DARKSTALKERS CONTEST LOSER!

Well, looks like I am a big fat loser after all... at least as far as Udon is concerned. My Rikuo character piece entry was not chosen to be published in the upcoming DARKSTALKERS TRIBUTE art book. Oh well. I put a lot of work into this piece, including many preliminary sketches and drawings, so it's disappointing to not get in. Now I won't get to see my piece in print and receive the prize of... a free copy of the book! Guess I'll have to pay for it myself now.

Anyway, this is the piece. I've fiddled with it a bit since the original entry -- the background elements before were much flatter and poster-like, and, as you can see by the inks, I was going for a more stylized-icon look (that might make a good poster print, giant sticker, or t-shirt design) than the fully-rendered scenery approach. I thought the choice of mostly flat, bold and bright colors might be a nice contrast to the typical Udon-style artwork we're used to seeing (very digital-painterly). As I mentioned before, I did get a late start on this, despite knowing about it well ahead of time, but freelance work got in the way and I ended up working on this right up the the deadline. In truth, the original entry needed a good 1-2 more hours worth of work before it was ready. I'm interested to see the entries that did make it in, though. Anybody else out there contribute and get rejected?

Oh, and here's some images of the character from the game that I chose. His name is Rikuo, and he's a fish-guy.


I thought I'd also, along with the finished inks, post a series of inking progression pics, just in case there's anyone out there who's interested in that sort of thing. I stuck with my usual modus operandi for this piece -- pencils printed in blueline on bristol board (in this case, 2 separate sheets to facilitate scanning), inked with 95% brush and ink and 5% pens.

"HELL BELOW, STARS ABOVE" -- the final pass, I swear it!

A big part of getting back into the swing of things is going through my rather large backlist of personal projects that have been started but never finished. Call it my "new year's resolution", if you will. I started going through my files of in-progress work and was stunned at how many ideas I had been tinkering with or nearly-completed but then abandoned either due to freelance work monopolizing my time or just from setting the thing aside and forgetting about it. Going through a housing move recently didn't help either, as all the stuff I had strewn about in my work-pile got packed away and fell victim to the out-of-sight out-of-mind rule.

Anyway, this is something that's been in-progress for far too long. It's time to polish this thing off once and for all, but not before retouching it a bit. A big problem with setting something aside for so long is that, inevitably, when I come back to it I'm not at all satisfied with how it looks or (perfectionist that I am) I simply look at it and think "I can do better". Actually, that may not be such a bad thing. Sometimes an artist can benefit greatly from stepping away from a piece for a while and coming back to it with "fresh eyes". That's a big part of the reason why I don't like to rush my illustrations and let them progress at a natural pace. Unfortunately, if I take too long on them, or rushed them in the first place, I usually just want to redo the thing 4 months later!

It's always good to have a few projects going on concurrently. This keeps things fresh and allows you to jump back and forth at your leisure, and keeps a piece (and your interest in it) from stagnating. I'm always doing this, but I think I've taken it to ridiculous extremes by allowing my backlog to bloat to an overwhelming size. I made a list of all the illustrations and personal projects I have in various stages of completion and there are about 30 items on the list (and I know I'm still forgetting some). So, while it's very hard for me to promise that I will not begin something new before finishing off the old stuff, I can at least try to complete 3 new illustrations before beginning one new one. Hopefully I can whittle this list down within the next few months and build up my portfolio nicely in the process.

Currently, I'm in the midst of inking this thing, as well as the first DONKEY KONG piece, as well as reworking the final revision pencils for both the UGLY STICK and CARRION, WAYWARD SUN t-shirt designs. Also tightening up the final drawing for the second DONKEY KONG piece. More updates soon!

"HELL BELOW ME, STARS ABOVE" -- Take two!

I guess you could call this a reworking of my original "Hell Below Me, Stars Above" piece. It's the same basic theme and layout(astronaut on rocky peak besieged by tentacles and claws, blasting away at the advancing hordes), just a bit modified. I have a bad habit of wanting to continually go back and tinker with old pieces I'm no longer happy with. I hope I don't spend the rest of my life going back and revisiting the same bunch of illustrations.

This is just the pencil stage, of course. I flipped the original and kind of like how it looks in reverse, reading more from left to right. Haven't yet decided which version I like. Inks and colors to come.

"What the @#$%&* is Wanglin'"

Every once in a while, it's fun to dig up an old phrase or colloquialism and toss it back out into the public arena to see how it plays. "Keep on truckin'" (popularized in Robert Crumb's comic strip) was one that I thought was due for another ride around the neighborhood, so I started tossing it out there in casual conversation and using it to sign off the occasional correspondence. I don't know why (perhaps it came to me in a dream), but one day the phrase "Keep on Wanglin'" popped into my head (perhaps I was just bored with "truckin"). I liked the sound of it, and jotted it down in my omnipresent notebook for future rumination.

Most of my illustrations and designs are born from odd words or phrases that happen to jump to mind and are immediately captured in my notebook, and this is a perfect example -- I just had to figure out what "wangling" is! It came to me just the other day, and it seems so obvious in retrospect: "wangling" is "the action of a squid, octopus, or other tentacled creature walking across a solid surface using a majority of its appendages for locomotion". See? It's so obvious. And so, another future t-shirt design is born (with apologies to Mr. Crumb)!