Smoking Holes

Here's some rough sketch ideas I had for what would become the illustrated header for the "Smoking Holes That Were Once My Eyes..." blog--

 

 


 I liked this one, particularly...

 I did a tighter penciled version,  but some things were "off" about it, so I started again from scratch

 This version, below, was nearly the final one, but I wasn't happy with the glasses; they were in the way, and I screwd them up a bit while inking them. Now, if this was a paying gig for someone else, I would've found a solution with the glasses... but for this, I decided to skip 'em. I put the drawing, and the launch of the blog itself, on the back burner for awhile.

Here's the finished version, in black & white. It made sense to go simpler and even more cartoony. The hands are a bit funky, but are adequate for this. I was eager to color it.

The finished piece, colored in Photoshop--

 

Renovating the Castle

When I wanted to use this 2004 pen & ink/brush drawing I made of director William Castle (from the intro to The Tingler (1959)) to help kick off my "Smoking Holes..." blog earlier this week, I took another look at a screen shot from the film, and noticed that I'd originally gotten a few details of his face and head slightly wrong.

Overall, it looks like him, but just a bit "off"... so I got out my Ugee pad and stylus, and digitally re-drew his brows, nose and chin... touched-up his hair, mouth and ears... and corrected an odd taper I gave his skull just above his ears. I also fixed the weird angular shoulders I had previously given him, and improved the neck shadow. Finally, I made the three separate dialogue balloons into one contiguous balloon, and added a light grey tone to the background, to make him pop out more.