AAU Workshops, Fall 2015

I've been teaching at the Academy of Art again, and it's been taking up quite a lot of my time. On the plus side, I have a nice backlog of demos and workshop drawings to share! Let's start off with a couple of recent figure-drawing events masterminded by the Illustration department's magical model coordinator Sarafina.

Back in November we had the twice-annual Costume Carnival event. The theme for this one was a beastly ball populated by human-animal hybrids...

Just last week, the Drawing Mode workshop gave the Illustration peeps a chance to draw some of the groovy clothing created by the Fashion department. I did a couple of big montages, one of which I gave to Sarafina, plus a bunch of little crayon sketches on construction paper. How kindergarten1

Superhero Costume Workshop 05/08/2015

And now, some sketches from the traditional end-of-the-semester workshop hosted by the AAU Comic Book Club...

Aaron as the TV version Daredevil, and Margo as a very kittenish Catwoman. This is clearly the role Aaron was born to play. He's so hardcore, he didn't take the mask off all evening!

 

And here's Margo getting ready to punish us in the name of the moon.

By the Power of Grayskull, it's Jonathan as He-Man! I may have action-figured him up a bit.

A time-lapse sequence of Jonathan fighting some Fin Fang Foom kinda dude.

Aaron versus Jonathan, wow! Since these were just five-minute poses, I doubled them up for maximum effect.

Saturday Morning Mythology

Cartoon characters recreated in the March 2015 Costume Carnival, hosted by the Academy of Art's Illustration department. Thanks to model coordinator Sarafina and her amazing models for another wonderful drawing event!

The night before, I'd been to see "Mr. Burns, A Post-Electric Play," at SF's American Conservatory Theater. Looking at all these classic cartoon characters, I couldn't help wondering how they'd play out in a mythological context. Isn't the conflict between Bamm-Bamm and Sailor Moon a bit like the domestication of Enkidu?

And while I was thinking along those lines, this fabulous Misfit struck me as a kind of punk Gorgon. Incidentally, I'm pleased by how well those metallic Sharpie pens showed up in the scans.

As portrayed by Sarafina, Jem seems too stylish and sassy for a goody-two-shoes heroine. I think this is a better mythological role for hologram pop stars.

The Pink Ranger and Wonder Woman? Well, that's straightforward enough.

Our Yosemite Sam sported a ferocious fake unibrow which reminded me of a Chinese lion dancer. And then this happened.

Finally, I took a break from the high-concept character renditions to try and document the entire Costume Carnival in a single two-page montage. It was exactly like this, I tell you!

Trolls and Goblins and...

First and foremost: Logan Garner of "Nerd Out With Me" just wrote up Alive, Alive, Alive! as his webcomic of the week. How excellent and flattering!

More Hobbit- and Tolkein-inspired sketchbook nonsense.

This one's crying out for a caption.

A Great Goblin, if he does say so himself.

I can't possibly be the first person in Internet history to think of this.

Hobbitses

So I finally read Tolkein's The Hobbit, and I thought I'd try my hand at visualizing some of the creatures and characters for myself. I'm trying to approach this with no reference to previous interpretations...

I like the idea of hobbits as fauns - it's not just their feet that are hairy! Also featuring Gollum, Smaug, and a sample elf. The elves in the Rankin-Bass Hobbit movie are pretty weird, but their green skin is cool, so I straight-up stole that idea.

Lots of possibilities for dwarf proportions. I like the idea of big heads and torsos with small limbs, like real-life dwarves, simply because you seldom see this in fantasy illustration.

Gollum and goblin ideas. Really, all these guys should be roughly dwarf- and hobbit-scale. The Great Goblin, as per Tolkein, is distinguished by his exceptionally large head.

Fantasy Five

We're canceling our cable service this week, but we were able to catch the season premiere of Face Off first. Here’s my take on this week's challenge - a set of five fantasy characters (ogre, troll, pixie, faun, and witch) - with an elemental theme to tie them together.

Mektons

So before it's too late, I should also mention that I'm involved in an ongoing Kickstarter funding drive! Mike Pondsmith and the nice people at R.Talsorian Games are raising funds for a new edition of the anime-inspired giant robot role-playing game Mekton, with the new edition bearing the moniker Mekton Zero. So here's the Mekton Zero Kickstarter page.

At the moment, they're well past their original funding goal, but if they can round up another $4,000 and change then they're going to print the rulebook in full color. Which would be nice for me, because I'm slated to do a bunch of the artwork, including the robot designs!

Speaking of which, this project's given me the opportunity to redesign the humongous Excalibur--one of the robots featured in the second edition of the rulebook way back in the 20th century, with an accompanying illustration by a young and foolish Mark Simmons. Now that I'm old and foolish, it's been a real kick giving this classic 'bot a full-color makeover. I prepared two versions of the Excalibur's color scheme, and the editors eventually went with the gold-based one suggested by my wife Julie. But for your amusement, here's the rejected alternate, in sinister purple hues.

Prince of Madness!

I think this was probably the most intense working experience of my life! Last night was the first public reading of Gesualdo, Prince of Madness, a new opera being developed by San Francisco's Opera Parallèle. The performance was accompanied by a full-length motion comic, with artwork by yours truly and animation by Brag Art's Sony Green.

The opera's based on the true story of a late-Renaissance scandal, full of sex and blood and flagellation and late-night madrigal playing. So we pulled out all the stops in the comic version, enhanced by Sony's animation and a specialized musical instrument known as the "slap stick" that produces whip-cracking sound effects.

Here's some character artwork in progress. 26 multi-panel pages, each with multiple poses for the animated figures, which together covered 45 pages of 11x17" Bristol board. My awesome wife Julie came to the rescue by adding in the flat colors as I worked.

By the time I was done with that, I only had three days left to draw all the backgrounds, delivering the final pieces to Sony barely a hour before showtime. Here's a selection of these.

There was a pretty good turnout for the reading - over a hundred opera-goers, and I'm pretty sure none of them knew what to expect.

Does this look like a man who's been awake for three straight days?

Conductor Nicole Paiement sets up the performers. (That giant lute is known as a theorbo.) During the performance, the accompanying motion comic pages were projected on the wall above them, kind of like those Rocky Horror Picture Show re-enactments.

For obvious reasons, we didn't get photos of the actual performance, but director Brian Staufenbiel apparently videoed the whole thing. Here's a blurry curtain call; the actors left to right are Chris Filipowicz (Orazio), Nikola Printz (assorted female servants), Maya Kherani (Leonora), Daniel Cilli (Carlo Gesualdo), Michelle Rice (Maria), and Andres Ramirez (Fabrizio).

A post-show discussion panel with librettist Mitchell Morris, composer Dante De Silva, director Brian Staufenbiel, and conductor Nicole Paiement.

As a bonus, here's the hitherto-unseen final frame from the last page, which didn't play during the reading due to some kind of technical glitch. This is pretty much how Sony and I were feeling at the end of the week, but I'm sure we'd leap at the chance to do it all again!

Once More Mu Gundam

And here's one last round of Mu Gundam stuff. First, let's fill in a couple more gaps in the good-guy chess ranks, with the robots corresponding to the king and pawn...

The Gardam, as its name implies, is a knockoff of the Ardam. Instead of having super-tough armor all over, it just carries a really awesome shield. And then there's the Kingdam, a monster giant that can take down any enemy, but is normally kept out of the battlefield because it contains the heroes' irreplaceable mandragora root.

In case you were wondering, this is how all these prehistoric giant robots are able to move around. Each one houses an alien plant stem which functions as the equivalent of a nervous system, interfacing between the human pilot and the robot's cogs and gears.

Meanwhile, I figured we needed some characters for this story. I didn't try to get too fancy with the names, and they're just one degree removed from the literary characters I templated them on. Since this is set on the lost continent of Lemuria, naturally there's a lemur mascot.

And here's the obligatory enemy ace, a human traitor who fights on the side of the titanic Atlanteans. Again, I'm not exactly trying to be subtle with the names!

Return of Mu Gundam

I had a lot of fun doing those fantasy-themed Mu Gundam designs, so let's bring on round two!

One thing that seemed a little "off" about the first round was that the bad guys had a strong theme, with the medieval stylings and chess-piece motif, but the heroic Gundams didn't. So instead, I've revived the classic trio of the Gundam, Guncannon, and Guntank, while eliminating the anachronistic "Gun" moniker...

Here, we've extended the chess motif to the good guys, via the original Indian version of the game (in which the rook was a chariot and the bishop was a war elephant). The Ardam is an armored knight; the Bowdam is a ballista-equipped chariot with rocket-punching fists; the elephantine Saydam has giant sabers for decapitating enemy robots. (Credit goes to my friend Mark Schumann for that last concept.)

Meanwhile, here are the Saydam's bad-guy counterparts, the White Bishop Gyan and Black Bishop Gyan. Enjoy!