Harry Potter Conquers The Universe

Two pictures I drew for The Brutarian, fanzine dedicated to trash culture, (monster movies, rock music, exploitation films, etc.)  The Brutarian ran for quite a few issues and received wide distribution, in that Tower Records carried it in their magazine section.

This article had to do with the popularity of fantasy and sf in popular culture, as best I can recall.  The first illustration here is titled "Harry Potter Conquers The Universe." (Could that have been the title of the article? Maybe.) The second illustration depicts interstellar love, (although, as so often on Earth, the love appears a bit one-sided).  This is titled "Lunar "L'amour."

Flayed Head

This is an ink wash and gouache drawing of a plastic head ecorche I have, cast from a cadaver's head. The other side of the ecorche is just the skull, so one may see and compare the bony structure under the musculature. The gouache was a happy accident; I intended only for this to be an ink wash rendering, but I laid down an area of wash that was darker than I intended. Not knowing how best to correct the error, I went over that section with a thin layer of white gouache, hoping to lighten the ink. I succeeded in my intent, at least partly, but I was surprised to find I liked the look of the gouache over the ink. After I competed the rest of the ink wash layers, I went over everything with the gouache. 

Dance of the Oddfellows

Here's the final picture, used as the cover drawing for issue #3 of Oddfellow, a humor magazine published out of NYC.  This was the "Spring Issue," (a hint to the theme of the image), and also the final issue to be published. It was a joint effort by two brothers, the younger of whom I met when he was temping at my place of work. When he told me he and his brother were planning on publishing their own magazine, I recommended they contact a friend of mine, a professional illustrator, to do some work for them, which they did, and which he did. They also asked me to contribute, flatteringly enough. I provided four interior drawings illustrating a story in their first issue, a single doublewide drawing (it ran across the top half of two pages inside) for another story in their second issue, and this cover drawing and an interior comic strip for this final issue. The interior strip was written by the publisher and was an advertisement for a music store in NYC. (I generally write my own comics--not that I have produced a surplus of them--and only twice previously had I ever illustrated someone else's script.) 

This incorporates elements that I drew separately (as shown in the previous several posts), then put together digitally in Corel Painter, (with some tweaking in Photoshop).  For a closer look, click on the picture, (as with all pictures posted on this blog). This is an upload of the tif file of the finished illustration, and not a scan of the published cover.  

Dancers Dancing, (Discarded)

Initially, I thought I would try rendering the finished cover in a block cut style, (digitally "cut," however). I completed these test renderings of three figures before discarding the idea. I concluded it would be too time consuming to treat each element in the picture in this style, and I wasn't even sure I liked it. I was afraid I would expend effort and time and, in the end, be unhappy with the final result. In retrospect, I really like this faux block print look, and I wonder now how the picture would have turned out if I had continued with this approach.

I'll publish the actual finished picture in my next post.

Dancers Danc--uh, where are the dancers?!

Here are a few more pencil sketches of elements that were part of the final cover illustration. The next post will include some finished renderings of some of the dancers that I ultimately did not use.

Dancers Dancing, Part Two

Here are more pencil sketches of dancers for the aforementioned cover illustration for the short-lived NYC-based humor magazine. In the next part of this series, I'll share some more elements that comprised the final result, and some first attempts at finished renderings over the pencil sketches. After that...the big picture!

Dancers Dancing, Part One

These are pencil sketches for what became the cover illustration of a short-lived humor magazine published out of NYC in the late oughts of the 21st century.  In my next posts, I will upload more sketches and a couple of preliminary-but-discarded tryout treatment drawings for the finished illustration, (which I will put up at the end of this short series).