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Monday, June 9, 2008

Merchant Captain vs. a Squid (or sea monster of some sort)

Woo-eee! It was a record-breaking ninety-eight degrees this week here in Atlanta, where I've spent the last couple of days trying to reclaim our new yard from the hundreds of roots and vines that crisscross the thing. Liz has been fixin' up the insides, and twixt the two of us we'll likely have it in good shape come move-in day. Her family's coming down from Kentucky on Thursday to help paint.

Still trying to fill the new stuff void that a year of working on Crogan's Vengeance has created in time for HeroesCon in a couple of weeks. The smokers print is done and printed, but the numerous comments turned me on to the fact that there are STILL quite a few quality characters that I inadvertantly left out, and so I'm strongly considering adding them to the mix. I'm also thinking about doing some prints using some pulp archetype characters I've been playing with. Whether anything comes of them aside from the illustrations, I can't say, but that's how the pirate characters started out - seven archetypal characters, all of which made it into the book (though only five were major characters).

Anyway, too much blabbing... I had an idea for the Merchant Marine-style captain character that you see in TinTin, King Kong, Corto Maltese, Adventures of the Scarlet Queen, etc, fending off a Big Squid or something. Here are the thumbnails:





And, after settling on one, I did the final drawing:




I left the upper section mostly open, in the pulp tradition of leaving space for a title. You never know...

Tomorrow I'll be trying to finally get down to business and finish editing the FLUKE coverage for Indie Spinner Rack. My apologies to everyone for taking so long to get it over to those guys.

5 comments:

Randy Lander said...

You're doing a smokers print? Awesome. Any chance you're going to San Diego with those?

Joseph Lee said...

Love the linework to this piece! Very cool!

jangojim said...

wayy too cool! Tentacles are always menacingly cool. How did you make the white faded lines and stuff in the first pic ? The kind that make it look like an old comic book, I love that style

Chris Schweizer said...

Thanks, Jim! The scratches are done using photoshop. I printed out a big patch of black on cardstock, and then crinkled it in the way that I thought a book would crinkle, and then scanned it in. There's a thing in photoshop called a mask, which works like taping off an area to paint around it... in this case, the areas being the crinkles.

jangojim said...

Waw thanks for the fast answer. This is very useful ! Hooray to constructive and functional comments :). Keep up the great work man