Blast from the Past #278: Splinter in fighting pose pin-up

Here's another pin-up drawing from the old days -- 1985, to be precise -- showing Splinter preparing for action. Or maybe he's just doing a kata. In any event, I think I may have inked this one with a marker -- it has that kind of line quality. -- PL

A drawing for Emily

My daughter turns twenty-one shortly, and when asked what she wanted for this significant birthday, she responded with a request for two things, one of which was an original drawing of the Turtles celebrating her birthday.

I thought "I can do that!" and set to work. I started with blue pencil and no preliminary sketches, as I pretty much had the layout clearly worked out in my head. Here's a photo of the finished blue pencil drawing:



About the time I finished the penciling, I started thinking maybe I should go a step further with this piece and do it in color, perhaps using watercolors to add the hues over the inkwork. With this in mind, I decided to eschew my preferred inking tool -- the Pitt brush pen -- and go with a real brush and India ink. I didn't want to run the risk that the brush pen ink might run under the watercolor. It was the first time I had done any inking of this nature in a while. Here's the drawing half-inked:



And this is what it looked like when fully inked:



I wasn't sure what to use to color it, but then I remembered a nifty portable watercolor set I'd picked up at an art supply store in Bennington, VT last year on a motorcycle ride. I went out and bought a few new brushes, and got to it. I was more than a bit trepidatious, as I hadn't done anything like this in some time, but once I got into it, the process went quickly, and it was fun. I think it took me about an hour and a half to finish it to my satisfaction, and here's what the completed piece looked like:



I put the drawing in a "floater frame", and gave it to Em at her pre-birthday party, and she liked it! -- PL

Blast from the Past #277: "Amazing Heroes" cover in black and white

As I recall, this one was a lot of fun to draw. I did this in 1986 for the cover to an issue of "Amazing Heroes", a now-defunct magazine about comics from Fantagraphics. I believe there was an interview with me and Kevin in that issue.



This is the black and white version -- for the finished cover, I colored the other companies' characters, but rendered the Turtles in shades of grey using my airbrush. -- PL

Blast from the Past #276: "Fugitoid" pencil layouts

I stumbled over these when I was looking in my files for some art to hang on the walls in our house. They are my rough pencil layouts for several chapters of the original "Fugitoid" comic book. I was a little surprised to see these, as I had forgotten that I had done layouts for that project. The group of layouts that I found does not represent the entire book, so it's possible that Kevin did some or all of the first and/or second chapters... but it's also possible that I did all the layouts. At this point in time, I can't recall.

Back when I did these, Kevin and I were still planning to release "Fugitoid" in individual five-page chapters. The idea was to print these on one sheet of 17 by 22 inch paper, so that when folded you would have four pages at 8.5 by 11 inches, then the last one would be a huge "poster size" page visible when you unfolded the sheet (we got this format idea from some "poster magazines" which were popular at the time).

Of course, we never published it in that form. A couple of years later, when we decided to blend the story of the 'Toid into the TMNT universe, we added a few more pages to the tale and published it as a regular (though somewhat oddly-sized) comic book which led into issue five of the TMNT comic.

I didn't find any layout pages for Chapter 1, and only this one page which I think is from Chapter 2, when Honeycutt first realizes what has happened to him...



Here are some page layouts from Chapter 3...

Page 2



Page 3



Page 4



Here are the first two pages from Chapter 4...

Page 1




Page 2



Here are all five pages to Chapter 5...

Page 1



Page 2



Page 3



Page 4




Page 5



And finally, the five pages of Chapter 6...

Page 1



Page 2



Page 3



Page 4



Page 5



You may have noticed that some of these pages were drawn on paper with alternating white and green bands. This is another good example of "using what is at hand". This paper was stuff left over from my word processing experiments at the Dover, NH Public Library -- the library had installed a computer with a dot-matrix printer and it was freely accessible to anyone who patronised the library. It was the first time I'd ever used a computer, and I loved it. The printer printed on the classic green and white "computer paper", and I saved any blank pages it might print and used them for various purposes... including, in this case, drawing pencil layouts for a comic book story! -- PL

Blast from the Past #274: TMNT group shot

I don't know if this drawing was ever published -- looking at it, I have the sense that I've seen it used somewhere, but I'm not sure.



Anyway, it's another "inked with a real brush" pin-up drawing that I did in 1987. -- PL

Blast from the Past #272: Leonardo with sword raised

Here's another pin-up, executed in ink with a real brush, from back in 1987. -- PL