I’m currently involved in a local production of the play, The Boys Next Door. The play is set in the early 1980′s, and one of the characters has a scene where he wears a Spider-Man tie. No one could find a Spider-Man tie in the stores in our area, so I volunteered to make one. I wanted to make it rather simplistic. It couldn’t have all the dramatic coloring that comic book characters have nowadays, though I did add some shades and tones to keep it from looking completely flat. The tie that the design went on is red, and has a pattern on it that is suggestive of a spider web.
Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop
©Kevenn T. Smith 2010
This second entry in my Singular Sensation series is of a character drawn for the cover of Oziana #37. I simply call him “Pig Guard.” I got a request to draw characters that appeared in stories in the issue, but I didn’t always have access to the actual stories. In some cases, all I got was copies of artwork being used to illustrate the stories. In this case, all I had was an illustration to go on, but one that really captured my imagination. I am a big fan of the work that The Four Horsemen studio did on updating Mattel’s Masters of the Universe property for the 2002 line. The amount of detail they put into each of the character re-designs continues to impress me. When I saw the illustration of this “Pig Guard” character, I thought it would be a really fun idea to give him that same kind of approach. I wanted to put more detail into his look and to introduce a more aggressive and physical element to the entire wrap-around cover piece.
In the cover piece, the Pig Guard was going to be fighting on the same side as Bastinda, the Russian version of the Wicked Witch of the West. I thought it would be a nice homage to the Winkie Soldiers in the MGM musical movie version of The Wizard of Oz if I made the Pig Guard’s skin green. However, when I thought about that, I worried that some people would think that I was trying to rip off the Gammorean Guards in the palace of Jabba the Hutt in Return of the Jedi. So that idea was nixed. I still wanted to make the Pig Guard look more otherwordly, instead of a pink, tan, or brown skin tones that one usually found on a pig. That’s when I hit upon the idea to make the skin tone a nice “decayed blue.” It really worked too! I thought I was being so original, until a friend pointed out that Gannon, the Big Boss in The Legend of Zelda game for Nintendo, was a big blue pig. It’s true, there really is nothing entirely new! I haven’t played that game in years, but from what I remember of the character, I think I made this Pig Guard look significantly different.
Pencils, Ink, Prismacolor Color Pencils, Photoshop, and Adobe Illustrator.
©Kevenn T. Smith 2010
This is the first entry in a series of posts I plan on doing for this site that will showcase individual pieces of artwork that are used in larger pieces of work. Some of the pieces I work on are created in a collage-like manner. Creating work in that way allows me options in placement and makes doing things like special effects a lot easier. However, sometimes, the entire drawing doesn’t always get showcased, or is showcased at a size that doesn’t fully show off all the detail put into it.
This first “singular sensation” is to show off the full rendering of the Patchwork Girl illustration that I created for the title of this site. Now, all the different patterns and colors used in composing Scraps can be seen, all the way down to her shoes. Scraps is my favorite character from the Oz books. I felt that her colorful look and personality was the perfect central face for the first image that shows up on this site.
Pencils, Ink, Prismacolor Color Pencils, Photoshop, and Adobe Illustrator.
©Kevenn T. Smith 2009