Friday, August 8, 2014

Maxx Limited Sketches... and Mars Attacks is DONE!!!!!!

Maxx Limited Edition Prints



Things have opened up enough for me.....



.... to finish off these 25 Maxx sketches.



Although their not always OF the Maxx himself...



I tend to like doing outback creatures like this odd looking "Outback Bird"...... so they may tend to have a splash of color on them, not always, but sometimes..


Sometimes I'll do Julie,




..... or maybe Gone,



.... or even Maxx once in a while ...



...but I don't wanna burn out too soon.  Remember: A little Maxx..... goes a looooong way.

Kinda got burnt out on commissions, no one's fault.  Probably mine, took on too much.  That's why i stepped away from them for a while.



Trying to make these fun..



...doing them as if I'm drawing them... for myself... mostly.  Which usually works best for me.



Which explains why their all done in different colors ink or paint,



Like this guy... another long necked. Outback Creature.



Yeah, sometimes they look simple and scribbly ... sometimes rough and abstract...



Sometimes they spill out of that little square too!



sometimes like a doodle... Here's a julie who looks to slim-fast for my taste, so will add a little weight to her. You can see I've already moved her boobies down, so they droop a little.

Hey... Time and Gravity... affects folks in the Outback too!



and sometimes just plane weird.

...like this Gone, done in brown ink.

why in brown?  why not?



anyhoo...


Kinda cool to think one of these will be in someone's hands someday soon.






-------

MARS ATTACKS .....



Finished Mars attacks!  Here's two version of a splash page for issue 3, which do you like better?

The white one appeals to me, but the brown background is probably more dramatic.



- actually felt pretty good about this series... i like my hand drawn style, kind or an evolution of what I tried in the Hollows.  It's not just the art that I enjoyed doing, but the story too.

Writer Chris Ryall was nice enough to let me co-plot..



Meaning after we discuss a rough plot, i basically draw whatever the heck i want, and *then* we try to make sense of it all.  Takes a lot of trust for a writer to do this. Course it helps i'm invested in the story too, plus Chris is talented enough to pull it off. He's my 'net' for plausibility, continuity, and logic.

Here I was caught miss spelling the word "Trauma" ( on the left ) ... even after i googled it to make sure it was spelled correctly, wrote it down... somehow, by the time i got back to my art table... i lost an 'a' somewhere.



I think I'm also proud of the story because I was able to work in an older grandparent figure and a little girl.  ( Notice here, i double checked before i added Trauma again! )



My subconscious seems drawn to this combo of kids and grandparents. I notice Director Miyazaki has lots of kids and older people in his stories. Maybe that's why were all drawn to his sensibilities as a storyteller.

Funny how often 'old people' are left out of a lot of modern stories.


Another issue dealt with was Grief.  Loss. Here i didn't even realize a panel i drew at the bottom of this Marks page, Clair struggling with her attachment to the baby marian...

which partly echos Annie giving up little Ojo ...



And also, Lo in Bimbo waiting for his wife to return.. staring wistfully.

Same lost figure staring out the window as he is dealing ( or afraid he'll have to grapple with) some future loss.

And  I won't even get into Maxx lying around on chairs and couches in a fetal position,

....that's *another* story.


* * *

Thanks for listening. And Thanks to Chris Ryall for enduring me as both collaborator...

and friend.

- Sam