expected, more complicated. From him, I requested anything involving robots. I got three chicken scratch doodles of abstract impressionism, and this:

I asked what is was and he said it was me. I was nonplussed, until i gleamed it was, in fact, a prescient, cautionary tale about the risks of helmetless, brakeless, middle-laning urban cycling methods, as witnessed by the unreasonable double amputation.

:::

For my task, I was given a rapid-fire list of demands that generally amounted to animals on top of other animals, indicating the boy’s impressive cognitive comprehension of vertical hierarchies.

I called this piece ‘Strange Tales’, a pun lost on my young client, who was eating a fork at the time, and bouncing his foot against the table in a repetitive jackhammer action.

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Please note the fine crescent moon man motif in the header. I was under the impression this was to be a dreamscape when provided my first set of unrealistic co-occupations of horzontal space. However, no further data was provided.

This was the primary illustration, which I mistakenly inferred was the focus of the composition. … Read on for more awesome…

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This was done for the TRDL R3 Jam, the character this week being Princess Jasmine, from the Disney film Aladdin. Now, I haven’t seen said film, but I have seen said character, and she’s hot! Anyway, I went for the classic flying carpet, though her pose here is obviously intended more for the TRDL Pinup Girl theme than proper flying carpet navigational management. Never will I draw a carpet again.

You can see this illustration herein the TRDL Tribute Gallery.

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This was done for the TRDL R3 Jam, the character being Dream Queen, daughter of Nightmare, from Marvel Comics. I love when bad 80s character designs show up in these jams. It’s redesign time in the Lab! I kept the approximate colors, though I muted them, but otherwise took design cues from the original look and tried to give it my spin. I kinda liked how it turned out!

You can see this illustration herein the TRDL Tribute Gallery.

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This was done for the TRDL R3 Jam, the character being Hank Pym/ Yellowjacket. I’ve always found this character fascinating. Marvel writers took what was essentially a dubiously redundant and undefined character (gee, two insect-based shrinkers, yay! Wait, he’s big! Wait, he’s weird!) and turned him into one of the earliest tragic figures I remember reading about as a kid: insecure, arrogant, a wife-beater, an accidental genocidal robot inventor… but throughout, he was a purveyor of lame-looking inventions and curiously gauche costuming. EXCEPT for Yellowjacket. I loved this persona. I loved the colors, Buscema’s way of illustrating his stance and anger (it was Buscema, right?) and something about the cowl. Anyway, I had just finished reading Secret Invasion, which I loved until the last issue, and I was stoked on the idea of stealth Skrull sleepers. This piece is a reference to the reveal that Pym has been a Skrull for a long time. And the easter egg, of course, is what happened to Wasp at the end of the book. Unfortunately, he has subsequently taken the name of Wasp and designed another shitty costume and displayed more ridiculous science. But we’ll always have Yellowjacket.

You can see this illustration herein the TRDL Tribute Gallery.

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This piece was done for the TRDL R3 Jam, the subject being Black Widow, the soviet spy from Marvel comics. I’ve drawn her in her early days as a Russian femme fatale in a veiled hat and dark dress with magnetic powers (Tales to Astonish) and I’ve done a conventional shot of the black leather/latex costume with straightish hair (kidnapping Future Thom) and this time, I was thisclose to drawing her 90′s ash grey one-piece with the short red hair… but when I looked at it from the perspective of doing another TRDL Pinup Girl, I decided I wanted the classic look.

That’s probably my most labor intensive, non perspective background yet. The motif is actually an easter egg: it’s the skull of a kodiak bear. The USSR being defunct and all. Also the text reads, or is SUPPOSED to read: Romanov: she mates and she kills!
But it probably reads: Misfortune: the ankle what ate the baby!

Still good, though.

Process notes:

Inks:

You can see I rely on Photoshop for these backgrounds. The original skull was more humanoid…

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You can see this illustration herein the TRDL Tribute Gallery.

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This commission was done for a longtime commission client who has me design characters for his series of comics and fiction pieces set in a space opera universe. You may have seen some of the earlier designs done for him, including The Admiral, Xar, Toni, Cherie, Kenya and others.

Captain Hamilton ended up being my favorite of the lot. He was described, through reference art and some text, as a cross between James Rhodes and the Black King from Checkmate. I used the same design model for the uniform as was used on the Admiral (but with a sort of reverse-design to come up with a complete uniform, as the Admiral’s gear was shredded and old) and gave him some honor insignia and such, which I decided to show in graytones because I thought it looked effing awesome. I made him a man of age and experience, with a lined face, pepper in the hair and steely eyes. I originally designed a uniform for a different branch of the story’s military, but the client requested them be of the same branch so I modified it accordingly. I’ll post the original later. I also did a variant with cyber eyes, because how could I not…

You can see this illustration herein the TRDL Tribute Gallery.

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This was done for the TRDL R3 Illustration Jam, the subject being Akio Ohtori from Revolutionary Girl Utena. The original jam was 2 years ago. I’m late!

I wanted to do this for Suncat from the outset, as it was a personal, awesome choice and one that was very different from much of what we’d had in the jams until then. Also, she has always been a strongly supportive and encouraging member of the R3 Army in helping new members and up and coming artists get involved and post their work. Unfortunately, after my inks were stalled at some point, we got engaged in all sorts of other real life stuff, and this languished in my to-complete folder… and when i finally got around to finishing it, it was what, 2 years later! Anyway, I really liked drawing him. He’s thin, lanky, androgynous and distinctly anime… I had some initial struggles with the very 80s costume design but I chose not to redesign, and instead just did my take on it. I gave him glossy white wing tips, but looking back on it now, I’d probably go with white cowboy boots. I gave him a TRDL pimp cane that’s maybe a prop, maybe a weapon, maybe just a beguiling affectation. We just don’t KNOW…

You can see this illustration herein the TRDL Tribute Gallery.

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This was a custom character design for a longtime commission client, for whom I have done previous superhero characters based on his concepts, including Aero, Zoe and Luna…this time around, another group of three: Safety Girl, Arcangel and a Crucible Soldier.

Crucible, in this client’s world, is sort of like HYDRA or AIM or what have you. He had some good general concepts about how they needed to look: paramilitary, well-equipped, fiery and angry. We tried a few different treatments of gear and patterning: urban camo, degrees of technology detail, etc and a lot of messing around with the weapon. I also designed their organization logo, which you can see up int he top corner and on his uniform. Spittle was added for effect at client request, ha! They CRAZY.

You can see this illustration herein the TRDL Tribute Gallery.

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This was a custom character design for a longtime commission client, for whom I have done previous superhero characters based on his concepts, including Aero, Zoe and Luna…this time around, another group of three: Safety Girl, Arcangel and a Crucible Soldier.

Safety Girl can manifest energies in the form of an electric guitar. She’s petite, asian, and awesome. She wears the standard Journeyman team uniform, with some tweaks. I’m going to hold off on describing the character further until I know how much background the client would be willing to share, since he uses these in his RPG campaign, but that’s the gist of it. We went over, as usual, several morphologies, including a more mixie-mix facial structure, some different options for electric guitars and their colorways, and the design of the Journeyman costume itself, based on some previous concepts he had. i thought it turned out pretty well. My first guitar! Safety Girl is obviously in the know, as well…

You can see this illustration herein the TRDL Tribute Gallery.

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This was done for the TRDL R3 jam, the subject being the theme ‘super girlfriends’…

As far as superhero love interests go, it’s hard to beat Atom Eve. She’s hotter than the sun, has a beautiful costume design, and Ottley and crew draw her pretty enticingly. More important, however, is the thematic narrative of Invincible, which allows us to experience her as the main character does: a girl he’s attracted to, with his unique superhero thing going on, while he’s still going out with a regular girl. Who hasn’t felt the pull of someone knew, especially regarding common interests, when in a relationship? Strong stuff. Anyway, i never tire of drawing Atom Eve, so she’s now a part of my pin-up bombergirl series…

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You can see this illustration herein the TRDL Tribute Gallery.

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here!… Read on for more awesome…

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