Chinese Gnemo

Wednesday I received several copies of Fantasy Art Magazine from Beijing, China that I did an interview for. They did an excellent job of printing my Gnemo paintings. I was pleasantly surprised to see a gatefold (fold out) for two paintings. Here are three pages from the magazine. You can, of course, see my Gnemo art on Gnemo's Art and Story but for the sake of novelty here they are with Chinese pictographs.



If you can read some of this feel free to tell me what it says. You're also welcome to make up something as long as it's clever. That's my real face there not the fake one I use for my blog. I like the way they used one of my airships as a bullet points.



I did a painting demo this week and on Friday I gave a talk and slideshow to a few hundred 4th and 5th graders -- oh, what a day that was. It exhausted me. I'm still tired. It's also possible that they infected me with their middle school germs. Cooties? More about this in my next installment.

Robot Close-Ups and Drawings

These two gentlemen put up some very nice robots on their blogs: Ryan Wood and Mattias Adolfsson. And monkey see, monkey do. So . . .

Black Lines Two

These Door Demons were all drawn on the same page. I separated them out for you. All of these drawings were all done with a Pigma Pen and they were all done for fun. Even though there’s not much of a market for me with this medium I still can’t resist the call of the pen. See my previous post: Black Lines (you'll have to scan down to it). Also, please go and take a look at my newest Gnemo posts: Gnemo's Sketchbook.

This one (above) is my favorite of the Door Demon group. I like that it is loosely organic.

I had to do a close-up of his face.

I often do things in reverse so this little thumbnail was the last thing I drew. My thinking is that once I know what I want I can step back and think about it in more graphic terms. This doesn't explain why in my normal life I often do things in reverse as well.

I keep meaning to post something to Illustration Friday. This would've been one if I didn't get distracted. It's called "Hide."

The above would've been my first post to Drawer Geeks. I think I'm approved but I haven't actually tried to post anything yet. With both art blogs it's easier to do the assignments than it is to post them. It's called "Grrr Face."

The War of the Worlds (click for Amazon link)

There's plenty of new stuff to post but I got to thinking about my War of the Worlds stuff because I went to Andrew Glazebrook's Blog (scroll down to see his tripods). It made me want to post some little-seen images. Above: Cover for the book that came out in 2001. I did 17 paintings for the book.


Above: This was my alternate design for the cover. It's just a color sketch.


Above: How I imagine someone out in the field might have sketched the Martian war machines (tripods) from a distance.

Above: Design for a War of the Worlds chess set. It was never made. The Queen.


Above: Here's the rook from the chess set. I wrote a whole story to go with the chess set too. It was too 'weird' for the client.


Above: This is one of the earliest drawings I did for this book. It was done before I moved out of NYC so I must've been in my 20's when I drew it. The company that assigned me the book went out of business before I could get very far. Did you know that H.G. Wells' Martians were vampires?


Above: What does a zeppelin pin design have to do with this subject? I say stay tuned. One day it will be revealed.


Above: I'll be making the two designs above in wax to later be made into bronzes.

Quite a few of my War of the Worlds paintings and more sketches can be seen in my book Kiddography.

Battleship!

Because I've done a few airship paintings people occasionally ask me to design some for them. My airships for Gnemo are based on what would be plausible for the level of technology of that world but with the expectations that that world, although obeying the same physics as ours, would still be different. For example they might have access to a strong lightweight material that is more difficult or too expensive to acquire on our planet.

However, when someone else ask me to design something they have their own rules. Sometimes the parameters are wider and sometimes they're narrower. Giant ironclad aircraft carrying battle-airships seem pretty impossible to me. I can't come up with a plausible explanation for it but then I avoid changing physical laws unless I call it magic. Because of that these airships could never fly in the world I invented. Actually, they won't fly anywhere because they weren't quite right. These were just quick sketches to see if I understood what was wanted. I didn't. (And that's why I can show them to you.) I was thinking too big.

Speaking of Gnemo, I've got a new post there. It's a bit more finished than this drawing: Gnemo's Sketchbook

Eyebrow Envy

Well, I'm not through with elephant forms. Go to see this if you haven't yet: Gnemo's Sketchbook. This is just to let you know I'm still here painting, drawing and writing. Maybe I'll even have some sculpture in the near future.

My face only has half eyebrows. I think if I looked like the guy above I could be a real artist but then I wouldn't be able to see what I was painting.

The Elephant Form

It took me a while but I put up a massive post to Gnemo's Sketchbook. I guess you could call it a small short story with illustrations. Please go there and look at that. The story was written around existing pictures. Now that I've written it though, I'm thinking I'll do a few more drawings on the subject. Above are just a few elephant forms. I may have posted these before. It's here just to get you to go see more over at my Gnemo blog.