I’ve been on a pin-up kick since finishing up and getting Wahoo Morris Book 2 printed.

The impetus started as an exercise in staying busy while sick with the flu, then it just became an exercise in fun while playing around with some styles I haven’t tackled in a while.

Continuing the theme of my last post, all of the pieces I have been working on have been finishing up earlier ideas and sketches.

The following three pin-ups (now finished) were all rough sketches that I was going to include as-is in my upcoming art book. While I was on the kick I figured why not finish them off.

Now that they are done I thought it might be interesting to show what the old pieces looked like before “finishing” them!

The Conan and John Carter sketches date back to 2010 when I was attempting to follow along with the ComicTwart sketch blog and was actively keeping a digital sketchbook.

The Tarzan/La of Opar piece was on the back of a location design from one of the animation studios I worked at in the early aughts, so it is the oldest unfinished idea I’ve used.

I have dozens of similar pin-up ‘ideas’ scribbled on layouts and in workbooks going back to the beginning of my career, so I could keep this process up for months, but I think it’s time to get back to some sequential story pages.

Whether I continue/finish any of the partially done stories in my archives, or start something brand new is a decision I’ll probably wait to make until Monday morning!

I went down a bit of a rabbit-hole lately, going through my stacks and stacks of old comic art and stories going back to my earliest months in High School. I was looking for stories and art to include in pdf anthologies I was putting together as bonus rewards for the Wahoo Morris Kickstarter.

One thing that struck me during the process was how prolific and full of ideas I was at a younger age. I would start multiple stories at the same time, finishing some, abandoning others.

The better I got, and the more ambitious I got, the greater the tendency to abandon a project and start over from scratch or move on.

Honestly, that didn’t change much as I turned pro, except that I’ve never had problems finishing if there is an outside influence, like a deadline or paycheck!

And I no longer start the same idea over from scratch again and again.

But my archives are full of half-done or briefly sketched out ideas for short stories and pin-ups I never quite got around to finishing.

Though, lately, I seem to have reversed my inclinations.

I’ve been stalled out on starting something new for ages. And the ideas just are not flowing.

But, after a slow startup, I seem to find it easy to finish off old loose ends.

I’ve been sick this week, and unable to concentrate through the fog and fever, I’ve tried to keep productive with some busy work.

I started by fleshing out my sketch for the back-cover portion of an intended wraparound cover to Sîan #1 and then picking away at the inks until it was completed. This one has been on the to-do list for awhile as one of my next to-be-published projects is a full-colour single issue of Sîan. Drawing a billion coins on the floor of a treasure vault was a little challenging while dizzy with a fever!

I then pulled out a sketch I had started as a potential cover to a planned pin-up/art book before changing my mind and abandoning it. I originally started drawing it last fall, so it’s not that old of a project, but it was based on a doodle I made on the back of a Katie & Orbie location design from around 15 years ago! I finished penciling it, then inked it, and will probably end up using it as the back cover to that proposed book.

Then, wanting to keep busy, I pulled out this abandoned pin-up I started over 10 years ago for an Edgar Rice Burroughs Fanzine a colleague was involved in at the time. It was of a scene from the novel the Cave Girl, and I was trying to do my best J. Allen St. John impersonation!

Deadlines got in the way and it sat unfinished until now.

I imported it into Clip Studio yesterday and inked it from scratch just for the hell of it. It really has no purpose, but it can replace the pencil and partially inked version that was going to go in the Art Book.

And to keep the momentum going, today, I pulled out 3 other old pin-up sketches and started fleshing them out as well as pulling out a 3 page story I started in 1997 that was supposed to be my first submission to Mythography but was abandoned when I couldn’t shoe-horn the plot into the allotted 3 pages. If I can flesh it out to 4 pages, then the planned anthology book of my Mythography and Forbidden Book stories will be a few pages longer.

And maybe, just maybe, getting a bunch of finished art done in a short period of time just might start to knock loose some of those mental blocks that are still getting in the way of the new ideas starting to flow again!

No Inktober challenge for me this year.

I was planning on participating, going so far as organizing a themed prompt list for myself and planning  a chapbook/sketchbook to publish the results.

Then on Friday I signed on to storyboard on a new (to me ) TV show. It starts the second week of November, I’m guaranteed two episodes and if I get the style of the show to their satisfaction it will run until April. So the next 5 months I will be working 14 hour days 7 days a week with minimal down time.

Which means I have 5 weeks left to get Wahoo Morris Book 2 and my short story anthology book print ready, or I won’t have them for next years convention circuit. And I need to get the Kickstarter for Wahoo Morris prepped and ready for launch. And…. I was planning on starting my next comic project today as well, the inks of which I was going to use as a few of my Inktober pieces.

Now reality has set in, and instead of multi-tasking and doing a little bit every day of a bunch of projects,  I need to rank them in order of importance and get each one done before moving on to the next.

So, for this years Inktober, I’ll post art with the #Inktober hashtag if I get any done, but I won’t be attempting to hit it daily.

Maybe next year I’ll be able to commit to it.

In the meantime, here are all 14 of my pieces from 2016 in one place.

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!