1552 - "Two Worlds"

The finished bespoke globes of the fictional planets Mongo (Flash Gordon) and Krypton (Superman).  It's time for me to pack these up and send them to my clients.

Generally, I'm not sentimental over my own artwork.  A lot of it has been archived digitally so I can revisit it at any time.  However, there's only one Mongo and one Krypton.

 I'm wistful about sending them away.

They are flawed, since they are prototypes. I learned a fair bit about globe-making, though.  And while for a few days I catalogued my errors and self-made promises to do better next time, I ended up simply staring at these worlds and wondering at the adventures a brave pioneer would experience soaring their many-coloured skies, swimming the depths of their cobalt oceans, or setting foot on their alien soils.  

The volcanoes of Kira smoulder.  The forests of Lurvan beckon.  The pull of the Magnetic Mountain is real!  (No, it isn't.  I decided against putting a magnet in Magnetic Mountain.  But it does look like that, so incredibly corny, but that's what I get for using a comic book as an atlas, alas.) 

Strange to me, the feeling that these pieces are not just the result of my artistic intent and skill, but that these planets really do echo the supersonic exploits of those great Golden Age superhero comics.   What great fun it was to manufacture these token worlds!  At night, I look up into the galaxy and gaze in giddy wonderment.  Which blazing stars possess these worlds for real?

 

1519 - "G&G 13: Formula De"

This is the final version of the Formula De poster for the Gaming & Guinness group.  The gigantic 30-sided dice are rolled to decide what happens to each race car on the fictional Formula De track.  With all of the text and special effects, the composition of this poster finally comes together.  

Monaco (and its typeface), Guinness (and its harp logo), and G&G ("Fraternatatis Venatus") are the intellectual property of their respective owners.  The use of Guinness with racing cars in this image no way endorses, encourages, or condones drinking and driving.  

1513 - "Happy Birthday To Me! (9)"

Well, another year, another birthday, another present to myself.  This time it's the sexy Lieutenant Marla McGivers from the Star Trek Episode "Space Seed".

Over the past couple of years for personal reasons that are not easy to explain on JSVB, I've developed a strong attachment to this character.  Certainly it's enough for me to try for a well-rendered portrait.

Marla is peculiar.  She only appeared in the one episode, and her treachery nearly kills the entire crew of the Enterprise.  Or perhaps a better way to phrase her actions would be as misplaced loyalty.  

The Star Trek Guide points out that although she is lieutenant by rank, her uniform doesn't have that stripe.  Her duty on the Enterprise was as the ship's historian: she could interpret what the ship found on her five year voyage of discovery in terms of Earth history, which seems to me a remarkably useless skill given the wide variety of strange and alien worlds Captain Kirk discovers.  Mind you, kirk also encounters a few "parallel Earths", but Marla McGivers is never seen to help with those.

She does find critical use when the Enterprise locates the marooned spacecraft Botany Bay: it's a sleeper ship sent from Earth in our time, and it's loaded with genetically-enhanced supercriminals entombed in hypersleep.  Through Marla, we come to understand how Khan Singh and his team came to be jettisoned into deep space.  She sides with Khan in a mutiny that nearly costs the lives of all the crew.  

Marla McGivers is one of the first crewmembers on the Enterprise shown to actively pursue the arts.  She seems to prefer painting rather than doing her regular duties, something I appreciate.   

1465 - "Life Is Like A Box Of Tribbles"

Please click to embiggen.

Fan artwork for television shows, especially ones that mix together different franchises, are always so uncool to me.  Unless I'm the one making the artwork, then it's brilliant.  

With that out of the way, this month I find myself in the happy confluence between two of my all-time favourite shows, Star Trek and The X Files.  The context of each program excites my imagination: both are smart, inclusive shows with a lot of nostalgic appeal.  

Emphasis on "nostalgic".  Certainly aware that there is a large built-in audience who has watched decades of this programming, television producers also seek to give the viewers something new.  The trouble is most everything new has already been done, and Star Trek and the X-Files have attempted to pursue new frontiers while remaining tethered to the concept that launched them in the first place. 

Star Trek: Discovery has been entertaining, but it's not the Star Trek I want to see.  Violent, often gory, definitely not a show I choose to share with my family, Discovery charts a dark, mean-spirited and morally ambiguous course through yet another interminable space war.  The production values are far above any other Star Trek show, the look and sound of the series makes all the older Trek shows seem like stage plays by comparison.  The acting is normally sharp and the writing makes frequent smart call-backs to various interesting and surprising story beats, so that later episodes for the most part seem to stand on the careful foundation laid down by earlier adventures.  But: it's not Star Trek to me.  It's some kind of militaristic soap opera where the characters find themselves trapped in relationship minefields as often as they are ensnared by science fiction munitions.  And the characters themselves for me range from annoying to loathesome almost without exception.  Yes, it's amusing to see what will happen next to the Discovery, but I also feel that Star Trek would be better off if the ship remained lost in space.  I want to see a Star Trek episode where the ship and crew genuinely trek.  I'm tired of fictional war stories, especially when I know the outcome. 

The X-Files is the opposite side of the coin.  Built into the X-Files is the greatest character duo on television since Kirk and Spock.  Again, yes I find the new X-Files episodes entertaining, but it's not the  X-Files I want to see.  Confusing, indirect, the X-Files has become a show impossible to share with anyone outside of the fan base.  Agents Mulder and Scully have become ciphers of themselves, having faced the same perils over and over again so many times.  The dangers are all iterative but hew to the same truth: the world is doomed, alien intelligence may or may not save us, and only Mulder and/or Scully have the key to unlock all of the clues, if only Mulder and/or Scully were not mortally wounded in hospital and/or being protected by extra-terrestrial shadow agencies.  Knowing that the narrative is hopelessly bound in knots, individual episodes often become flippant or experimental, sometimes with memorable results, sometimes not.  Then there are episodes devoted entirely to exposition, forty-four solid minutes of Mulder and Scully telling the audience what has happened to date.  X-Files hasn't really changed in that regard, not since the movies were released.  

So, I find myself wishing for Star Trek: Discovery's production values and writing, with the strong morality and conviction of Mulder and Scully.  I guess that's why I gave today's JSVB artwork the flavour from Forrest Gump:  sophisticated computerized visuals coupled with geek nostalgia.  The trouble is Forrest Gump for all of its virtues just isn't all that good of a film, at least not to me.  There is a reason why sentimentality and high-tech storytelling don't mix: the harder you work the recreate the past the more you squander your future.  

I certainly don't mind having good choices for entertainment on television, but I'm also ready to leave some of the shows I've loved in the past behind.  I want to be a patron and not a demographic. 

1404 - "Illuminating Girl"

I finished inking the girl on a swing.  I've given her a quill so that she can illuminate text.  I'm thinking of using her as a header for some of my infrequent letters, her pen will start whatever I am thinking of writing.  ("Dear Advertisers, I am disgusted with the way old people are depicted on television. We are not all vibrant, fun-loving sex maniacs. Many of us are bitter, resentful individuals who remember the good old days when entertainment was bland and inoffensive. The following is a list of words I never want to hear on television again. Number one: Bra. Number two: Horny. Number three: Family Jewels.") 

If you are curious, my drawing is intended to emulate the style of Art Nouveau.  In the industrial era leading to World War One, new techniques in publishing allowed a greater population access to art.  Mass advertising in particular became cheaper and more prevalent.  The art world responded to an increasingly mechanized society with intricate and detailed designs that chose to exhibit Nature as the primal force over Man.  Geometric designs contain natural forms, but not completely.  Nature is tamed using carefully-placed lines, but remains unruly and unpredictable.  Man can hope to rein in the macrocosm, but only for the short-term.  Predictive of the awful cataclysm of the Great War, Art Nouveau seemed to be the last pure form of global culture before the world descended into fanatical patriotism.

All that, and the Art Nouveau artist also gets to draw lots of pretty girls with really long legs.  Priorities remain important!

1400 - "Sean Bruises His Shin"

Click to Embiggen.

Every hundred posts on JSVB I like to celebrate by showing something I think is special, and if possible something that challenges my artistic boundaries.  

For JSVB Post #1400 I present "Sean Bruises His Shin", a fully hand-drawn and painted artwork in the manner of master woodcut printer Hokusai from the Edo period of Japan's civilization.   Back in February my friend Sean bruised his shin, and more or less it took me until today to commemorate that event in a wildly intricate and desperately trite Internet meme based on designs from over three hundred years ago.  

The poem I wrote - a haiku - in the corner reads:

Sean bruises his leg

his shin pain barks like a dog

yet he shrieks Me-Ow 

 

1382 - Happy (Fiftieth!) Birthday To Me (8)

Click above to embiggen.

(Cue John Barry Orchestra, James Bond Movie Theme Mode)

He has your figure on his mind

He knows that numbers never lie

The years tumble forward, a deadly sum

But he's prepared you for the world to come

He knows all the best odds to play

To draw you in his own special way

He lives under no one other's thumb

He'll have you ready for the world to come

Lovely woman, with your precious look

He will trace you in his artful book

You will live forever by his design

His very touch is a golden mine

With you near he is far from done

He will bring you to the world to come

The world to come!

The World To Come!

The Woooooooorld Tooo Cooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo- (breathe, Shirley Bassey, breathe!) -oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooome!

cha-cha-cha!

1379 - "The Girl With The Gerbera Daisy"

"This little fella will bring some colour into my life," thought the girl with the Gerbera daisy.  Purchashing the cute potted plant, she climbed into her rocket car and took off for the rings of Saturn, where she battled Kromm The Destroyer and saved the universe.

The girl with the daisy is a real individual, I saw her from a distance in a plant shop.   I have no idea what her story is, though, at least not past the moment where she posed with her flower.  You could probably guess that from my opening paragraph.  

She was attractive, but wore drab clothes.  The daisy was as stereotypical as a houseplant can be.  I was really excited by her composition and mein, which looked to me like a New Yorker cover or a Norman Rockwell painting come to life.  (At this point, I imagine my wife is a little bewildered: You look at other women and you're excited by their MEIN!?  I am certain, dear JSVB followers, that I will have to pay for this in the future somehow.)  Since I had no camera, I came home and drew what I remembered of the girl, whoever she was.

I am developing a personal mania for recording my remembrances.  I don't want to rely on photography, but on translating what I have in my head through my right hand and onto paper or digital media.  That seems really important right now.  It sure is hard work, though, and I wonder who would buy any of this stuff.

1351 - Nativity 2 Complete

I know I forget to post my final results every time I finish an icon, and Nativity 2 falls into that pattern.  I did finish this some time ago, and this was the picture I took back in January.  

This icon is very much like the previous nativity icon I painted.  To see the other Nativity, you can click here to see JSVB Post #1195.  I used the same design, but some of the paintwork is a little more mature.  The inscription is in Greek this time.  Mostly, I chose Greek because the Cyrillic Russian and Ukrainian lettering took up too much room.  The writing translates to "The Genesis Of Christ"... Jesus' birth!  

1300 - "Jeff-O-Nomicon"

Yay!  I am a published author now!  Of course, I had to self-publish.  And I also typeset and illustrated all the pages, printed them, and bound them myself.  So there's only one copy of my book, and - full disclosure - it's more or less a fan-made copy of another book:

 

The Necronomicon Ex Mortis.  Legend has it written by the Dark Ones.  Roughly translated - "The Book Of The Dead".  The book served as a passageway to the evil worlds beyond.  It was written long ago, when the seas ran red with blood. It was this blood that was used to ink the book.  In the Year 1300 AD, the book... disappeared.  

 

So I made one of my own, hooray!  I know some crazy kids from Michigan also stumbled upon another possibly apocryphal copy, but I can't imagine how their story could be any more interesting than mine.  

 

If you haven't been following JSVB for the past while, please click on the following links to see the previous One, Two, Three, Four, Five, and Six steps I took to hand-build my own Necronomicon, reasonably faithful to the one featured in the Evil Dead movies.  Click on any image to embiggen it: 

The seventh and final step was the painting, sealing, and binding.  I took my baked Necronomicon cover and spray painted it matte black.  Yes, it looks shiny in the picture.  I could have made a better choice with my paints.  I spray-painted the inside cover as well, which obliterated the library mark from Lansdowne Elementary School, as well as covering my duct tape repairs.  

I painted over the black paint with student-grade acrylics.  I used burnt umber and black to make a series of muddy, leathery browns.

  

 
Again, the colours are bright and shiny, but acrylic darkens when it dries.  I started by dry-brushing the colour on and using careful washes and layering, but the pigments I used were ultra-cheap, so I slathered on the paint like it was cake icing.  

It took a night for the paint to dry.  I returned my Necronomicon to its lair in the garage to spray matte acrylic fixative on my paint:

Once again, the Necronomicon smelled horrible.  I cannot imagine exposure to these chemicals was good for me.  But then again, now I have my own Necronomicon!  

The ultimate step was to bind the pages.  I cut a long strip of thick cardboard to match the inside of the book spine in length and width.  I used hot glue (Smells bad? Check!) to fasten the cardboard to the inside of the book.  I stapled the printed, coffee-coloured pages together and hot glued the edge of the folio to the cardboard backing, making the crudest binding possible.  I didn't take any pictures of the process since it required at least three out of my two hands to achieve.  Imagine a big fat guy swearing in the wee hours of the night at hot glue that dries before the pieces are pressed together and you get the idea.  

Below is the picture of the final product, a fully-functional Necronomicon Ex Mortis (but please do not use the incantations lest you invoke possession by Kandarian demons!).  I wouldn't play with it much as it is a little fragile, but then the book in the movie got ripped to pieces anyways.  Scary!

 Today is both Hallowe'en and my 1300th JSVB post!  Normally, every one hundred posts, I like to share one of my larger art projects that turned out well.  I hope you enjoyed following me as I built my Necronomicon decorative prop!  Happy Hallowe'en!



 

1253 - Happy Birthday To Me (7)

Today's JSVB Post features a comic book character spanking another comic book character.  If you don't wish to see that, please do not scroll down. 

Judge Dredd & Judge Hershey.  Judge Dredd is The Law!  Click to embiggen.

Hello, and welcome to JSVB on my birthday.  As a present to myself, I like to come up with something I wouldn't ordinarily do.  It helps if it's a little racy, but I also like to try to push my technique.

Attention to line quality is lost when you're looking at a picture of Judge Dredd spanking Judge Hershey.  So instead of discussing my struggles with keeping my inks tight, I'll mention Hershey struggling on Dredd's lap.

Of course, violence against women is shameful.  Dredd, however, is an R-rated violent, not-politically-correct officer of the Law of MegaCity One.  Consider a futuristic, satirical Dirty Harry dialed up to eleven.  

Dredd hits women, at least those who are bigger and meaner than him.  Dredd hits men, quite a large number of them.  He even hits children, although in the form of a judicial spanking.  He hits mutants, dogs, robots, rats, alligators, dinosaurs, Santa Claus, sea monsters, and space aliens.  Dredd has hit Stan Lee.   Dredd punched Death in the face so hard that his clenched hand smashed through the back of Death's skull. ("Gaze into my fist!" Dredd growls.)  One of the joys of Dredd is seeing exactly who or what he will have to hit to make it to the end of the story.  At its most creative, the Dredd comic supplies an amazing variety of villains for the Judge to punch.  

So yes, Dredd is violent, but the violence is seldom presented in a serious manner.  His stories are a skewed view of American morality.  Dredd is powerfully brutal, but he is completely abstinent when it comes to sex.  The comic rarely deals with intimacy or sensuality, likely because those things are generally outlawed in MegaCity One.  

Judge Dredd and Judge Hershey, motorcycle cops of the future, were created by writer John Wagner and artist Carlos Ezquerra.  They currently belong to Rebellion Developments. 

 

1234 - "Night Hams"

Edward Hopper's "Nighthawks" (1942) is one of America's most recognizable and parodied artworks.  

I spent today, which happens to be World Hamster Day, re-painting a copy of Nighthawks to incorporate hamsters.  It was a lot of fun making this project, including tightening up a few details to make the picture more hamster-centric and setting up a really nice colour palette for the hams.  

If I had any craftsmanship, I'd sure want to build the diner to hamster scale and populate it with the rodents as in the illustration.  I guess I'd have to fasten them to their seats to get the Hopper composition, but that would likely anger everybody especially the hams.  

For other World Hamster Day tributes on my blog, please click here to see JSVB Post #942 and click here to see JSVB Post #765 which explains exactly why April 12 is World Hamster Day.

1200 - The Art Of Interstate 10

Every 100 posts on JSVB, I feel obligated to show something good to make up for any lazy work I may have been posting.  

Back in October of 2015, I kind of went on a rampage designing the front cover for a fake pulp novel out of the 1970's.  I posted the final product, which has me holding what appears to be a real copy of the book.  Of course, it's all Photoshopped, but I did need real artwork for that cover, and it took me a couple of weeks to grind it out.  Inspired by pulp novels, I put together a draft of the layout, and then filled in the details in Photoshop and Corel Painter.  I went overboard, and my design is probably too rich for true pulp.  Likely those covers were painted in a day.  

I thought it would be a good idea to show the final art in detail without the Photoshop artefacts covering half of it over.  You should see the art in book form by checking out JSVB Post #1168, by clicking here.

Naturally, the master file for this artwork is poster-sized, so should you order one (yes, it's for sale, e-mail me!) you can see details like Jake's space shuttle mission patch, the mysterious FIST logo, and his JFK Space Center Committee Number (69... why not?)

In a case of art imitating art, my friend Earl wrote the perfect rear cover blurb for Interstate 10.  One of these days, I will Photoshop that into the back of the book.

And in a case of art imitating art imitating art, I've set upon the course of writing the actual book.  Considering we went through all this effort to make a convincing cover, the writing seems very straight-forward.  All I have to do is come up with a story about a cowboy stunt man race car driver who fights a karate army, woos a ninja princess, outwits the ape with the golden AK-47, and hooks up with the girl.  It has to be in the style of Steven King but mentored by Philip K. Dick.

Really, it writes itself.  All I have to do is  sit here and press the keyboard letters in the correct order.  

If I do make progress on this, I think I'll open a new blog to post my results.  My wife says that's what Andy Weir did for The Martian.  So, where he went, I go.  The journey's the thing.

777 - "Wrath Of Gandhi"

Please click on image to embiggen.

For my 777th JSVB post, I am pleased to present... "The Wrath Of Gandhi"!

The last few days, I've been posting my progress on this piece, but I neglected to mention the star of the show: General Mahatma "Wrath-O" Gandhi.

For the non-geeks among my JSVB readers, this is not at all the famous world leader Mahatma Gandhi revered for his peaceful spirituality and unfailing sense of justice.  This is an infamous counter-culture Gandhi who spews death, destruction, and mechanized chaos in his bid to take over the world.  

Gandhi appears as a playable character in the Civilization V videogame.  There are dozens of world leaders available to play, either as avatars for human players or as computer-controlled opponents.  Each computer opponent is given a numerical rating from 1 to 10 for several behavioral attributes.  As a running joke for every version of the Civilization game, Gandhi's desire to acquire and use nuclear weapons is set to 12/10, or a 120% likelihood that he would choose to use nukes.  

Since Gandhi in the game generally flourishes through peaceful diplomacy and careful population management, he's not an easy character to bring to full-out conventional war.  If provoked, Gandhi would much rather carpetbomb the world with nukes than raise a massive army to crush the other nations into submission.  

Some time ago, I wondered how a Civilization V game would go if Gandhi used a conventional military to take over the world.  He would go marching on the world's great capitols in an Indian GDR, or Giant Death Robot, the most powerful conventional military unit in the game, as yet fictional in nature.  I tried a few times to make Gandhi a tyrannical megalomaniac hell-bent on world domination, but typically my ambitions were aborted during the Renaissance, Gandhi being cruelly taken out by other more combative nations at least 400 years before the invention of useful robotics. 

My online friend ragan651 had a lot more success with Gandhi than me.  He took over most of the Civilization V world, but was stopped at the very gates of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris.  The illustration is my what-if scenario, had he been able to break the French resitance and storm their capital in a GDR, and then rule the world unopposed.  I've tried to replicate the smudgy, palette-knifey art style of the anonymous illustrator charged with coming up with painted pictures for the Civilization V game.  It's not quite a fit for my own art style, but it's close enough to prove that the Civilization art catalogue can be expanded. 

The Civilization V GDR is your typical hundred-foot-tall walking death-robot.  My version of the GDR is much closer to the nulcear-age aesthetic of the old "Mars Attacks" collector's cards from Topps.  (For another take on collector's cards here on JSVB, please click here.)  I like the big glass dome because that makes it so much easier to see General Gandhi raging inside.  I also like the big crushing pincer claws, while the missile rack is a nod to more Japanese-inspired killer robots.  The Civilization V logo is courtesy Rdg Vitorino of Logopedia.  

For another look at science-fiction warfare, please check out JSVB Post #649 by clicking here.




 

714 - A Tribute To Charles Addams

 

 

Brilliant dead genius cartoonist Charles Addams once drew a cover for the prestigious New Yorker magazine that looked a lot like this photograph - and yes, this place is real.  I just happened to be lucky enough to have this vantage point and a camera ready.  Plus, I jiggered around a few elements in Photoshop, just to make it all look decent.