Assembly Line I

Transformers was the first comic series I started collecting, back in the '80s. At the time, I would draw the main characters all the time, but I was little and the pictures were not exactly award-winning material. Then the series was over, and I moved on to other comics. A few years ago, Dreamwave started putting out new Transformers books, and even though I never read any of them, the artwork blew me away. I remembered the what I considered just serviceable artwork from the original series, and the stuff Dreamwave was putting out was incredible. Here you had robots that actually looked like complex machines instead of a bunch of boxes put together. Then the IDW Transformers books were released (and they still are being put out by this publisher), and the artwork was mindbending. Artists like Don Figueroa, Guido Guidi, and EJ Su seemed to have been born to draw these characters. Never in a million years could I draw anything remotely like it. Never. So, of course, I decided to give it a try.

It's funny because, as I've said here on a number of occasions, I find drawing buildings and technology extremely difficult. And, to me, drawing Transformers is, by their very own nature, pretty much like drawing buildings and technology combined and turning the mixture into a character. I knew it was going to be hard, but I really wanted to have a go at it, so I looked up pictures of a couple of my favorite Autobots and decided to draw them together in a picture.

The first one is Grimlock, the leader of the Dinobots, and it took me over three hours to finish him (original pencils here). I was looking at the photo references measuring distances and trying to make sure nothing was too big or too small. I was also difficult to decide on what he should look like because there are so many different versions of the character, and I wasn't sure which one to choose. In the end, I went for the traditional G1 look, and I must say I am quite happy with the results. I think he looks like a machine and a living creature at the same, and I think I got a reasonable enough resemblance so that Transformers fans would look at the picture and know that it is, indeed, Grimlock.

But as I said, this is only half of the picture, because I went on to add a second character to keep Grimlock company. If you want to see who it is, come back tomorrow and read us again!

Cult Classic

I recently got a chance to watch Heavy Metal, the cult-classic animated feature from 1981. I only know the Heavy Metal magazine in passing, and knowing the kind of stuff they put out I had a reasonably good idea of what to expect. As it turned out, I was right, but I don't mean that in a bad way.

The movie was okay, even if the animation was terribly dated and quite strange at times (like the credits at the beginning), and it was true to what little I know of the magazine. There was some fantasy, some sci-fi, lots of nudity (and I mean ladies with boobs bigger than their heads), monsters, robots and spaceships. Such variety can be explained through the structure of the movie-- a collection of short stories with a common element: a powerful orb that everyone covets. This premise allows us to experience different tales, ranging from the crime noir to the aforementioned more standard sci-fi and fantasy portions of the movie, with the last tale being my favorite.

The movie wasn't great, but it was enjoyable, but one thing kept nagging at me throughout the whole film: that the stories would look much better on the page than they did on the screen. Maybe it was the animation that made me think so, but I honestly believe these tales would benefit from a panel-to-panel presentation, as this seemed to be their origin and kind of looked like a goofy attempt at translating the comic book sequentials into film. But maybe things would have been different had Heavy Metal been made last year instead of twenty-eight ago. And now that I bring it up, I hear they want to make another HM movie, and directors such as David Fincher, Gore Verbinski, Kevin Eastman, Mark Osborne, and James Cameron are interested in directing some of the different segments. I have a feeling that one is going to be way better than this campy romp!

Hobo

Aquí tenéis un dibujillo que hice en clase el otro día, y que pensaba que había puesto en el blog pero resulta que no, que se me había pasado. Este dibujo lo hice durante mi Cartooning Club, un día en que una de mis niñas decidió dibujarme para burlarse de mí, aunque siempre con buen humor y sin malicia. Ni qué decir tiene, me puse manos a la obra inmediatamente para dibujarla a ella de vagabunda, aunque al final no llené el carrito con todas sus pertenencias (o viejas latas vacías) porque no tuve tiempo. De todas formas, creo que el dibujo quedó medianamente gracioso, así que ahí lo tenéis para vuestro disfrute personal. Enjoy!

No Bite

Here's a movie that could have been so much more, but it turned out to be dull and rather boring. But let me tell you about the concept before I discuss my problems with the film.

Teeth tells the story of Dawn O’Keefe, a girl who has made a purity promise and therefore won't have sex until marriage. Or so she wants to think. At some point (I'm not spoiling anything, believe me) she finds herself in that situation, only to discover what the "teeth" in the title are a reference to: the myth of the vagina dentata.

Okay, you must be thinking this sounds horrible, and that of course the movie was bound to suck (or bite), but I disagree. I thought this was the perfect setup for a funny dark-humor comedy, a great mix of laughs and horror, kind of like the hilarious and underrated Idle Hands. I mean, come on! A high school girl with teeth down there, surrounded by horndogs who just want to get in her pants? Cue laughs, right? Well, not quite.

The main problem with the movie is, I think, the tone of the film. It takes itself too seriously, and it somehow aspires to be a drama. A drama. Really? It's a movie about a girl with teeth in her unmentionables, and you're going for serious instead of funny? What a horrible mistake that is. Who would take a movie like this seriously? Well, only the creators of the movie, as it turns out.

The second issue I had with the film, and almost as important as the first one, was that Dawn was an incredibly unlikable character. There she was, finding out she was a freak of the worst kind, and I just didn't care! She had proved to be so bitchy and narrow-minded, such a holier-than-thou bible beater, that I am almost ashamed to confess I thought she deserved pretty much all the grief coming her way.

So we have an unrelatable main character I wish the worst to in a movie that should go for the laughs but spectacularly miscalculates and goes for the angst and religious virtue instead. A movie that should be full of jokes but turns out to be one. A movie that I encourage you to give a wide berth. As if you weren't doing that already.

Tharkay

Here you have a picture of Tharkay, the mysterious character from Naomi Novik's Temeraire series that makes his first appearance, if I remember correctly, in Black Powder War. I like Tharkay because he is cool and shrouded in mystery, and you never quite know when or where he's going to pop up. I also like his personality, and how he seems to be the exact opposite of Laurence when it comes to grabbing the dragon by the horns, so to speak. He is honor- bound... to himself, which makes for an interesting interaction between him and Laurence.
At any rate, I hope you like the picture!

Yawn

Today I'm going to talk about Children of Men, a movie I had been interested in for a long time. This film, starring Clive Owen, introduces us to a near future in which humanity has been rendered infertile and therefore has its days numbered. Needless to say, a pregnant woman emerges, and it's up to Clive Owen to protect her.

The premise was interesting, and the movie got all sorts of praise and good reviews when it opened back in 2006, so I was somewhat surprised to find out it was one of the most boring films I have seen in the last few years. It was The Hulk boring, Van Helsing boring. It was The Matrix Revolutions boring, Revenge of the Sith boring, minus the presumptuousness and delusions of grandeur. I lasted for about an hour or so, and then I went to get my laptop. Forty minutes later or so, I heard somebody shooting somebody else, and I looked at my TV screen, but all I saw was the logo: Children of Men. The movie had just ended, and someone had ostensibly died, but I didn't know who it was. And perhaps not surprisingly, I didn't care enough to push the rewind button and find out. So, if you guys have seen it, let me know how it ends. Or not.

Cover Girl

Here you have the finished cover for Worlds Collide. If you remember, I showed you the original sketch a few days ago, but this time I did something different with it. Instead of just looking at the sketch and reproducing it on a bigger scale, I blew up the original sketch using a copying machine and then I traced it on the bigger sheet of paper. That way, I made sure I kept the exact background/figure ratio I had in the original layout. Once I had that done (it only took a few minutes), I started redrawing the whole thing and adding as much detail as possible. It took me about two and half hours, and after that I broke out the markers and technical pens and just inked the whole thing. I hope you like it!

Bonus: Check out the original pencilwork!