It’s mine. It’s twisted. It’s art for its own sake. I draw things as I see it on paper and I draw things as they are in my minds eye. It’s sorta of a Magical Realism piece. There’s no need to straighten anything out just entangle my intertwine.
I’ll let you interpret the rest and allow you to see whatever you see. I’ve told you too much already, but a penny for YOUR thoughts.
It’s Friday the 13th and we’ve got a brand spankin’ new post: my version of a Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas Movie Poster.
I’ve been working on this for a while now. I’ve been super busy getting ready to graduate school and I found the time to finish up and polish this piece which I am pretty proud of. It’s kinda the culmination of all of my Fear and Loathing posts. This gonzo-inspired vision is available for purchase as a high quality artist print and movie poster:
For those who are wondering, yes that is not the original Ralph Steadman lettering from the book or movie poster. I made it myself with ink, brush, and watercolor paper. It was fun as hell trying to recreate such iconic lettering. I used the original as reference, but I wanted to bring something new to the table.
Below are some of the steps I took to creating the poster and character, Enjoy
above is a rough layout sketch, below is one of the final thumbnail drawings for the poster
below are some thumbnail sketches and silhouettes when I was designing the character Raoul Duke
To whet your appetite for daily art, a snippet of something I’m working….
If your not sure what the hell this is, welcome back to bat country!
“We’ve gotta get out of here. I think I’m getting the fear” ~ Dr. Gonzo
This is the sketch I came up with for a Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas Movie Poster. I shaded it a bit in Photoshop to make it look punchy. I cropped out the bottom because I have yet to put the logo in it. I have already started the final colored version of this and it should be coming around fairly soon so keep your eyes open.
Well, today I’m also having knee surgery which sucks. Hopefully the doctor will be able to fix the problem. It might be hard to post art while I’m recovering, but I’ll be back…..
Many moons ago, I was working on the tonal study for a layout sketch of this Hawaii beach kite shop you see partially digitally painted today. Obviously, it is still a work in progress, but all my selections are made so the boring technical stuff is over.
The selection process essentially allows me to stay true to the shapes I created in my original drawing. With these shapes all selected out, I am able to paint within a particular selection which is a pretty powerful tool.
I am having some trouble thinking of how far I can push the colors for the kites in shadow. That is to say, how much color can I get away with without drawing attention away from the main kite the little girl is playing with and the story which is supposed to go along with that.
I refer you back to the origins of the sketch in original layout “Welcome, to Big Kahuna’s Kite Shop” and the first tonal step. I still have a ways to go, but things are coming together.
Below are some sketch concepts for the prop design for the kite shop. Enjoy…..
“The possibility of physical and mental collapse is now very real. No sympathy for the Devil, keep that in mind. Buy the ticket, take the ride.” ~ Raoul Duke
In this final Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas character design of Raoul Duke, I wanted to spend a minute recapping the journey. Most of the Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas work I have posted on the site have been part of a class assignment for a character design course I have been taking. I was instructed to choose a story and to create my own designs of the various characters.
This may be my last character design for my class, but it doesn’t mean this is the last one I will draw. I do plan to rework a few thing here and there including the Dr. Gonzo character. I will probably also make a movie poster.
From the Hitchhiker to Dr. Gonzo and from the Vegas Lizard People to Raoul Duke, all the different character have been a lot of fun to draw. There are a few other characters that I’d like to tackle in the future including the cops and Lucy, but if anyone wants me to do a particular character in Fear and Loathing I am open to suggestions.
I may also show some more tweaked versions of these characters along with some other conceptual sketches from time to time, but for now this is the last one except for the completed reworked version of that “ rotten attorney” Dr. Gonzo.
You may be seeing a little less Fear and Loathing soon as I will begin to move on to some other things, but fret not as one thing you can count on is that more sketches are on the way.
“Where there is no imagination there is no horror” ~ Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
I remember growing up thinking, wouldn’t it be cool if one day there was a zombie outbreak and life changed dramatically. I still don’t feel this way, but I remember wishing something would happen. It didn’t have to be zombies. It could have been vampires or werewolves. Just something crazy so life wouldn’t feel so mundane. Now I create art to keep things interesting.
I’ve never been a huge fan of the zombie movie genre, but I am a fan of horror. I remember when I was little and walking into a bookstore and being mesmerized by the book covers that had the scariest monsters on them. I would look at the book having no clue what it was about, but I would beg my mom to buy them for me. It was the same way at the video store.
I even remember enjoying my nightmares. The earliest art I could remember making was always horror. My mom would look at my work and say why don’t you draw something pretty like rainbows or butterflies and I would just laugh. Since then I have expanded my horizons, but I guess you could say horror was my gateway drug into creating art.
I was thinking about posting some clip from some zombie movies, but I am unsure which ones are really best. The only zombie movies I remember liking were Thriller, 28 Days Later and Shaun of the Dead. I know there are a few others I liked, but nothing else immediately comes to mind. I guess just a couple of faceless movies that were on in the wee hours of the night sparking my imagination.
What I am a big fan of is the Robert Kirkman comic: The Walking Dead. Now there is some good reading. The stories being told in that book just blow me away. Stories like that remind me why I’m glad we live in a world without zombies (or do we?).
So many of us live our lives on a routine. It’s like we’re sleepwalking through life. It’s the same thing over and over and over again. Consequently, our brains all too often vacantly skip from moment to moment and our lives just fly by us.
I hope today’s zombie sketch messes with your head a little, but I hope you take the next step to evaluate why you find this interesting, disturbing, or whatever. For me, the answer is simple. It’s reminder that’s it’s high time time for all of us to start changing our patterns and explore the possibilities life has to offer us lest we become the mindless monster of passive destruction rather than a thinking affirmation of the creative force. I cannot express how important it is for all of us to find that spark in our lives which will stop that unconscious drift so our brains can turn on again.
Right now I want you to remember what it was like to be a kid and the joys of discovery clear eyes could make. Maybe if we could all look at the world again with new eyes, it wouldn’t appear so mundane and we wouldn’t be too afraid of stepping out of our little boxes. Maybe we would find ourselves excited to make this world a better place, start using our imaginations and no longer be content with the status quo.
The sad truth is that there are obviously worse futures than a zombie outbreak and we are seeing hints of it everyday. Maybe I’m just babbling, but I know we have no future if we continue to be zombies. I also know I’m just as guilty as anyone else so I’m going to try and follow my own advice and start living.
With every piece of art I guess you could say I am trying to create a new vision of the world: a world inside the world. By coming to my little corner of the internet, you participate and interact with my creative force. You empower my ideas with your thoughts and perspective, but I also hope I am empowering you to see things a little differently. You may not always manifest your own vision as I would, but I would like to think you carry that audacity to create into the world and that you make real what only you can see in your own life with your own imagination. I aspire to be a part of that.
I want you to know that all of you are capable of being artists as long as you make that affirmative decision to bring your imagination into the world in whatever form inspires you. If you can accomplish that, you are the farthest thing from a zombie imaginable.
Well, I hope you enjoyed today’s post. You never know what you going to get here at Jay Zuck’s Sketch of the Day so stay tuned. There are few projects in the works I’m really excited about showing you guys. I guess that’s all for now, so I’ll leave you with some awesome music from one of my favorite DJ’s: D-Styles. It’s a little song called Murder Factory from the amazing album Phantazmagorea.
“I’m the one who steps from the shadows, all trenchcoat and cigarette and arrogance, ready to deal with the madness. Oh, I’ve got it all sewn up. I can save you. If it takes the last drop of your blood, I’ll drive your demons away. I’ll kick them in the bollocks and spit on them when they’re down and then I’ll be gone back into darkness, leaving only a nod and a wink and a wisecrack. I walk my path alone… who would walk with me?” ~ John Constantine
Today’s post was a exercise in mimicking a noir style based off of a Hellblazer comic book cover. It all started as an ink sketch in my sketchbook.
I actually drew it a while back and completely forgot that I did. I was flipping threw my sketchbook when I rediscovered it and I was greeted with the satisfaction one feels when finding lost money in a coat pocket.
I decided that it would be fun to scan it in to play around a bit with Photoshop. I experimented a little with partially inverting my line work which added some interesting textures. I also started to add some highlights to make the character pop and then overlaid a brick texture to give it a dark alleyway look. Finally, I slapped on my Simian logo for your friendly neighborhood graffiti. Good times and smoke’em if y’ah gottem and by that of course I mean happy belated 420.
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And if you made it down this far you totally deserve an extra bonus in the form of another Constatine sketch.
“Ours is not a perfect world, and therefore the old must die in order that the young, that which is more perfect or at any rate capable of greater perfection, may live. Thus death becomes a thing necessary and useful in the evolution of the whole; the destruction of one celestial body contributes to the progress of the rest of the universe.” ~ Max Wilhelm Meyer
The last thing you might have been expecting from the colorful cartoony scene above is that it was really depicting the end of the world. It is not a realistic interpretation of the apocalypse, but is rather more of a symbolic and dream-like view of those end of days in which a father explains to his son how the world fell apart and how even in these most dire hours things aren’t so bad
I often wonder myself whether the end of the world is but a dream and the act of finding something uplifting is necessary to begin anew.
“You may not believe that Loch Ness is Jurassic Park, but that doesn’t mean that there isn’t something in Loch Ness that is yet to be explained.” ~ BBC News on the occasion of the 75th anniversary of Nessie
This is a digital painting that I began for a children’s story a while back and never quite finished. My girlfriend to a liking to it and wanted me to put it up. She thought that it represented some of the diversity in my work. I know that it is a departure in style for me, but I would be curious to know what you think.
