Blast from the Past #43 repost: Donatello firing Mac-10

This pinup of my favorite turtle doing something uncharacteristic was penciled and inked by me. I think I may have drawn this one after getting a paintball gun which was a cool replica of a Mac-10 submachinegun (I think it was a present from Kevin); it actually fired paintballs from plastic cartridges packed with gunpowder, and would do so on full-auto fire. What a racket it made! -- PL



(My original posting of this artwork on the planetracers.com "Blast from the Past" pages also included this note about various things that were going on with the TMNT back then (I think it was originally posted sometime in 2001) -- I include it here, slightly edited, for its historical interest. -- PL)

"For everyone who has come to the "Blast" pages and seen nothing or next to nothing, I apologize -- as I understand it, our ISP has been making some server changes which have caused some minor technical problems. We're working to get them squared away, and I expect it to all be back to normal soon. Thanks for your patience!

Now for some good news and bad news. The bad news first -- it looks like the TMNT TV show which we are hoping to get on the air in the next couple of years will NOT be CGI. I am very disappointed, but for whatever reason, the powers that be at the networks which have shown the most interest in a TMNT show don't want a CGI one. I don't really understand their reasoning, but at the present time if there is to be a TMNT show on TV, it will be some style of cel animation.

However, there IS something of a possible silver lining in this cloud, and that is that there may be an opportunity to do some kind of CGI turtle project down the road -- maybe a direct to video thing. I would dearly love to do something in CGI with the turtles.

Next bit of (sort of) bad news -- due solely to my own absentmindedness (i.e not being totally on top of scheduling/planning) and slowness in inking, the first issue of my new TMNT comic book will be in the Diamond Previews catalog for a December 2001 release. On the other hand, the GOOD news is that it is DEFINITELY going to be in Previews, and WILL be published in December.

Now for the good news -- I finished inking TMNT #2! This week I completed the last few pages, erased all the stray pencil lines, and will shortly be starting to tone the pages. Other good news -- Jim Lawson has been pencilling issue #3, and today is up to page 20 (and this issue is going to be 40 pages!). I may have to enlist the help of one or more of my studio pals with inking from here on out, but I'm not 100% sure of that yet.

I've also settled on a title for the new book -- it will be called simply "TMNT" (possibly with "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" as a very small subtitle), and it will be published by Mirage Publishing.

-- Peter Laird"

Blast from the Past #117: Splinter character sketches

I can't recall exactly why or when I did these sketches of Splinter, but I suspect it was probably either for Playmates or for 4Kids, to be used as "model sheets" (although these drawings are considerably rougher than most of the model sheets I've ever seen). -- PL

Blast from the Past #116: TMNT group shot cyberinking experiment

From 1991, here's another of my experiments with "cyberinking".

First, the pencils...



... and then the "inks". -- PL

Blast from the Past repost #42: Mirage TMNT color series #1 cover pencils, unused

I remember being disappointed that this cover drawing wasn’t used, but I got over it. I penciled this as a possible cover for the first issue of the Mirage-published TMNT color series. This was during a period when I was doing a lot of my penciling in photoblue pencil (the kind that is invisible to stat cameras), because I found it to be physically less messy that regular lead pencils.



The problem was, being photoblue pencil, it was difficult -- if not impossible -- to copy on our Canon copier. I solved this by figuring that if I took a thin sheet of transparent yellow plastic and laid it over the blue pencils, the copier would perceive the pencil lines as green, and thus be able to copy them. It worked! -- PL

Blast from the Past #115: Crab mechanic mutant

This is another drawing I did back in the early days of working with Playmates to come up with ideas for characters to extend the TMNT toy line. It wasn't completely fleshed out, but the idea was that this would be a mutant crab with a "mechanic" theme -- one of his large claws would be replaced with a mechanical one, and he would have tool belts and such. This idea was never used. -- PL

Blast from the Past #114: Donatello about to throw bo staff

This is another early pinup drawing I did, back in 1984... old-school style. -- PL

Blast from the Past repost #41: Elite fights Foot / pencils

I penciled this depiction of one of the Shredder's elite guard fighting a bunch of Foot soldiers around the time we did “City at War”, as another “cyberinking” test. I don't believe it was ever used for anything. -- PL