New n' Old Maxx crap.. and the spaces in between.

Here's the new cover to one of the IDW Maxx reprints.

 


Wow, I almost ran out of yellow ink on this one..



Decided to leave the background white... seems like there's enough distracting stuff happening in the rest of the cover.



Some vintage Maxx sketches I dug up.



May have posed these a while back, but at least these are different pictures of them.



Maxx's design was still all over the place, still getting used to his proportions.

 

Come to thing of it, i never did settle on one exact way to draw the Maxx, did i?  Same deal with Julie..



Least a 'happy-faced' Maxx was ruled out early.  *That* would have been a wildly different book.



and finished up with the Slug cover again... glad i got a chance to throw him on at least one cover.



I may add a few more black dots on his tail,

 

or maybe not?

Either way,  this is the version that'll go on the reprint. But I suspect i'll just keep doodling Maxx covers every month, even after the reprints stop.

I'll find a home for them somewhere.

* * * 

Wanna thank everyone out there who hasn't given up on me yet. I know my hermit-like nature may make it seem like i don't care, but it's not true. I'm just at a time in my life when... my focus on drawing.. often takes away from more frequent posts, but i know it can be a pain to wait so long between posts.

Best way I can make it up to you is just to keep plugging away.  Drawing. Creating.  Never giving up.  All your considerable patience ... is *never* lost on me. Hopefully when i DO finally get it up to post again, it can make up for those long spaces in-between.

Thanks,
Sam

Trout Update...

Just throwing these up..

added some white highlights to him.  About a third of the way through...

i might go back in and darken some of the highlights on his lower lip?  I notice (but sometimes forget to) sacrifice detail....

...in order to get a more realistic lighting on the overall figure.

It's often what i *don't* show that is the most impressive,

well, hopefully.

: )

Twout Cover I started...

Here's a budget version of a marbling effect I tried.

Instead of wet-in-wet, "water dropped on ink: effect, instead I dipped some bristol into a cooking pan of water, face down, then pull it out, tiled it, all to create some cool swirling effects. 

It's pretty easy, if you type in 'marble paper' into google or youtube there's tons of better examples than this online.

What I like about it - is letting my brush or pen follow various 'pathways' the ink and water make, ones i wouldn't normally think of drawing myself.

Like this guy.

Sort of a different kind of Twout than i might usually might draw.

Somewhat gigeresque , but with some goofy-looking 1900 sam touches mixed in there,

like the little bowler hat.

You can see from the chin that it's still pretty rough and unfinished.

Maybe I'll go in and beef  up some more sculpting on the over all texture,

sharpen the highlights and dark other bits too.

My overall hope... is not to render it too much that the whole watercolor effect itself gets buried by the end.


I'll throw up a finished version when it's done,

or 'abandoned'..

is more likely the right word.

I doubt any of us are ever really finishes this kinda stuff, do we? 

Signature Plates for Upcoming Maxx Artist Edition.

Sponge came in handy this time

Yikes - stack was something like a thousand plates.

and here's . . yet another Maxx cover  I kept fooling with.

Very different than the "unfinished" reprinted version.

Don't worry, I'll throw this Julie unpublished version in a new book of Maxx Cover's some time next year.  

But i forgot to draw Julie into the original version. Let alone finish Maxx's hand.  

So I decided to cut & pasted her in,

that is... once i get some glue.

Don't worry, her face isn't this blurry than this one,  my cameras' focus was off.

so yeah, . . .

finally back.

: ) 

Handfull of Chickens..

Pile of seven un-posted Chickens pages..

had to throw the Twout in there eventually, didn't i? ; )

Way$hak will load them up in a short while. Were both buried under other deadlines for now. ( yes, that's construction paper i used.  My goofy a nod to Matisse, who did construction collages.  But i don't mean that in a pretentious name dropping way. )

This one i finished this morning.. added the '1800s old guy' on the left, because i wasn't satisfied with the 'blue woman' on the far right..

You know, other people writing self-conscious or quasi-pretentious sounding comments in their art bugs me, so why do i keep doing adding Logos & Comments/Logo to my own stuff? Dunno. Maybe because i'm both trying to explore stuff, yet also wanting to make fun of myself in the process.

I guess most of you guys/gals are used to it by now.  My 'Sam Logos' are kinda part of my style now. Used to get crap for it when i started, but funny how whatever style or quirks editors resist when your started out, they eventually grow  to accept.

Kelly Jones has a quickly style too, he was great at telling me to let it roll of my back.

Don't worry, the purple guy's arm looks much better in the scanned version. 
.

Okay, here's a few characters who snuck in the Chickens book from the Dana/Nola Twout stories. Just one page, so i doubt anyone will mind.

.

Okay, this one is a report, but i just like it. Faux Basho poem.

Okay, between the twenty new pages i have here.. and if this inspired Jon to add twenty of his, plus the thirty on the Chickens Web site... we might reach 70 or so pages, which will be enough for a collected book someday.

Thanks for letting me ramble. Have a stress-free weekend.

Sam

Fifteen minutie BATS drawing for Charity.

Something for the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund auction.

Well it's not 'anything' at all yet.. is it?

But i often work better under a deadline, so i'm clocking myself on this sucker.  Trying to do it in under 20 minutes.

Batman's has a better chance of moving in an auction than most stuff i might dream up..

This isn't that big, maybe 5 inches by 7?  It's also drawn on same textured paper i sometimes use... you'll see what i mean once i add some color to it.

Yuk - this gooey little 'ink blob' is what happens when India ink sits too long in the ink bottle.

Okay, added some pen detail. but still very rough around his mask. There's that paper texture i was talking about.. We're gonna try to make it work for us when I add some more blue to his mask.

Yeah, my old ink pad trick again. I could probably smooth out the rough texture with colored inks or watercolors, but that defeats the point.

Okay, this was what i was going for, regardless of how unfinished it looks, i wanted his mask to sort of blend into the paper's background.

Here's how it's shaping up. Also added a few white highlights on his nose... forehead.

Might have overdone those... but too late now. It's 14 minutes in so far, but i bet i wasted a couple of minutes snapping pics while drawing.

It's nothing to brag about, drawing is obviously not a race.

I've also slowed down a lot over the years.  I'll sometimes toil away on a cover for weeks. The challenging bit is, sometimes 'taking more time', doesn't always make it a better piece of art.  Sometimes - yikes, it gets worse! Sometimes a good drawing is knowing when to quit.

As we all know, creativity... the 'muse'...  is fickle... and as we age, more and more illusive.


Oh yeah..

one last thing i forgot....

... there!







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