In a great stroke of luck, I happened to be in a Comic Artists Guild chat when Michael Marcus of the Hamtramck Idea Men asked me if I wanted to do the cover illustration for the upcoming April issue of IF-X.
My response was, essentially, "Sure, I'd love to!" So later that night, I emailed these doodles. Marcus liked the "Easter Bunny who wandered into an Alien nest" concept the best. By a happy coincidence, so did I.
I quickly drew this little thumbnail (the original really is tiny) just to get the layout figured out. I emailed this to Marcus too, and he approved it, just requesting a few small changes.
Here is the pencil line art on what would soon be the final version. I like to scan or photograph the various stages of an art project *just in case*. It is nice to have a record, but it's also nice to have a backup just in case things go wrong.
And here is the *almost* almost final version. I knew I wanted to have some of the eggs already painted, but I didn't want to risk losing those neat sponge-painted textures. Photoshop layers seemed the best way to go...
Finally, here's the version I sent to Michael Marcus. I used a series of transparent layers to "paint" the Alien eggs. I also took the opportunity to enlarge the facehugger in the foreground, just to make it more prominent and to emphasize just how screwed our poor Dumbest Bunny is.
The final version can be seen here.
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In lieu of a Sketch of the Day, here is a brief Movie/DVD Review. I saw "Ponyo" the other night and... and...
Welp, this is the weirdest Anime I've seen in a while. And it is certainly the strangest thing I've ever seen coming out of the mind of Hiyao Miyazaki. You see, his films usually start out in a place that's fairly normal and mundane (but beautifully realized; my favorite Miyazaki moment of all is that little scene in "My Neighbor Totoro" where the little sister collects rocks and seeds and things and piles them on the desk to show her daddy, who is hard at work on something and is basically like, "oh, that's nice"), but then some fantastic element or other enters into this normal world. "Ponyo" starts weird and ends in an even weirder place, so by the time you get to the more typically Miyazakian scene where they're eating Ramen, it gets... odd. While I did find plenty to like in it, it is definitely for kids. Gotta give their little brains something strange once in a while, but "Totoro" is much better in this regard.
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I've got some art cards up for sale on ebay. Give them a good home, won't you?
