madmodpoetgod

JLI: This is my dream team Justice League lineup. The central figure, Black Adam, is one of the darkest anti-heroes in the DC Canon. Just about everyone else on the page is a screwoff. I styled the image after classic League covers of the era (White Background, Early Colors).

Metropolis Heroes: Booster Gold, Superman and Supernova, flying over Metropolis. I’m not as satisfied with the halftones here as in the illustration at the bottom. Though it does have a nice eighties quality to it (ink).	Cousins: A second entry for the PowerGirl Jam over at the drawingboard (Early Colors).

Skyline: While more of a Booster Gold piece, this also serves as my third contribution to the Power Girl Jam. As I’ve gotten into the habit of over rendering all of my colors, I’m very happy as to how the relative simplicity of this color halftone turned out.

Gown, Girl and Field: The majority of what I’ve been doing in my free time lately has been super hero work. So here I wanted to make sure to include something a little bit more traditional and classy.

Blue and Gold: As a nod to the Golden Age controversy on Batman and Robin being a gay couple, a spoof Super Buddies TV promotional featured in the miniseries Formerly Known as the Justice League portrayed Booster Gold and his best pal Blue Beetle as A heterosexual dynamic duo for the new millennium. In the same series, Booster claimed to have married a much older wealthy woman, Gladys, hoping to inherit her fortune. She forced him to dress as Wonder Woman during intercourse (Booster Gold Headmorph).

Booster and Skeets: Booster Gold is a disgraced football player from the 31st century, he threw games. Working as night watchman at the Metropolis Museum, he stole a number of items and traveled back in time. Skeets is his robot sidekick. The duo uses their knowledge of the future to seek fame and fortune. This drawing took on a strange underwater atmosphere. I’d always intended it to look like Booster flying through the sky. Now, though, I look at it and imagine the hero on his way to deliver whatever it is he has clutched in his hand to Aquaman.

Powergirl Jam: Next month I’m slated to host the drawingboard jam session on Powergirl. As I’ll be hopefully knee deep in the job hunt I decided to draft my contribution up early. In drawing this up I suspect that I was influenced by Frank Quitely’s work on All-Star Superman.

Life on the River: I’m about done student teaching, a couple more lessons, 45 Honors Juniors’ research papers to grade and I’m done. The last couple days I’ve hardly even had class, there’s been testing. My proctoring assignment was with six mentally handicapped students. The sad thing is that they had better decorum; more focus, and perhaps even wrote more intelligently than my Essentials Freshmen. So while they were behaving themselves, testing like responsible, respectful, driven human beings. I was working on this. The coloring I finished last night during Lost (detail).

While struggling through The Odyssey with my Essentials students I put these illustrations up on the dry erase board. Subbing I stumbled upon the realization that students who have no respect for education, who come from homes that have no respect for education, still respect a prolific doodler. In fact it seems their populations are less likely to infantilize or ghettoize their artist than are the more affluent. It was my goal to try to work this to my advantage. They might not respect the material, and they might not respect my mastery of it, but they can respect this. And if they can respect this, respect me for it, maybe it might cause them to reevaluate their stance on the material. As they may see value in me and I see value in it.

Daisy: I’m teaching a unit on The Great Gatsby, funner and fluffier than what we did with Their Eyes Were Watching God the month before. I’d given the students some image laden notes on Art Nouveau and Art Deco, two movements that back to back had a good deal of influence shaping the look of the period. Using the class room projector, some fonts and borders found online, as well as some screen grabs from the movie, I’m going to have the students make character posters in groups trying to incorporate some artistic flourishes from those movements.

Safari Girl and Ape Man Tableaux: The idea for this came to me while watching The Bucket List, there’s the scene of the two old men sitting inside their tent not entirely dissimilar. I’m not totally satisfied with the texture on the center post.

Manhunter from Mars: I was a Marvelite, Rob Liefeld was on X-Force, Jim Lee on X-men, Silvestri on Uncanny. Sixth, Seventh, Eighth grade; somewhere in there was the big comic book trading card boom. The House of Ideas put out a series a year, their distinguished competition followed suit. I imagine I only bought DC’s cards because I’d completed the other sets. My friends and I joked that DC stood for “dumb comics”. This was a long time before Magic, or Yu-Gi-Oh or anything like that. These cards were encyclopedic, indexes of their universes, not competitive games, though there was an inclination to catch them all. I don’t really buy any comics anymore, but my respect for what the two companies represent has certainly changed.

In his 1955 debut story, J’onn J’onzz is accidentally teleported to Earth by a scientist who has a heart attack and dies immediately thereafter, leaving the Martian stranded. The alien uses his powers to disguise his appearance, adopting the identity of police detective John Jones. J’onn eventually reveals his existence to the world, after which he operates openly as a superhero and becomes a charter member of the Justice League.

During the Justice League International years J’onn is shown to be obsessed with Oreo cookies, or “Chocos” to avoid copyright infringement. Grant Morrison establishes in his JLA series that the Martian Manhunter is the most recognized superhero in the Southern Hemisphere.

Arctic Typewriter: A variation of this is intended to replace the current wrapper of MMPG, it’s meant to evoke Harpers fantasy world as well as the old Form and Voids (and perhaps current Girl and Her Yeti’s) which took their local from the barren icy landscape presented on Farscape where Crichton spoke to “Einstein”. There’s also this more dynamic interpretation.

Pygmalion: Pandora, from Shade the Changing Man, was introduced in a story called Pygmalion Fever (one of Glyn Dillon’s few issues). Shade brought a statue of the mythic figure to life in an ornamental garden. The first thing she said was “hi, honey, wanna date?” Later she turns to dust because Shade’s girlfriend (and her girlfriend) couldn’t resist the urge to open her box and look inside. Shade made a second Pandora; she didn’t have any memory of the first one’s experiences. Eventually she ran off with a piece of living art. This lover dies in a fire. After the funeral Pandora asks Shade to make a statue of him. Not to be brought to life, but for her to stand next to after the box is opened again.

I’d started with slightly different intentions than what I wound up with. One thing I’ve been meaning to draw is a field of broken statues. The central figure would have been the same, but naked stone and with a different angle, her face obscured behind the pedestal, while other more broken and classically posed statues populated the background. That transformed into a single clothed stone figure which evolved into a single clothed flesh and blood figure. The clothed stone figure would have also worn stone clothing. Eventually I’ll draw that original intended piece in a setting similar to this. I’ve been working on broken statue limb props and nose morphs to help me in the composition stages. I’ve also made a nice stone texture map.

Desert Intrigue: I was very excited about this drawing. The idea came to me and I sketched it out on the back of a large tan envelope. The camel in the foreground, the girl on top of a half buried statue staring at her map in utter befuddlement. But for whatever reason I’ve been unable to get very far on it. I finally got the statue, girl and map where I was happy with them, now I struggle with the camel hair and sand.	Silver Surfer and the Horse Head Nebula: The problems with this drawing are quite the opposite. I’ve been happy with the figures from the start. I am a bit concerned about what I’m going to do with the space behind the giant anthropomorphized nebula, the current direction of the line work there isn’t very satisfactory, but mainly this is just a question of filling in the larger figure. Something that I’ve been too lazy to make time for.	Grooming: This also hasn’t seen a lot of progress since the last art update, I put some thinly disguised lettering into the snow on the ground, the brushy line work of which has seemed wrong from the start (maybe drawn more like arctic typewriter it’d be more appealing). I’ve lost momentum since and have not been able to keep up the same general feel. It looks like I deleted whatever work I did on the sky for that reason.

Ghosts: A Halloween themed image, I started working on this back in August. After having put it aside for quite awhile I decided to start over with a more direct perspective, putting the girl between the window and the viewer (alternate colors).

Zombie Homecoming: I work in Painter Essentials 3 (with a number of brushes imported from the trial version of Painter 9). I’ve stuck mainly to the pen and digital water color brushes. But I recently tried their liquid inks and found that I could get much more natural, and smoother, brushwork (toxic halftone version).	Send Me All Your Vampires: I did this fairly quickly the evening after I saw 30 Days of Night. I wanted to capture that kind of vampire, very Nosferatu in the film, though I kept the red eyes from some of the comic book imagery. However I’m not sure how close I came to the feel of the movie. When I look at my vampire here I get a vibe reminiscent of The Master from Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Spoiler is based on a Dean Trippe redesign and was drawn up rather quickly for a drawing board jam on sidekicks. Silver Surfer was begun a few months back; I’ve slowly been filling in the details on the giant lumbering anthropomorphized nebula. Champaign Supernova was inspired by a special I saw on PBS where two suns appeared and the sky turned brown because the atmosphere had been burned off by a celestial collision (I haven’t begun painting the brown two stared sky yet). And grooming is a girl and her yeti piece, I’m having trouble with the foreground snow, the gritty brushwork just isn’t cutting it.

I intend to start working the Yeti-Sasquatch Transpacific Brotherhood into the mix, as well as the northwest tree octopus.

Most recently I’ve tacked “A Girl and Her Rhino” onto the art update, I was inspired by some Frazetta stuff. I’ve changed the proportions on my Jungle Girl from the one I’ve used in the past. She’s now more amazonian, voluptuous, a nod I suppose to some of Frazetta’s thicker girls.

Safari Girl: I think I’m going to apply for a low paying graphic design work/study job to make some money this semester. To that end I’ve decided to draw up a few new things that are completely free of crotch and bush.

By the way, that’s the way I found the map on Wikisource, meaning I didn’t notice the whole “negroland” thing until well into the process. It’s not so much a political statement on my part, as it is a symptom of the general lack of high resolution scans of old African maps that aren’t offensive.

Save the Date: Nate is getting married. This is an image for his Save the Date card (8×5).

Worlds Finest: This piece and the next are contemporaries of the last art update. This illustration features Supergirl and Powergirl, two DC comics characters who are alternate reality counterparts. Both are cousins to their earths respective Supermans. I’m undecided as to which color scheme I prefer, but I am happy as to how Supergirl appears younger and Powergirl more womanly and mature (alternate colors).

These are items that I was working on before I started Nate’s Save the Date. The starro image is my new Facebook moniker. Summer seems worth completing. A Superman sketch, and a K9 Doctor Who fathers day card.

Power Girl Vs Guy Gardner: Guy Gardner was changed significantly in the 1980s by creative talents Englehart and Giffen who turned him into a boorish, jingoistic parody of an ultra-macho red-blooded American male. Historically Gardner had been a noble character. When the mortally wounded alien Green Lantern Abin Sur crash landed on Earth, he commanded his power ring to find a man honest and fearless enough to pass his legacy on to. The ring found two suitable candidates: gym teacher Guy Gardner and test pilot Hal Jordan. Because Jordan was closer, he was chosen to be the hero and Gardner was relegated to back up status. It’s been suggested that Jordan’s stealing Gardner’s girlfriend away from him while Gardner was comatose (the result of jumping in front of a bus to save one of his phys ed students) might have been what caused him to revaluate the way he was living his life and become such a monumental ass. You don’t actually see Guy in this image. But I imagine he’s done something to piss Power Girl off. He’s been known to goose underage super heroines and then smell his finger (letters and lanterns).

Sentinel of the Spaceways: While I liked the background on the other Silver Surfer drawing, it was suggested on the drawing board that it looked like he was standing on an egg. My girlfriend just assumed he was perched on a small planetoid. This one solves some of those problems, though the colors are not as lively.	Silver Surfer: The background is based on a Hubble image and the logo is lifted from an old comic. The more I look at this drawing the more I suspect that I could have gone with a more dynamic pose. That and the surfboard looks like a damn egg (Fixed Nov 07).
Pastoralaba: This is one I started work on quite some time ago. I had trouble coloring it, so I put it aside and recently picked it back up (where I left off). I’m fairly happy with the finished product, at least on a technical level. But it does seem rather boring, all that clothing and grass and so little skin or pubes.	Scarf and Field and Butterflies: I’ve recently moved into a new apartment. I needed something for over the mantle, something that wasn’t silly or tasteless, something lacking in both yeti and tits. So I drew this. The most interesting thing about it is the butterflies. They were rendered in 3d over the drawing. I then exported the render back to Painter and put some line work on them.

The 9th Doctor: I remember watching Doctor Who as a kid on local PBS affiliate Channel 11 WTTW Chicago. It seemed like it came on late late at night, probably around nine. A month or so ago I saw a new episode on the Sci Fi channel featuring the 10th Doctor. More recently I’ve begun to catch the new series from the beginning on assorted PBS channels. I caught The End of the World in Chicago Land, Fathers Day in Champaign. Heather’s added it to the TiVo for me. The 9th Doctor is interesting, certainly different from the ones I remember best, Doctors Four and Five. Gritty, working class, he masks a lonely, guilt-ridden melancholy with an almost manic exterior alternating between mean spirited sarcasm and child like glee.

John Locke: For me, Locke is the most interesting character on Lost. The man we met after the crash was capable, confident and clearly skilled, with innate charisma and an air of mystery. Then we learned that before the flight Locke had been an office drone, a cripple, whose gullibility rendered him a constant victim. Now we realize that much hasn’t changed, despite what he’s become on the island. He’s still reactionary, a patsy.

Power Girl: Once upon a time to facilitate story telling DC Comics took advantage of the idea of multiple parallel realities. Under this conceit Power Girl was the Earth-Two version of Supergirl and the first cousin of the Earth-Two Superman. DC eventually abandoned multiple earths, yet she remained, a kind of meta character, one of few survivors of a vast and sweeping editorial decision.

Of course her costume is also a draw. Through the characters writers have offered two different explanations for the front window. First that it shows what she is: female, healthy, and strong, suggesting amusingly that it’s the men who degrade themselves by staring and drooling. Alternatively it’s been said that she isn’t showing off or being lewd at all. She wanted to have a symbol like Superman or Batman but couldn’t think of anything. Eventually she thought she’d figure it out and close the hole. She hasn’t, her lack of an identity symptomatic of her outsider status.

Oh Say Can You Scream (In the Shadow of Bachalo): The depiction of the American Scream lumbering towards Shade from over the horizon is derived from a Chris Bachalo illustration. I had some trouble establishing flow between the largely derivative upper half of the image and the lower drawing. I am somewhat happy with the final product, though I find myself preferring the Screamless version.	The Same but Different: This is the same drawing as above, but sans the American Scream. I replaced him with a starry sky and added some madness bubbles to enhance visual interest. This is the preferred version.

If Only: This is a lackluster Spectreman in Spectralove piece. It plays on the often felt emotion of wishing you’d known someone longer, when you were younger, when they could have made more of a difference in your life. This is why Spectreman and Dynagirl are depicted as younger. This drawing shares its title with another I did years ago of a similar theme (Link).

A Girl and Her Yeti: This is an update of an illustration posted several months ago. The position, turning, of the Yeti’s hand in the original has bothered me since I drew it. While I could correct the angle of the hand, I instead opted to take it out of the picture and narrow the image. I also added text.

A Great Man: What I found strange, and maybe most humorously fitting, was that I didn’t hear until the day after. I noticed it on the bulletin board of the high school where I was student teaching. The day of, the news was too occupied with revelations of Anna Nicole’s baby’s daddy and nappy-headed hoe fallout (without text).	Man in Midair: I’ve been trying new things. This is digital, but it’s a digital drawing done on scanned paper. I think it turned out looking believable. I’d like to stick something in the sky. I tried missiles, but my girlfriend wasn’t a fan. I also thought about abstract shapes, something I don’t have much experience with. I’m open to suggestions.
Holy Shitballs, an Elasmosaurus! This is in sort of a campy pulpy tradition. I feel dirty for using filters. Some folks on the drawing board seemed to appreciate the end results. The more experienced artists did not. For years I’ve been using soft light duplicate layers of the original image run through a gradient map to make the colors pop more and be more interesting. Recently I’ve started adding poster edges to that process. I feel like it helps to give the picture a more texture in spots. This is what the piece looked like unmolested by Photoshop.	Spectreman in Spectralove: In my alternate take on the mythos Spectreman was left behind on Earth after Dr. Gori killed himself and the Nebula 71 satellite left orbit. He’s a lost and dejected character. Flawed, broken, he has to make his way as a costumed superhero in a world that’s beyond his saving. Eventually he meets an otaku girl at the supermarket, she dresses in a bootleg female Ultraman costume, and offers him her company as he tries to move forward with his life.

The Dynagirl is just another tokusatsu image. The other drawing originated as an illustration meant to accompany a writing prompt included in a unit I’m teaching about F. Scott Fitzgerald and characterization. It went along with a brief character sketch. At the end of the day I decided that I only need to impress my students so much.

Specterman: I’ve been playing Rampage on the Gamecube lately, on the weekends, when I visited my girlfriend. The city crushing mayhem reminded me a lot of Specterman, the title superhero of a tokusatsu sci-fi TV series produced by P Productions and created by Souji Ushio. In the eighties I caught it dubbed in the Chicago suburbs. The villain of the show, Dr. Gori, is said to be the inspiration for Craig McCracken’s Mojo Jojo. You can find the lead in at Retro Junk.

Deep Sea Jungle Girl Adventure: I’ve found myself drawn to campy archetypes lately; you’ll notice the resurgence of A Girl and Her Yeti pieces. The Jungle Girl, as a name or descriptor, is often used in pop culture. The first such character was Rima from the 1904 novel Green Mansions. Sheena Queen of the Jungle is probably the best known jungle girl. Mine is of the same tradition. This piece was illustrated in the style of Arthur Adams. With classes it took about a month to fill in the details and color it.

A Yetiless yeti piece, as well as two spectra images.

A Girl and Her Yeti: I can’t imagine this is healthy. Frank Cho did much the same thing with Brandy in his Liberty Meadows. I don’t speak to this person, but I keep her on as a stock character. A nose, a scar in the eyebrow, lend themselves to something ready made and three dimensional.	Shoulders: I originally intended the girl to be flexing her muscles as she sat on the yeti’s shoulders, to make this much more like another drawing I did years ago. But I just couldn’t get that to look right, so I went with pointing instead.

Hulk: This was done for a drawing board jam session. It’s much looser than what I usually do. While the other artists were going for a savage Hulk, I remember a smarter Hulk with an integrated Bruce Banner / Hulk personality.

Phoenix Descends: I wanted to do an image of Rachel Summers as Phoenix that to some degree captured the feel of 1980’s X-men comics that I favor. That included trying to achieve a color halftone look with Photoshop post work (Full, Full Ink).	Shade the Changing Man: The style is both my own as well as reflective of Christopher Bachalo’s, Duncan Fegredo’s and Sean Philips, all artists from the golden age of Vertigo. Em over at the drawing board even said it was cool (Ink, Fegredo’s Hand).
Uht: Owen and Mzee are a real life hippopotamus and a tortoisewho have formed a unique bond. Following Owen’s orphaning the old tortoise came to accept the young hippo and gradually taught him what to eat and where to sleep (ink, superscreencap, version two)	Serengeti Girl Two: Months ago I did a more scantly clad Serengeti girl, but in the time since it’s occurred to me that white girls in loincloths in Africa don’t make a whole lot of sense. So instead I’ve moved on to a more safari like outfit (Ink).

Cerebus and Jaka were taken verbatim from an issue of Cerebus; I’m in the process of setting them in my own setting. Death in Graveyard is a continuation of an older Death drawing, same drawing of Death, new graveyard. Electron typewriter is intended as a wrapper for a general release version of the current MMPG layout (itself a modification of Simplr), I was thinking of getting into the layout game. Hoodygirl seemed like a good idea at the time.

King Nothing: I added some birds to King Nothing after I decided not to use it for a layout, a cliche for me. It feels more balanced now. I also added a beard as I’ve stopped shaving again. A cropped version of this now serves as my facebook image and as my identifier elsewhere around the net.

Leaves: Inspired by a Gwendolyn Kraehenfuss photo, this is the first substantial drawing I’ve done on my new Toshiba M400 Convertible Tablet. It’s made the process much more natural. The tag is meaningless, and was meant to serve a design purpose in a layout.	Serengeti Girl: An Intous drawing from about a month ago, composed initially in Poser. Overall I think the line weights are a bit too even. Having them all the same thickness goes a long way to flatten the image. The pool of light catching the girls face, however, is alluring.

Daughter of the Resurrection: A tattoo style tablet illustration done for a Drawing Board Jam on the Summers Family. This is Rachel Summers, daughter of Cyclops (Scott Summers) and Jean Grey of the X-men.

Kleather, a drawing of Kathy George in a leather jacket was for a Drawing Board Jam on leather, and Cerebus and Jaka a Jam on Independent Comic book Characters. The Hippo was an older drawing done to amuse heather.

Joe, Heather, and Starro (in crayon): Starro is a fictional DC Comics super villain. Who comes from an alien race known as the Star Conquerors. The starfish-like creature first appeared in The Brave and the Bold #28 in 1960, also the first appearance of the Justice League of America. He uses mind control and the rapid reproduction of psychic-parasitic clones to conquer planets.

I drew it and Heather colored it in. Quite the portrait of the happy couple, don’t you think? (ink)

The Hedge Maze: I’ve gotten away from the peculiar style I adopted my senior year of college. I’d block out an image chunks of pastels or watercolor and then add line in pencil or waxy crayon, dependent on the size. Since my last update I’ve opted to illustrate in ink and watercolor. It’s less of a hassle. The setting of this picture was based on a googled image. It was someone’s vacation photo. I doubt they’ll mind. The poses were provided by the stock chicas Panda and Mallet Girl. (ink)

With Limbs Like Trees Shade has turned into a tree at least once. I seem to remember him sprouting limbs while time tossed into the Salem Witch Trials. He was angry that his girlfriend Kathy George was getting it on with a likewise temporally errant John Constantine. Shade was going to have them strung up on his own arms. This, of course, has little to do with that, and more to do with the fact that I like to draw fields and birds and skies.

Cloak and Dagger Revisited: This is a more dynamic rendition of Cloak and Dagger than the one I did several months ago. The teenage runaway heroes of the Marvel Universe who had their mutant powers awakened by elicit experiments performed on them by a pharmaceutical company (Original, Original Updated).

Power Girl: Power Girl had her origins in the Earth Two continuity of DC comics. In that universe she was Superman’s cousin, the last daughter of Krypton. When the universes merged in the Crisis on Infinite Earths, Kara Zor-El lost her original identity and was retconned into being the descendant of an Atlantean Sorcerer. Most recently, however, her Earth Two origins have been restored. Not only as Superman’s cousin, but as the Cousin of Earth Two’s Superman (pencils).

Zatanna: Rednu eht Ogiterv tnirpmi ta eno tniop ni emit, Annataz saw eht cirtnat rentrap fo Nhoj Enitnatsnoc. Revewoh, ehs sdneps tsom fo reh emit ni eht maertsniam CD Esrevinu, erehw ehs sah deilla flesreh htiw eht Ecitsuj Eugael. Reh srewop era lacigam ni erutan. Ehs nac ekam tsuj tuoba gnihtyna neppah yb gniyas ti sdrawkcab. Nehw I saw gniward siht, vrep taht I ma, I detrats ffo htiw a yltsom dekan Annataz dna ylwols dedda sehtolc ni tnereffid snoitanibmoc. I thgim yllautneve dda a tekcaj. I thgim ton.

Dancing in the Field: There’s been more grass added.

Joe on Chair: Something I thought of using for face book or a layout, didn’t though.

Kent Farm: A quick drawing of the farm from Smallville.

Mr. Boo: Fat Boo from DBZ

Joe with Pink Shirt: This is my face book image.

Trike: A very clownish image (wallpaper).

Walkaway: Also an old work that I’ve finally fixed up. Their was a cheekbone problem in this one as well. The composition is taken from the final page of Shade The Changing Man issue Fifty.

I’ve been putting this off. Waiting till I had at least one winner to show you. But it’s not going to happen. I start things and they go unfinished, even if they show promise. I just haven’t had it in me. And the rest of the pieces are just blatant theft. I work on them to work on something, thinking eventually better will come to me, but it never does anymore. I’ve never been a serious artist, but now more than ever I’m just a hobbyist.

Birthday Card for Heather: This is Starky the Star Child from the old Square game Chrono Cross. At least other than that it’s original. He’s riding a three legged alien hippo. I called the piece “home on the strange”. It did make it farther than this, but this darkened sketch stage gives the clearest indication of where it was going.

Death in the Snow: This is complete.

Dancing in a Field: Working towards some new minimalist aesthetic, at least in color, I would have filled the whole field in with grass. Using heavier lines to distinguish shadow, as with the grass you do see by her legs. The rest of the grass would have been with lighter line, decreasing in detail as you recede toward the tree line.

Smallville: I’ve been avoiding my real life worries lately by burying myself in genre television. This is a tribute to my show of choice.

So there you go. That’s it. I’ve just not been up to it.

Joseph of the Sprouting Finger: The background and the character were drawn separate. Then merged. Next I added the vine through the tree and detail to the sky. Eventually the vine slithered through the grass and the birds were added in two obvious portions. The last thing I did was the flowers (background only).

Goldfish Dreams as Death: Obviously the primary influence for this drawing of death is the stock of Goldfish Dreams, but I also used a cemetery image from Affy-Stock.	A Better Constantine: John Constantine isn’t a suit wearing whoa saying american with the acting talents of a block of wood. He’s James Marsters without the radioactive hair.

Cloak and Dagger: Back in some 80’s Spiderman comics Tyrone and Tandy were of a group of runaways kidnapped and used as guinea pigs in the development of the next big addiction. The drug released unsuspected latent abilities, turning them into Cloak and Dagger. Using an abandoned church as sanctuary, they used their powers to hunt and kill those who’d taken advantage of them.

William the Bloody: The fact that I drew this doesn’t make me gay. But the fact that I contemplated calling it “Blondie Bear” just might. This was drawn off an Angel publicity photo.

Other: Teddy Bear Girl (colored), Vampire Spike

It’s been a while, since about Halloween. I’ve not been productive.

Joe and Heather: Done way back in November to commemorate our trip to French Lick. There was an elaborate background planned, it was to be assembled colorform style. But the background was too ambitious a project (unfinished background, just heather). In a fourth season episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, entitled ?The Freshman?, a vampire named Sunday makes easy pickings of the first years. She and her posse knock them off, take their stuff. They surmise quite a collection of art posters. That?s the gag, eighteen of Monet?s Water Lilies, and twelve of Klimts The Kiss.

Plane Mockup: I tried to get a design job with Hobicco, sent them a couple samples of what I thought were neat ways to display there wares. Sorta old fashioned, nostalgic. They like it so much they didn?t return my email (Boat Mockup).

Moomin: The Moomins are the central characters in a series of books by Tove Jansson. In appearance, they are white and furry with large snouts that make them resemble Hippopotamuses. They first appeared in the form of comic strips in the London Evening News 1954. Jansson drew and wrote all the strips until 1959 when she lost inspiration. Her brother Lars, who could duplicate the style of drawings and texts accurately, then took over the job until 1975 when the last strip was released. Heather likes hippos, Joe draws hippos (layout).

Just Joe: This guy is the coolest (with shade).

Pandora in the Window: The Roman poet Ovid tells a story of a sculptor who falls in love with his sculpture. Pygmalion, son of Belus, was so lonely he made a woman out of ivory. He prayed to Venus, the goddess of beauty and love. She took pity on the lovesick artist, and brought the sculpture to life.

In Greek mythology, Pandora was the first woman, fashioned by Zeus as part of his punishment of mankind for having stolen the secret of fire. Eventually she opens a box imparted to her by her maker and releases all the misfortunes of mankind (plague, sorrow, poverty, crime, etc.) She only shut it in time to keep one thing in, hope.

In Milligans seminal Shade The Changing Man, Shade fashions a statue and hopes to trap an Angel in it. The trapped angels take on the personality of whatever statue is fashioned for them. One of the poet gods initial tries involves Santa Clause who promptly asked him to sit on his lap.

His next sculpture traps Pandora. This Pandora is Greek, but free of all of her mythological properties. She is instead an ancient prostitute. Her box was used to hold an enormous lambskin sheath for use by her Johns. It was deliberately oversized to make them feel inadequate.

Mid coitus Shades girlfriend and his girlfriend?s girlfriend open the box. Pandora then returns to stone.

Pandora in the Garden: Pandora went on to be sculpted again. The second time around she had no memory of the first. No memory of Shade. She eventually fell for another piece of living artwork that was unfortunately blazed in a fire. Unready to be cubist, he let himself slip into death. Pandora then opted to have her box opened. She sits in the garden a statue next to one of her dead love.

leigh with trees: Welcome to Electralux in Canada, and to our range of appliances that help make life a little easier and more enjoyable in and around the home. We believe that true innovation starts with a dedication to understanding consumers’ needs, desires and aspirations, and then translating that into products that are both a pleasure to use and attractive to look at. We would also like to introduce you to the other Electralux Group brands in North America. Together, we will continue to provide you with innovative, practical and reliable products that will serve you for many years to come. Welcome to the world of Electralux!

Electralux Leigh: She’s the Priestess I must confess.

Lenny and Kathy: Sexual activity between women is as diverse as sex between heterosexuals or gay men. Like all interpersonal activity, sexual expression must be seen within the context of the relationship. It is only within the last generation that women in the western world found the economic power to take control of their lives, including their romantic and sexual relationships.

There is a growing body of work on lesbian sex and with it much debate over the control women have over their sexual lives in a patriarchal society, the fluidity of female sexuality, the redefinition of female sexual pleasure, and the debunking of old stereotypes such as “lesbian bed death”. This is a phrase that has been in use within the lesbian community for many decades, to describe the lack of sexual passion in a long-term relationship between two women. While it is a phrase that is often used in a joking manner between lesbians there are also sexologists using the term. Sex researcher Pepper Schwartz published findings indicating that lesbian couples have less sex than other varieties. However, many have criticized her findings, especially men of all ages relying on lesbians for their masturbatory fantasy. Bed Death happens in most any long-term relationship whether heterosexual or not. Within part of the lesbian community, the phenomenon is usually rejected and is the subject of jest.

Lenny Shapiro and Kathy George are the Lesbian lovers of Shade the Changing man. Their relationship a long held secret, Kathy herself being the lover of Shade. They were eventually exposed while fucking underneath a blanket, a blanket that just happened to be a rather disenfranchised and discombobulated poet god.

Your Own Personal Jesus: Christianity emerged from Judaism in the first century AD: for this reason, the Jewish view of Jesus is important for a historical understanding of Christianity’s and it?s debunking. The first Christians were Jews. They subscribed to Jewish beliefs and practices, among these that a messiah?a descendant of King David?would restore the monarchy and Jewish independence, things that may never have existed.

According to Jewish beliefs, the absence of the prophet to resurrect and proclaim his coming (John the Baptist was not Elijah) the failure of Jesus to restore the Kingdom, and his crucifixion by Romans, negated claims that he was the Messiah. The followers of Christ redefined the requirements of the Moshiach to encompass resurrection, a second coming, and the notion of messiah as God. Judaism teaches that it is heresy for a man to claim to be a part of God; Jews view Jesus as just one in a long list of failed Jewish claimants of the Moshiach.

Most Jews have the common sense to figure that a triune god is just a little bit nutty, most Jews including Jesus. Kabala style Jews however that three isn?t enough. Their God has ten aspects.

Many Jews believe that Jesus was merely a Rabbi with an apocalyptic message, that Jesus never claimed to be God or part of a trinity, that he was a liberal reformer, this leads us to believe that Christianity has nothing to do with Jesus’ teachings, but rather is the outgrowth of the teachings of Paul of Tarsus. These are also the views held by most unbiased historians.

Me: in the cosmology of Sumerian mythology “me” describes the discrete bestowal of each of the arts and sciences by the gods to humans. In one poem, Inanna is described as meeting with Enki, the divine caretaker of ?the me?, and getting him drunk in a plot for their theft.

Hippo Ryder: Drew this up for Heather. It’s based on a doodle. But this is better. I changed the outfit. Used a photo reference for the face. I think a photo of her naked and moaning. You know, if you’re looking to sidestep the wholesomeness of the work.

Hippo Ryder Sleepygirl Layout: Months ago I made a crappy layout for Heathers Site. I’d link to it. But recently she’s been posting clever little linguistic things done up in formal logic language. She’s a nerd really, and I’m embarrassed. This is the image from the above entry developed into a much better layout

I like what I did here. It’s better than an earlier thing I’d made for her. I drew a couple variant hippos. Sampled the grass and pasted it. Tweaked the colors. This is a lot of fun. Reminds me of the cover to a Curious George book.

Rolled Sleeves: This is the only real good piece of this batch. It’s my latest. Has that kind of Tadahiro flavor to it. I started off just with the waist up and the sleeves. Then I added legs. Then I put it in a wider but shorter frame. Cropped off the legs I’d drawn and added all the long grass and sky.

Duckie Suit: I moved in with Heather about a month ago. I’d left my tablet back home, only brought it here recently. The duckie suit’s based on a design from the Simplicity Halloween catalogue. I drew this first with sharpie and crayons. This is a digital redo of that (crayons and sharpie).

Sherbet: This is based off a photo Heather took of herself a long time ago, part of some nekkid bath time fun thing.

Girl on Swing: This is just another soft-core porn inspired piece. It’s good though, good for a rip off of some soft core porn photo shoot.