Return of the Crypti-Creatures!

Three new sketches that I did at Crypticon this year. I had these scanned but needed to transfer and re-size them and only just now got around to it! "The Creature for the Black Lagoon" drawing is the one I had autographed by Ricou Browning, the Creature himself!

Appreciation to my friend Alexsander von Mausheim (who bought the other two and added them to his collection) for allowing me the chance to scan and present them here!

Last night was not only the 43rd anniversary of the Stonewall Riot and beginning of the Gay Rights Movement, which is now even more appropriately called the "Equal Rights Movement", but it was also a CLAW Open Swim event which I was hosting. In remembrance of the fore-mentioned anniversary, we chose as out theme: "Alternative Lifestyles of the Super-Fabulous!" My fellow CLAW member Anique Zimmer did that schweet poster illustration and I added the text.

Anyway, the idea was to take an established super-heroic character and decide how they might choose to fly their PFLAG as it were. Initially my thought was to do a drawing of a character exactly as he is, after all--gay people are (and here's the big secret of the gay community) just like everybody else! Except for who the hero was dating, there would probably be no change at all. (And another CLAW member, James Stowe, used that very theme to excellent effect with his recreation of the Spider-man Giany-Sized Annual "Wedding Issue" cover, where everyone is the same, but Spidey is Marty James Watson!)

I decided to NOT to be subtle. I was the host, so I wasn't really competing or anything...and I didn't have a clear, good idea going in. So I just took one of my fave superheroes and GAYve him a rainbow makeover! Before he was a crime-fighter, he tried wrestling...and wrestling singlets are hot, so I started there. I didn't think of the perfect tag-line for the drawing until I got home. "With great PRIDE comes great responsibility!" I HAD to add it in. I thought it was clever, even if I do say so myself.

Anyway, it's just a little rainbow fluff for you to enjoy. ^0^

Happy PRIDE!

This last weekend, I attended Crypticon in Seattle. I did some caricatures and some sketches. One of the sketches I did was of "The Creature form the Black Lagoon", which I was able to have signed by Ricou Browning, the man behind the Creature's mask! He is the only one of the original Universal Monsters that I ever managed to meet, and it was a great honor because, at one time in my life, they were a principle obsession--I used to play "Monsters" with my friends (I was always the Wolfman, btw) and we collected the old Aurora model kits and stayed up late on Saturday night sleep-overs to watch them stalking about graveyards on the Late Late Late Show! We even built "Spook-houses" in my friend Brad's garage. I even had the "Creature from the Black Lagoon" model!


All in all, it was fun and interesting as cons always are to me, but I only just broke even. I did however score a totally cool Plush TARDIS for my ever-expanding Dr. Who collection. When all is said and done--I am still a huge geek!

Anyway, I'll post a few more sketches later.

The Meme of Me

I thought I'd make one of those meme posters as a self promotional piece. It is sort of cute, so I'm sharing it here.

^0^

Draw A Dinosaur Day! 2012

Apparently, today is "Draw A Dinosaur Day"! This is my DaDD2012 submission. He's a dino explorer off to explore Pangaea. I sketched it during lunch today, so it's a bit rough because I started running out of time. The whole thing was drawn with a 0.7 Staedtler Sketch Pen.

Red Means "STOP"!

A few of my CLAW friends met at the comic book store today to sketch, ostensibly on pages for our group's still theoretical anthology comic. It was a bit difficult to stay on task...what with a Magic: The Gathering pre-release tourney going on at all the other tables. So after I puttered on a couple of sketches for pages, I finally broke down and indulged my demented brain by drawing up a sketch of a pun that had been plaguing me for the last few days.

I was listening to my art director at work talking about the rotation of videos and stuff he has to watch with his son and the word "Hellmo" popped into my head with the image above and wouldn't go away. Now, hopefully, it has been purged!

Dragons? NAW! Year of the Flying Monkeys!!

2010 was "The Year of the Robot" and 2011 was "The Year of the Pipe" and I unilaterally decided to make 2012 "The Year of the Flying Monkeys". To that end, this was a piece of art I created to put on the website and the programs for C.L.A.W.'s "Great Yearly Ceremony", which is our annual get-together to celebrate the previous year and usher in the new one. If we continue the pattern of using CLAW's Sacred Truths as inspirations for each year, 2013 will have to be "The Year of the Zombie". That should be an interesting program...

Anyway, this art was a relatively quick piece inspired by the poster for "The Rocketeer". I liked the deco design, and the reason I thought of using that is because I had decided my flying monkey would have a retro-style rocket pack instead of the traditional wings. That kind of art deco layout then seemed the obvious look.