A little treat from the Turtle Documentary guys

When I got up this morning and checked my email, I found one containing the following link:

http://blip.tv/fauxpop-tv/chasing-turtles-ep12-sneak-peeks-peter-laird-6432339

It leads to a short clip which may or may not make its way into the TMNT documentary. Isaac and his crew taped it in my office at Mirage Studios in Northampton, and it's basically me talking about Graphix Duo-Shade (the special paper Kevin Eastman and I used when we drew the first bunch of issues of the original TMNT comic books), and -- in penciling, inking and then toning a drawing of Donatello -- giving a demonstration of how it works. That was a fun afternoon, hanging out with a nice group of people.

If you have ever wondered how the Duo-Shade paper makes its magic, you might want to check this out. -- PL

Bookplate

A couple of weeks ago, Dan "The Man" Berger asked me if I'd be interested in doing some art for a "bookplate", which I think he said would be "tipped in" to some of the upcoming collected editions. (Dan, if I'm getting this wrong, please correct me!)

As reference, he gave me a really cool one that Jim Lawson did. Last week, I was sitting at my desk in my Mirage office trying to think of something to draw, when this idea for Donatello with some wacky gadget on his hand popped into my head. So I decided to take a leftover piece of tone paper I had in my office and draw it on that. Here's the inked version...



... and here's the finished version, with tones. -- PL

Documentary Day

The "TMNT fan documentary" crew paid us another visit today. Isaac Elliot Fisher returned, and brought with him two of the producers on the documentary, Mark Hussey and his wife Sarah (both very nice people). They were in Northampton to do some follow-up stuff, including a bit more interviewing and getting some footage of me drawing something. We set up in my office (I'm glad I cleaned it up yesterday!)



It was fun to listen to some of their stories about going all over the place to talk with both Turtle fans and people who have been involved with the TMNT property professionally. I especially liked hearing about their visit with my old pal Ryan Brown in his home in Ohio.

Here's a photo of Isaac and Mark conferring about some technical camera-related issue.



One thing I did to prepare for this visit was to dig out an old sheet of Graphix Duo-Shade paper which had been kicking around my office with an unfinished pencil drawing on it. It was unfinished because it was pretty bad, and I had no compunctions about erasing it so I could use the paper for this drawing demo. I thought it might be fun to do it on the Duo-Shade paper, as that was what Kevin Eastman and I had used for many of the Turtle comics we did together.

I'd also brought in some originals from issue #4 of Volume One, so I could demonstrate how we used to carefully cut up the large sheets of Duo-Shade paper to maximize the use of this expensive material. Once I'd done that, I proceeded to pencil, ink and tone this drawing of Donatello, which I gave to Isaac once I'd finished it.



It was fun to do -- I think it was the first time I'd used Duo-Shade in this way in about five years. Isaac and Sarah both took me up on my offer to try the Duo-Shade paper. I drew a quick Turtle head sketch in Sharpie on a small piece of the paper for Sarah. Here she is working on it...



... and here she holds up the finished piece. Unfortunately, I think my camera flash washed out most of the tones she did on it!



Isaac drew his own Turtle head (quite well, I thought), and toned that. Here he is with the result, which he gave to me.



Isaac also brought with him the t-shirt that he has been getting signed by many, if not all, of the people he's interviewed for this project.



All in all, it was a fun couple of hours. I have to say I'm looking forward to seeing the final documentary. -- PL

For more information about the project, visit http://turtledoc.fauxpop.tv/

"Leatherhead" by Steve Bissette

Here's the other cool piece I found while cleaning up my office yesterday -- a drawing of the character "Leatherhead" by the master of scaled and scuted creatures, Steve Bissette. I'm not sure if this was ever printed anywhere. -- PL

Blast from the Past #144: TMNT spot illustrations on Duo-Shade

Here are two drawings from the VERY early days of the TMNT, quite possibly drawn before the first book was printed. I drew these on some of those scraps of Graphix Duo-Shade we had left over from cutting the page-sized sheets out of the big sheets of Duo-Shade board (we used every little piece of that stuff!).





It's interesting to look at drawings like this to see how the way we drew the Turtles changed drastically from those early days. -- PL

Blast from the Past #35 repost: TMNT Volume 1 #2 cover/inks and tones

Back in the early days of the TMNT comic book, Kevin Eastman and I would alternate cover duties. He did the artwork for the cover to the first issue (although, if memory serves, I did the mechanical color separation overlay for the red color on that cover), I did the second, he did the third, and so on.

This is my cover drawing for TMNT #2, done on the duo shade board we used for the interior art. I’ve reproduced this black and white art in color to show the sepia tones created by the aging toning chemicals in the paper.



I think this was the first time I tried using the toning chemicals in my airbrush -- boy, did that dark tone chemical stink! It was truly vile. -- PL