For this week’s art practice I chose to make a copy of a newspaper illustration by Dan Smith from the early years of the 20th Century. Smith’s pen and ink work is superb and I wanted to test my skills. I chose a cropped image of his “Antony and Cleopatra” illustration as my subject. There’s no question that this was a difficult copy. His marks are so delicate and complex that I had to make the copy section by section in order to not create too much confusion for myself.…
In this week’s ROCKETEER I’m talking about a character from the “Captain Future” pulp stories, the android—Otho. More people today know him from the Captain Future anime from the 1970’s than the original stories. The anime takes some liberties with the character’s original design. In my post I talk about those changes and how Otho was originally conceptualized. You can read “Reconstructing Otho” on Substack. I’ve been noodling around with some Otho drawings using the original design from the 1940’s. Because he’s supposed to be a master of disguise and…
Dear Diary, The funniest things happen sometimes! I recently found a small stack of my first coloring book, “My Day at the Horse Show.” I really thought the entire first run was out of print. As soon as I mentioned them on social media, I sold two! Since the Flying Sauce Party is coming up on the 17th I decided to put together a flying saucer coloring book for the event. This reminded me that I’ve had plans to do a series of pulp-based coloring books for some time (as…
Today is a big day for me. I have spent the last few months creating a series of new pulp paintings and also rebuilding my studio website—Flying Pony Studios. I’ve added a Woo Commerce shop to that site and this will impact Lucina Press in several ways. The biggest impact is that in the not-too-distant future my eBooks will be for sale over at the Flying Pony Studios shop, along with prints of my book artwork. In other exciting news, my new illustrated novelette—INCORRUPTIBLE—will soon be available in print and…