Blast from the Past #713: Pete working on color art for TMNT t-shirt iron-on, circa 1984

I came across this photograph yesterday while continuing my long-term project to scan and digitally archive all of our family photo albums, a project which seems to go in fits and starts. Maybe I will have it completed by 2020.

Anyway, I had not seen this one in a while, and found it interesting. This shot was taken in my little studio room in the house in Dover, NH, probably sometime in early 1984. It was actually a second floor bedroom, right at the top of the stairs as I recall. I don't recall working in that room a lot, but apparently I had my airbrush set up in there, and in this photo I am using the airbrush to do part of the coloring on one of the pieces of artwork we produced to make the TMNT t-shirt iron-ons which we sold in the early days of Mirage Studios. I can tell this by the fact that the lettering of "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" on the piece is backwards, which was necessary so that when the iron-on was ironed on to a t-shirt, the writing would then be correctly oriented.

Very technical. -- PL

Blast from the Past #437: Me with TMNT #1 original art

I found this photo while I was looking for some other images to go with a post on my other blog, and thought it was kind of nifty. I'm not sure who took it -- probably Kevin, though it is possible Jeannine was behind the camera.

I'm not really sure what the point of it was. The artwork I am posing with is, as fans of the comics will surely recognize, some of the interior art from the first issue of TMNT. This was apparently taken midway through the process of toning the pages, as some are clearly completely untoned and others partially toned.

This photo was taken in the palatial offices of Mirage Studios... in reality, the former dining room off the kitchen in our Dover, NH house (a house which sadly is no more). The TV to my left is the one often obliquely referred to by Kevin and me in interviews about the birth of the TMNT, when we would refer to spending many nights together in that room drawing stuff and "watching bad TV shows". As I recall, it was gifted to us by someone who had to move and didn't want to deal with the TV set... which was a great bit of serendipity, because back in those days, we could not have afforded a color TV. -- PL