Kolchak:The Night Stalker / Kermit the Frog / Muppet News Flash Mash-Up

If you've never seen the '70s supernatural/sci-fi series Kolchak:The Night Stalker (and you only know Darren McGavin as "the old man" in A Christmas Story) you're missing out on some classic stuff. In Kolchak, McGavin stars as an intrepid reporter who investigates so many strange cases of the paranormal that you'd have to assume he lives in a city full of monsters.

You know what other intrepid reporter lives in a city full of monsters? That's right. Muppet News Flash's own Kermit The Frog. Kolchak and Kermit have been linked in my head for a while, so I thought I'd sketch up the concept for fun.

Here's the rough I sketched out in pencil (with some quick, Photoshop lettering) and then the finished pencils.

 This is the piece after I inked Kermit over my pencils, then the finished inks.

Here are the flat colors done in Photoshop, then some modeling with shadows and highlights. At this point the illustration is done, but I decided to go with the text after all, mimicking the typeface from some old Kolchak images. I also aged the piece a bit with yellow overlays to give it that "been around since the '70s" look (image at top of post).

And if this got any of you interested in Kolchak, good. Halloween's around the corner and there's nothing wrong with a good, old-fashioned scare. Here are some links you might find useful -v

Kolchak: The Night Stalker Wikipedia page

Kolchak: The Night Stalker IMDb page

Kolchak: The Night Stalker opening intro (YouTube)

Kolchak: The Night Stalker box set at Amazon

Darren McGavin IMDb page

Any Brian Poole and the Tremeloes fans out there?

In an article by Matt Warman about how, 15 years ago, Bill Gates and Microsoft decided not to develop e-readers because Gates thought the concept was "unimportant," I came across this old chestnut about The Beatles. No matter how many times I read this story, it never fails to make me smile:

"In January 1962, [Decca Records'] British executive, Dick Rowe, auditioned the Fab Four after being persuaded to listen to the group by their manager, Brian Epstein. But after the band recorded 15 tracks, Mr. Rowe famously told Epstein, "We don't like their sound" and "guitar music is on the way out."

Instead, Decca opted to sign Brian Poole and the Tremeloes, who also auditioned that day. Mr. Rowe would later say that both bands were good but, "We decided it was better to take the local group. We could work with them more easily and stay closer in touch as they came from Dagenham."

The Beatles, who had Pete Best on drums at the time, were said to be devastated by the rejection but the "Decca Tapes" were good enough to persuade George Martin to meet the group. Shortly afterwards they signed for his Parlophone Records and in October of that year released their first single, Love Me Do."

I'm thinking whenever I make a heinously bad decision (happens more often than I'd care to admit) I'm going to refer to it as "pulling a Rowe." -v

Happy July 4th!

Hope everybody has a fantastic Independence Day. If you're off, enjoy your picnics and fireworks. If you're working, well, so am I. So you're in good company.

Now, as a public service to my fellow Americans, in an effort to help you look as well-informed as possible if you get ambushed by one of those man-on-the-street interviews, here's all the info you may need to know about why we celebrate the fourth of July.

Why we celebrate the 4th of July

What's the deal with Uncle Sam?

And, as a further public service, I just reviewed the 2011 U.S. Fireworks Annual Injury Report put out by the Division of Hazard Analysis (a part of the Consumer Product Safety Commission). Let me break it down for you:

Last year there were four deaths (seems low, considering) and an estimated 9,600 injuries treated in U.S. hospital emergency rooms. And remember, these were all non-occupational. Just people having fun. So let's all be careful out there. -v

R.I.P. (Rocket Into Paradise) Ray Bradbury

Seventh Grade, Language Arts class. The teacher told us to pick a book at random off the classroom shelves to read for our next assignment. I browsed idly for a bit, and then I saw the words, "The Halloween Tree" and grabbed it before anyone else could. I was a huge Halloween fan and though I'd heard of Ray Bradbury, I'd never (knowingly) read any of his stuff at that point. So I started reading the book that night. Turns out Bradbury was a huge Halloween fan too. I was only a few sentences into the book before I was hooked. And I've been hooked on Bradbury's writing ever since.

Cut to 2003. I was just starting to fiddle around with digital illustration. One of the first things I experimented with was an interpretation of Bradbury's Halloween Tree. Still trying to figure out what all of the tools in Photoshop did, working on an uncalibrated monitor with no idea how to use the opacity option, I took an unforgivable amount of time to cobble together this barely passable illustration of Moundshroud and Tom Skelton, standing beneath the Halloween Tree. 

I was just callow enough to think it was half-decent, and just arrogant enough to send a copy to Ray Bradbury himself. Nothing came of it and I forgot all about it, diving back into my digital experiments. But then, one night, I was checking my email and saw one from Ray Bradbury. No artifice or internet code name. Just Ray Bradbury, writing to me, thanking me for the card, telling me how wonderful it was and -- here's the part that still astounds me -- asking for 25 copies of the card to send to his friends and family. Yes. Ray Bradbury, one of the foremost experts on Halloween and author behind some of the greatest Halloween stories ever, wanted to use my illustration as his personal Halloween card.  As I said, this still astounds me.

For a few years after that, there was an email in my inbox from Ray, every fall, requesting more cards. Sometimes I'd get an email from his daughter, Alexandra, and I think that was because Ray's health wasn't what it used to be. Once he sent me my own card back with a delightfully illustrated envelope (Ray was a first-class doodler) and an encouraging messages inside. 

After a while, I got busy with assignments and Ray was busy with whatever he was doing, and the back-and-forth emails stopped. My plan was to surprise him with a new, much better Halloween Tree illustration now that my skills had improved. I'd started a few, trashed them as "not good enough" and moved on to my other assignments. Every once in a while I'd sketch out an idea or two for the Halloween piece, but time and circumstance just never allowed me to finish it. Then, today, I got the news that Ray had passed. There's a lesson in that somewhere. You can piece it together. 

I'm hoping that his daughter, Alexandra, is doing alright and imagine she's basking in all of the praise and kind remembrances of Ray that I see all over the web today. And I hope she knows how many people her father influenced -- writers, artists, musicians, filmmakers and more. And I hope that Alexandra knows that her father's work will continue to inspire whole new generations of creators for a long time to come. I'm confident that Ray knows all of this already, as he rockets around us in space, smiling the way a kid smiles on Halloween night. Thanks again, Ray. -v 

The Haunted Forest: Flying Monkeys Still Scare Me

Second only to the gorilla soldiers in Planet Of The Apes, the Flying Monkeys from The Wizard of Oz are some of the most terrifying primates from my childhood. So when I decided to do a Haunted Forest illustration to accompany my Yellow Brick Road piece, I wanted to make sure the flying monkeys were scary enough. Hope I hit the mark. I laid out the process below if you'd like to follow along.  

Chaos in the Haunted Forest. This was the initial rough sketch I did while working out the composition.  I knew I wanted a lot of yelling and a lot of monkeys. In the end, four monkeys seemed sufficient to best our traveling band of heroes, so I stopped there. If I do another Oz piece, maybe I'll draw a whole army of monkeys. If my nerves can take it. 

Here's a more polished sketch, based on the rough. I wanted to indicate some depth of field so I scattered the heroes back through space, leaving Dorothy up front as the focal point. I also figured, at this point in the Haunted Forest, the foliage would be getting a little more unpleasant. We've not yet reached the place where angry-faced trees will actually reach out  grab you, but the sharp brambles seemed appropriate.

So I scanned in my sketch and began layering in some grey tones. I wanted the setting to be mysterious and foreboding, so I started with the darkest recesses of the woods, making them shadowy and full of potential danger. I worked a little larger than I needed -- intending to crop the image when I was done -- so you can see a lot of leftover "junk" at the edges of the image. Feel free to ignore that stuff. 

Working from back to front, the next step after the deep shadow was the trees along the path. I was tempted to make them even more twisted and gnarled, but I didn't want to take too much attention away from the wacky characters. The composition is busy enough as is without a bunch of crazy, twisted tree limbs confusing matters. So I left the trees at this particular stage of creepiness.

Ah, the yellow-bricked road. Don't let anyone ever tell you that drawing a hundred or so individual bricks that wind and curve back into the distance isn't fun -- because it isn't. But it does give you a nice feeling when you're done. And since I had my pencil sketch to use as a guide, I didn't have to draw every single brick. That's why there's a Dorothy-shaped hole in the road up front there.

Here I've gone over my pencil line in Photoshop to neaten up the figures, and I've started to put down tone (again, working back to front). I'd like to say there's a method to this part, but I really just kept experimenting with different brushes, some soft-edged, some hard, with varying degrees of opacity. The trick, I think, is to take your time and build up your forms in layers, just like with traditional painting. But seriously, what do I know? I still think flying monkeys are real.

At this stage, I'm almost finished. I filled in the details on all the characters, brushed in highlights, shadows and texture, and continued to add more mood to the background. This is a good stage to "fix" things that need tweaking. For instance, I notice that Dorothy's gingham dress gets a little lost in the brick background. I'll have to increase the contrast so she stands out better. I also note an empty area behind the front monkey's wings. I could've painted a whole new tree and some brambles, but for such a small area I figured I could just copy/paste some foliage from the other side of the image. After I fixed these things, I decided a little sepia-toning would add some warmth. The finished piece is at the top of the post. And yeah, it is a little warmer. The monkeys are still scary, but now they offer a little warmth with their terror. -v

A Tale Of Two Scarecrows

Maybe you've seen this Yellow Brick Road piece on my website. I was working on a post about my process on that illustration, and I happened to run across an early scarecrow sketch that I didn't use. I figured I'd post it and talk about why I didn't use it. Yeah. That oughta use up some space.

So here's the first scarecrow I sketched out. He's cute, right? I was thinking, maybe too cute. Looks like my design was influenced an awful lot by Ray Bolger's character in the MGM movie, which I enjoyed. But the thing about Baum's story is it's not just fun and fantastical. It's a little creepy. So I thought this loveable scarecrow might not be right for the job.

This guy is just right, though. He's cute but he's creepy too. I wouldn't want to run into him in a dark cornfield at night, but there's a sweetness to his smile that I really like. So this is the design I stuck with for the finished piece. 

And here's a quick step-by-step on the scarecrow. After the rough sketch, I cleaned it up in Photoshop and then painted in the color. I'll work on a step-by-step for the whole piece and try to get that up soon. -v

Avengers, Assemble! Hulk...Smoosh?

In anticipation of the release of the Avengers movie this weekend, RunRedRun has taken my cartoony Hulk designs and turned them into a very angry, very fuzzy Incredible Hulk fiber art doll. He's big, too. Probably the largest felted wool doll RunRedRun has put together. He stands 11 inches tall but -- get this -- his arms move! In an arcing, "Hulk Smash" sort of way, his arms are hinged so he can properly show his rage. And with his arms raised above his head he's about 14 inches tall.

Below you can see some very rough design sketches and a collection of potential faces to choose from. My friend at RunRedRun chose the classic Hulk grimace and turned those rough sketches into the fuzzy behemoth you see in these early photos.

To ramp up for the Avengers movie, check out RunRedRun for more photos. And until the movie comes out, you can amuse yourself with my uber-geeky, goofball, action figure recreation below. -v 

My Super Ziggy piece made the paper...and nobody told me.

Well, apparently, during the run of the Ziggy Show at AIP, Kurt Shaw (from the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review) stopped in to file an arts & entertainment piece for the newspaper (in print and online). And though I'm known as someone who craves constant attention and praise, nobody bothered to tell me my Super Ziggy piece was featured in the article. I guess that's what happens when you're a jerk to all your friends and never kick in for gas money.

Anyway, I did manage to get my hands on a facsimile of the article and I'm posting it here. Not necessarily so you can read it (There's really only one sentence about me, so...) but just to prove I'm not lying. Like I usually am. Because I'm a jerk. -v

Super Ziggy: The Process

So, you know my Super Ziggy piece is hanging in the Art Institute of Pittsburgh's Ziggy Tribute Show for the rest of this month. This is it. Everyone's favorite everyman, soaring high about the city. It's a nice change of pace from watching him lose yo-yo's down sewer grates. If the composition looks slightly familiar to you, it's because it's not just a tribute to Ziggy and Tom Wilson, but a nod to another famously optimistic cartoon character...

The Superman #1 cover by Joe Shuster is iconic and it's fun to mess around with revamps. But in the case of the Ziggy piece, it actually fits perfectly. The brief for the Ziggy tribute show discussed the philosophy behind the character and how his unfailing optimism was his strength and, in the face of the adversities he encounters, downright heroic. There is no more optimistic superhero than Siegel & Shuster's Man of Steel, so the illustration practically designed itself. It was an added bonus that Ziggy had a white dog sidekick to stand in for Krypto. So, let's see how I put it together…

Using the Superman cover as a guide, I penciled in Ziggy and Fuzz, flying above a cityscape. I actually scoured the web for some shots of old Ziggy strips and tried to create a hybrid architecture that incorporated the big-city look of the old Superman cover and the charming building style of Tom Wilson's original Ziggy strips.

Next, I inked the pencils of the figures in Photoshop. The oval frame and marquee were a little too perfect for me to draw by hand (despite them being drawn by hand originally by a much more patient and skilled Shuster) so I pulled the image into Illustrator and used the bezier pen tool to help describe my curves and blends.

Once everything was "inked" I pulled it back into Photoshop to color it. I tried to match the crazy comic book colors on the buildings (green, orange and purple skyscrapers!) but I also needed the colors to be a little washed out so I could make the cover look aged. The Ziggy logo, much like the buildings, is a hybrid of the Superman logo aesthetic and the Ziggy logo letterforms, and I think it worked out pretty well.

One of the most fun parts of doing a revamp like this is coming up with parallels for all the elements of the original. So, as a nod to Ziggy's 40th Anniversary this year, "64 PAGES OF ACTION!" becomes "40 YEARS OF OPTIMISM" and "ALL IN FULL COLOR" becomes "SOME IN FULL COLOR" to reference to black and white daily strips vs. the color sundays. After all the fonts are chosen and the blurbs are in place, I finish the coloring and move on to another fun part -- destroying all my hard work so it looks like a 40-year old comic book.

The first stage in wearing down this image is fading all of the colors. I want this thing to look like it's been sitting in someone's attic for a few decades. I also run a half-tone filter over the image to give it that old printing-press look. We're off to a good start, but I really need to ruin it some more.

I went to a nearby comic book store and dug through their old back stock to do a little more research (while I was there, I also emptied my wallet on a huge stack of Batman comics.) and I noticed a pattern of fading and darkening on some of those old comics that looked like the result of leaving the comics in shafts of sunlight or dirtying up the edges with smudgy little fingers. So I tried to recreate that on the Ziggy cover too.

Next came the binding cracks and overall wear and tear that would occur after years of handling. It's time consuming, but fun, to take a very small brush and etch in all of of those cracks and folds. After I wrecked it just enough, I mocked up some page edges and scanned in the stapled binding of an actual comic to complete the effect (seen in the very first image at the top of the post). If you'd like to see the Super Ziggy cover in person (where it's much larger) you can visit the Art Institute of Pittsburgh before the Ziggy show comes down near the end of this month. -v

The Ziggy Show is Finally Up! Super Ziggy To The Rescue!

I did this Ziggy piece for a Tom Wilson Tribute Show sometime last Summer. Between then and now, Art Institute of Pittsburgh went through some administrative changes, re-organized their show schedule, and, sadly, Tom Wilson, Ziggy's creator, passed on. All the while my Ziggy sat, lonely and forgotten, in a back office at AIP, waiting to pay tribute to a man who'd never see it.

But the Ziggy Show is finally up, and so is my illustration, Super Ziggy. It's a nod to a famous Superman comic book cover and I'll have a work-in-progress for it in a later post. But for now, let's talk about the show.

Ziggy: An Island Of Humor In A Sea Of Trouble runs at the Art Institute of Pittsburgh Gallery from March 7th to April 28th and features a nice selection of original Tom Wilson (Senior and Junior) Ziggy gags as well as some fantastic tribute pieces by local artists.

The photograph doesn't do this piece justice, but it's cut paper, highly reflective, and when light hits it the shape casts both a bright silhouette image of Ziggy (and a duckling) as well as an inverse shadow-silhouette. Pretty creative stuff and it captures the essence of Ziggy perfectly.

That's not the case (nor the intent), though, with Mark Bender's expertly rendered Hug Life colored pencil illustration which re-imagines Wison's lovable loser as a tattooed thug. Mark Bender's an amazing illustrator, an instructor at AIP, and a friend. But he's also a bitter, spiteful individual who just couldn't resist driving a rusty wheat thresher over and over a beloved childhood icon for giggles. With great precision and artistic skill he's managed to run roughshod over everything that Ziggy ever stood for and I don't know how he lives with himself. And now we'll see if Mark really reads my blog. : )

There are some other very nice pieces in the show, as well as a start-to-finish display about how newspaper comics get from the artist's brain to your breakfast table. If you happen to be downtown, you should consider stopping in and basking in the glory of the quintessential luckless everyman. -v

Happy Valentine's Day 2012

Who better to help express my feelings about the holiday than this heartless automaton with an axe?

I'm still working on this piece and I'll have work-in-progress steps soon, but for now this tin man's the perfect antidote for all the pink that's been assailing my eyes for the past few weeks. So here's a small preview.

If you're the type have plans with your sweetheart tonight, have a very happy Valentine's Day. And if you're destined to be alone this holiday, kick back, toss on Casablanca and have a good cry.

And if you're just another heartless machine who couldn't possibly care less about Valentine's Day, well, then you'll probably just hole up in your studio, hang out with your cat and draw pictures on your computer all night. -v

I'm Occupying The City Paper

Had a last minute gig to do a cover for the Pittsburgh City Paper this past weekend. As usual, I jumped on it. Lisa (the CP's art director) is a pleasure to work with and she always throws me something interesting. This is the image I handed in -- a timely, holiday piece -- and, beside it, a photo of the actual cover (out today, with minor modifications to the layout). If you can't possibly think of any better way to spend your next five minutes, you can read through my process below.

I had only the weekend to get this done, so I was thrilled that Lisa had already mocked up her idea for what she wanted. Basically, a composition based on the traditional nativity scene, but modernized to include Occupy Protesters on Pittsburgh's Mellon Green. I wondered, briefly, if appropriating someone's revered religious iconography to make a political statement could potentially cause controversy. But when has that ever happened? On to the sketch!

This was my initial sketch and it went through without a snag. I got big points for adding in the protest sign (to replace the usual shepherd's staff) and the hoodie (to replace the normal veil). My band-aid had to get editorial approval (we certainly didn't want offended riot cops to come and knock our heads in), but in the end, it stayed. A victory for the people! I was asked only to add some hay on the ground (it appears in the poem beside the illustration and it evokes the manger scene more literally).

After polishing up the pencils a bit, I just inked the whole thing in Photoshop, aiming for a brushed-ink, comic style. The hay was coming on way too strong, though, so I decided to change up the color a bit so it wouldn't compete with the other elements in the image. At this point I decided I needed to mock up a masthead so I could make sure the illustration fit within the final cover dimensions. So...

Here's how it looked after laying down a very simple night sky and some basic grass. Then I just started coloring the figures. I was trying for a natural, watercolor feel. I started with the rat because he was the most fun, but after working on it a little while that little Guy Fawkes baby really found a place in my heart. Now I want a baby Guy Fawkes.

Here I painted in the hay, darkened the sky a bit with a soft, cloud-like brush and added some stars. I had to re-create the Mellon logo as a stand-in for the iconic Christmas star and couldn't help wondering, the whole time, why is this the logo for Mellon? Not my problem. So I just kept going.

At the eleventh hour, actual controversy erupted: Did the nail at the bottom of the protest sign make it look like "WE ARE THE 9.9%"? To be fair, the 9.9 percent in this country are a legitimate group whose voice needs to be heard. They are, simply, the 9.9% at the near-top of the scale who make more than everyone else, but embarrassingly less than the top 1%. Only a Christmas miracle could help them. Alas, it didn't come. We decided to nix the bottom nail on the sign to clear up any confusion. My apologies to all the billionaires who read this blog. I gave it my best shot. -v

When You Think Football, You Think Vince Dorse, Natch!

Clearly hip to my legendary, almost encyclopedic knowledge of American Football, an ad agency recently asked me to create some comic art for the Pittsburgh Steelers. The concept? Steelers safety Troy Polamalu is a superhero, flying around Pittsburgh, keeping an eye on the city. Right up my alley.

The deadline was tight -- like, overnight tight -- but I felt pretty comfortable with the comic book/superhero framework and figured I could get it done. I did. But I watched the sunrise from my computer desk the morning it was due. Literally. That's the glamorous world of freelance illustration, kids.

The comic is slated to show up in the Gameday Magazine during five (5!) Steelers home games and is currently on the Steelers Facebook page as part of a "how does the story end?" promotion. You can check it out here at this link. (side note: getting samples of your own work is notoriously difficult. if anyone goes to the game and happens to get a copy of the magazine with my comic in it and doesn't happen to want it, I'd be happy to have a copy myself. so let me know, thanks!)

Below are some of the work-in-progress steps to getting this thing from sketchbook to print. The lettering was done by the fine folks at the ad agency, and -- I noticed -- they also tarted up my Steelers "bat-signal" in post. Collaboration. The life blood of the illustration biz. -v