Gully Foyle
This image is of Gully Foyle, the main character in Alfred Bester’s classic SF book “The Stars My Destination”. It’s pretty much my favourite SF book ever, and still stands the test of time as being a stunning, intricate yet fast-paced SF action thriller—not dated at all though, despite being written in 1956. I was commissioned to draw this by Steven Gettis, who runs the site Hey Oscar Wilde.
The image shows a moment at the start of the book, when Gully Foyle is marooned aboard a drifting, wrecked spaceship named “Nomad”…desperately struggling to survive by hauling air tanks (one is shown, he’s towing it with a rope which is not strictly accurate to Bester’s description, but what the hell) back to a small airtight storage locker which is his ‘home’. He spots a passing ship named Vorga which, although he signals it with rescue flares, disdains to stop and pick him up…he is ignored although clearly spotted by the ship.
Foyle goes into such a fury at being abandoned this way, he is stirred to extremes to find the way forward, to survive and wreak vengeance on those who ‘wrote him off’….and the plot goes into high gear!
This book burned a small beautiful hole in my brain when I read it as a teen, and so I am glad to have had reason to draw an image from it. If you are not familiar with it you can learn more at Wikipedia.
Superboy vs. Robot
This is a recent drawing I did, inspired by Nick Cardy’s cover for Superboy 206 (You can see the line art for that cover at: http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2160/2450413254_7c3ed4824e_o.jpg ). I used the basic design of the robot and then tried to imagine an alternate moment or version of the encounter between Superboy & Giant Space Robot…
Book Cover Art
This was an airbrush & Pelikan ink cover painting from 1988, for a book titled “Booze Boats & Billions”, about Prohibition-era alcohol smugglers and their operations. It was art directed/commissioned by Gord Pronk, of Pronk & Associates.
Animation BG Designs
Here are a few animation background designs done for the Nelvana show “Tales from the Cryptkeeper”–I am sure many remember this show with a warm tingly fond feeling, from their childhood days! These drawings were done for the storyboard artists, as a beginning guide for use in setting up the board sequences. The expectation was that the final designs would come later, taking into account any changes the board artists had made as they blocked out the shots.
Batman: Brave and the Bold Bgs
This episode of Batman: Brave and the Bold is airing tonight; below are some designs which I created for some of the settings. As ever, the final settings evolve out of consultation with the director and script, and in conjunction with supplied reference (which in this case was the old, fun comic book story which the script was based on).
New Frontier Designs
Here is a sampling of line design drawings which I made from the storyboard, for various scenes in the DVD “The New Frontier” by Darwyn Cooke & friends. A lot of them were fairly technical/industrial in nature, involving secret bases, control rooms, machinery, and the like…
Digitally-Dead Dinosaurs
This was an illustration done for Steve Rider, at Pearson Educational, related to theories explaining the demise of the dinosaurs…the first piece of art I did with my then-new Cintiq. It was great fun experimenting and getting the feel of this fantastic bit of equipment. Type was added over this, I believe.
Alien Artifacts
This was a piece of animation development art from a while back, colorized it a little, just to give it a light frosting!
Animation BG - color
This was a bg test for an animated series, searching for stylistic treatment. The brief as far as I recall was only for a high-tech lab, with counters, creature tank, etc…
