~ Take Two ... ~As per usual, I post something that I'm not happy with 5 minutes later. So, another handful of hair pulled and yet another redraw - on one single piece of paper this time:
And some attempt to make amends for my lack of proper shape and silhouette last post:
I realized that - other than using two pieces of paper taped together, and not drawing fluidly or quickly enough - I hit the first Soldat illustration right after I had read some dated obituaries for Hunter Thompson. I figure that one (or several) of the images from the article - consciously or otherwise - stuck in my head when I started drawing; hence another awesome excuse for why the pose came out the way it did.
.....
Speaking of which: Something cool I noticed while browsing through my laptop archive of pictures - every so often there'd be a random pairing of images together, one after the other, that would look pretty cool: They'd either mirror-image eachother in some way (faces, elements, pose, theme), or else they'd be complete contradictions. Fairly random placing to boot...
Sound boring and convoluted? You bet it is! Here are some examples:
-Akashi Gidayu writing his death poem just before committing seppuku... and Hunter Thompson.
-Operation Ivy (S.F.) and The Faith (D.C.), one apparently channeling the energy of the other.
-Because Ukrainian car models and English punks... tend to be white. And like to pose.
-I'll venture a guess the Google search that day was for something
blue.
-About as opposite as you can get. War and Peace, anybody?
-Ok, so these two images weren't exactly side by side - but I couldn't resist. Bill Shatner shamelessly doing a plug for Commodore "computer-and-game" system, and a Soviet poster - which (I think) reads:
"With Capitalism: Millions of unemployed workers". 
Some Medieval Mujahideen and Crusaders... on Post-It notes - not anywhere near accurate in historic details, but whatever.
...I know it's not much of an update, but the backlog of illustrations and sketches is building up, trust me. Some will hit the scanner soon. In the middle of reading Brothers Karamazov - which is like the book equivalent of running a marathon.
Conversation this last week made me realize that sci-fi - besides being my bread and butter for God knows how long - is probably the one genre of storytelling that falls back way too often on the fact that it is sci-fi - the "wow factor", for lack of a better term:
(Resemblence between this illustration and this professional piece is purely coincidental - I swear Marina, I saw yours after I drew this one.)
Probably have magnetic plates in their butt cheeks.
