Blitzen Trapper music video storyboard
I was privileged to draw storyboards for the music video “Mystery & Wonder,” by the experimental country/folk/rock band Blitzen Trapper, which is based out of my town of Portland, OR. Special thanks to local director/videographer Laki Karavias for the opportunity.
A lot of time passed after Laki & I hammered out the storyboards, to the point where I actually forgot a lot of what I had drawn. When I saw the video months later, it was uncanny! Not only did the barn look almost exactly like the barn I had drawn, but the actress cast in the role of the “muse,” Y La Bamba‘s Luz Mendoza, was a dead ringer for the figure in my sketches.
Temple Dog!
This short, sweet story was part of Cloudscape Comics’ Mega Fauna anthology. It was written by Angela Melick and features a baby elephant!
Read MoreX Pinup
One of my greatest joys and privileges in my “other life” as an assistant editor at Dark Horse Comics has been working on the superhero comic X. One of the most successful characters (along with Ghost) that Dark Horse created during the heady years of the mid-1990s, X is an archetypical vigilante antihero – a borderline-insane bruiser with a fanatical zeal for enforcing his own law in the nearly lawless city of Arcadia. The comic was re-launched in 2012 with a (slightly) more grounded, 21st-century recession vibe, but it’s still a gleefully violent mess.
This scene I illustrated is from X #12, my favorite issue of the current run, in which mob boss Carmine Tango lures X into a triple-trap where he’s ganged up on by Gamble, a swaggering, luck-obsessed hitman, Deathwish, a suicidal maniac obsessed with X’s punishment, and Tango’s own lethal secretary, Ella. X loses this fight BIG TIME!
I kinda pushed outside my “comfort zone” for this illustration. Realistic proportions don’t come easily to me, and most of my characters end up about six or seven heads tall instead of the standard superhero eight. I also tend to drape my characters in baggy clothes, which disguise those parts of muscular anatomy that I’ve never really learned. The jumble of sixteen different limbs was actually really hard to arrange without creating tangencies. If I had to do it all over, I’d try to compose a more daring angle, with more foreshortening – as it is, the figures look a little too parallel to the plane of the page. But with all those caveats, I’d say it’s not bad for my first true “superhero” drawing.
Read MoreJosé y Maria
This was our Christmas card for 2014, depicting Jesus’s parents in a modern setting. I was inspired by a number of evocative “imagine what it would have been like”-type sermons I heard earlier this year, and also (as usual) by the work of Will Eisner, who so often depicted, with religious reverence, noble individuals enduring the many minor discomforts and petty indignities of urban America.
The main goal of this illustration was to pack as many clever biblical references into the scene as possible. I won’t list every one (there are at least a dozen), but a few that I’m proudest of are: the verse from the prophet Ezekiel in the graffiti on the phone kiosk, the way the “Save More!” behind Mary’s head looks kinda like “Ave Maria!,” and the two ads for “Glad” and “Tide” on the newspaper (get it?).
Read MoreInktober Highlights
October is often celebrated by cartoonists as “inktober,” where artists try to complete one inked illustration every day of the month and post it on social media. I wasn’t able to hit the thirty-one mark by a long shot, but inktober did have the beneficial effect of getting me in the drawing habit again after a too-long hiatus. (Hey, give me a break . . . I got married this summer!) Below are a few of my more successful drawings:
Quina Quen from Final Fantasy IX
