A photo of my pumpkin this year!

I’ve played along with a few of the other weekly themes over at Comic Twart, but my schedule hasn’t allowed the time to finish any of them yet. One or two of these might get finished off someday…

Over at ComicTwart they are doing an Al Williamson Tribute. I don’t follow the ComicTwart Blog regularly, though I should as a few friends are involved.

Al Williamson was a huge influence on me at a time in the the early ’90’s when my work was making the transition from promising amateurishness to early pro-level (though, oddly enough it was after I crossed that threshold that work started to be harder to find) and for a time drawing as much like Al Williamson as I could without slavishly swiping was the goal. I’ve moved away from that in the last ten years or so, though more due to the subject matter of the work I do than any loss of interest in the Alex Raymond/Hal Foster school of Art that Al synthesized so well.

Anyway, the Comic Twart theme of the week got me inspired and I decided to join the fun. I sketched this out last night in between pages of script of the latest storyboard. If I can squeeze in the time, I’ll try to ink it before the end of the week.

EDIT – Here are the inks fresh off the tablet!

Over-sized mushrooms and little spotted lizards say “Al Williamson” to me!

Another page of digital pencils. This one was done in July. I’m currently working on page 159 but my productivity slowed to a crawl when I started my current storyboarding gig. I went from a page a day to a panel or two a week. But – unlike other ‘breaks’ I’m still plugging away. And my current schedule has a week off after every two boards, so I’m hoping I’ll be able to play catch up during the weeks off. I’m still hoping   to have the pencils complete early in the new year and inks done by mid-summer.

I’ve hit the part of the story where I really can’t show full pages without spoilers, so from now on it’ll be a panel here and there for show and tell.

And… here’s page 144, drawn in Manga Studio: