Blast from the Past #67 and #68 reposts: 1992 TurtleCon poster art

(For brevity's sake, I decided to put these two BftP's together into one (re)posting.)

Back in 1992 we held the Portsmouth, NH "TurtleCon", the only "official" TMNT convention to date. Held at the Portsmouth, NH Sheraton, it was a lot of fun. This is something I put together as a free handout at the show. It's one of my early Photoshop experiments (I think I was probably using Photoshop 2.5 back then!). I don't know exactly what the heck that gun Don is wielding does, but it sure looks cool.



Before doing the color work in Photoshop, I "cyberinked" the pencil drawing of Donatello.




I'm pretty sure I have some (pre-digital) photos from that Turtlecon somewhere... maybe I can dig some out and scan them for a future blog post. -- PL

Blast from the Past #66 repost: Proposed TV Guide cover

This drawing bothers me -- not because I don’t like it, but because for the life of me I don’t know if it was ever used! I believe it was done for a proposed TV Guide cover. I penciled it...



...and Ryan Brown inked it (beautifully, as usual). -- 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 #65 repost: Leonardo and Frostbyte

This is a penciled piece I did back in 1992. It's signed by me "To Sam" -- I'm not sure who Sam is. I think this may be the only drawing I've ever done which pairs one of the Turtles with a character from a Funatix! property, in this case Frostbyte™, the leader of the Barbearians™.



(In case you don't know, Funatix! was a toy concept and design group made up of most of the Mirage dudes: me, Mike Dooney, Jim Lawson, Steve Murphy, Eric Talbot, Dan Berger, and for a while Steve Lavigne and Craig Farley. Ken Mitchroney was also one of the founding Funatix! members, but problems due to geography -- Ken lived in Florida at the time -- led to his leaving the group early on. We worked on a bunch of different concepts, but Barbearians™ was one of the first and the most fun.) -- PL

Frostbyte™ and Barbearians™ ™ and © 2009 Funatix! Inc.

Triceraton by Tokka

It's a sad, almost inevitable fact of life that during the hustle and bustle of the holiday season, some things fall through the cracks and don't get attended to in as timely a fashion as they should. So it was with this cool gift I got from "Tokka" (aka Dave) last month. He fashioned a wild-looking custom Triceraton -- I think it is based on an existing figure of some sort, customized with additional details in some type of sculpting medium, and painted in Dave's unique style.







The figure has been sitting in my office at Mirage since I got it, and I've been meaning to post photos of it, but it just kind of got lost in the swirl of things. Dave, here's a belated "Thank you!" -- PL

Blast from the Past #142: Leonardo fighting Triceraton

This is a pinup sketch drawn by me in 1987. -- PL

Blast from the Past #64 repost: TMNT color series #2 cover pencils

Here's my pencil drawing for the cover of the second issue of the Mirage TMNT color series, before Kevin Eastman inked it and I colored it in Photoshop. This is one of a series of "big head" covers that we did for that series, wherein the background of each cover was dominated by a large image of the head of one of the characters in the story.



Last year, I pulled the final inked version of this cover, along with a couple of other covers, out of my files, and Steve Lavigne painted the original artwork in his inimitable style. I'm pretty sure we sold this one at the NYCC in 2008. -- PL

PS: As pointed out in the comments by Tokka/Dave, this is another unintentional "double repost" -- not only did I put this up on the original "Blast from the Past" page on the planetracers.com website, but I also posted it on this blog last year ( http://plairdblog.blogspot.com/2008/10/blast-from-past-103-tmnt-color-series-2.html). D'oh! -- PL