Blast from the Past #81 repost: Raphael's shower

Going through files a few years ago, I came across some stuff I had forgotten about. The most surprising thing was a stack of penciled layouts that I did for the DONATELLO Micro-Series. What was surprising to me was how detailed the layouts were -- it was (and still is) very unusual for me to do more than really rough, sketchy drawings for my layouts, but these were almost complete, tight pencils. I think we could have just inked these layouts. But we didn't, instead following our typical practice of enlarging the layouts on a photocopier and light-tabling them onto the Graphix Duo-Shade board for final penciling, inking and toning.

Also interesting were two preliminary drawings of the first page -- I really don't know why I did them, as I did not do anything like this for any of the other pages.

Here's the first preliminary drawing:



And this is the second preliminary drawing:



Here's the final layout drawing:



And this is the way the finished inked and toned page appeared:



While I like the two preliminary drawings, I think the final layout works better. -- PL

Blast from the Past #80 repost: TMNT #5 -- Anatomy of two pages

While going through some old files, I came across some photocopies of a few pages from our preliminary work for the original Mirage TMNT comic #5, in which we took the Turtles into outer space and had them meet the Fugitoid. It's a pretty good example of how Kevin and I used to collaborate on the creation of those original comics. (I've picked two pages -- 34 and 35 -- and reproduced first Kevin's thumbnail layouts, second my dialogue polish, and third the final inked and lettered versions of those two pages.)

First we would get together and talk out the plot, trying to construct a story which held together and covered all of the points we wanted to get across in that issue. Once we were satisfied with the plot, Kevin would do rough layout drawings, breaking down each page and roughing in dialogue.



Second, I would take Kevin's layouts and do finished dialogue.



(At both the layout and finished dialogue stages, we would confer on what we had each done and address any problems either of us had with the choices we'd made.)

Third, we would pencil the full-size pages, based on Kevin's layouts, on pieces of Graphix Duo-Shade board. After the lettering had been done on the penciled pages (in this case, I believe it was Steve Lavigne who did the lettering), we'd do the final inking, and after that the toning. -- PL

Thanks, Isaac!

This image of me is from the interview footage done a few weeks back for the upcoming TMNT fan documentary (http://www.turtledoc.com). I asked the man behind the documentary, Isaac Elliott-Fisher, to send me a copy of the raw interview footage, and I just got it a couple of days ago (along with a copy of his other documentary about Toyota Land Cruisers and a t-shirt for that documentary).

I watched the footage last night, and was relieved to see that, for the most part, I did not sound like an idiot. Here's a still shot from the footage:



I apologize for the bad quality of the image -- I couldn't figure out how to do a screen grab while iDVD was playing (my computer kept giving me warnings that it couldn't be done), so I finally resorted to taking a digital photo of my laptop's screen, which -- as you might expect -- introduced distortions and odd color artifacts into the picture. The actual footage looks great, and I am looking forward to seeing the finished product. -- PL

Blast from the Past #78 repost: TMNT drawing on tablecloth scrap

Sometimes when you do a signing or a convention, you get a little bored or punchy near the end of the day. I think I was a little of both a few years ago when I doodled this group shot with a Sharpie® marker on a scrap piece of the vinyl tablecloth in front of me.



I guess I liked it enough to cut it out and take it home with me. -- PL

Blast from the Past #156: another iron-on TMNT group shot

Here's another piece of art created to be used to make iron-ons during the early Turtle days. This one I did all by myself.



This is one of just a handful of pieces from the old days on which I used my airbrush, a tool which I was never very competent with, but almost always had fun using. -- PL

Blast from the Past #77 repost: Iron-on TMNT group shot with logo

I’ve always liked this art done for a t-shirt iron-on back in 1984. We based this on a piece of black and white art Kevin and I did for promotion of the first issue of the TMNT comic. I’m pretty sure we both inked on a pencil drawing by Kevin, and then Kevin colored it. It’s one of the first things we ever did showing the turtles in color.



This image is actually a "flipped" version of the original art, which we did with the logo in reverse, so that when the iron-on was applied to a shirt, the logo would read properly. These iron-on's were fun to do -- we made them at a copy shop in Portsmouth, NH which had the first color copier we'd ever seen -- but even when applied perfectly, they didn't last too long. After a few washings, they started to crack and peel and look pretty bad. -- PL

Blast from the Past #76 repost: PL as Turtle, with pencil

I drew this self-portrait in 1985 (I still had hair on top of my head) as a spot illustration for an interview in some magazine... I think it might have been the now-defunct COMICS INTERVIEW. -- PL