Mighty

A few (read: many) years ago, a couple of musicians that I worked with decided that they would record a prog metal EP. Mostly, this was an ironic joke: all of them were trained jazz musicians (and pretty good ones) with the only earnest member of the ad hoc trio being a classic rock tone poem enthusiast as a kid, which found its way to inform his choice of profession. As you may have guessed, he was also the writer. So I how was I involved in this? Since I have pretty much zero talent for music, they thought it funny to have a sort of over -the-top Manowar-style sword and sorcery cover for the five or six discs they were planning on burning, so they asked me to throw something together. Here's what came out:

Yes, there's some strange anatomy going on right there. Since this is pushing 15 years old at this point, and everyone's their own worst critic, I don't think it's unfair to say that this is one of the butt ugliest things I've ever seen. Still, it was my way of learning some of the basics of Photoshop (many of which I've forgotten), and they really dug it, so it wasn't a total loss.

As another kind of gag, I put together two or three redone covers for the writer guy. The music industry of the late 90s/ early 2000s just loved to repackage recently released material with special covers, so I jumped on board and did this:

I liked this one better, but probably because it was just separate scans of other stuff I sketched out that I cobbled together on a computer. The guy in the back was colored with markers and the spiky haired dude in the foreground was all magic wand and paint can. Except he doesn't have any ears. That's a little strange.

Anyway, so I haven't even thought about these since I made them and they've recently kind of resurfaced. Me being a dope that just can't let go, I've been a little inspired in the last week to do a sort of weird follow up. Let's call it the art for their never-to-be-released anniversary boxed set:

 

I wish I would have taken a pic of this in its primordial sketch form. I'm not really a great inker to begin with, and penciled images just seem to have a different dynamic to me; they're more exciting. This isn't the clearest picture, but I was about half done with the inks before taking it. Since I don't have a ton of time on my hands anymore, I sometimes doodle this stuff out during my lunch breaks, which gives me a solid hour to nail down a composition and decide where things need to be tighter and which parts can be looser. The sketch happened on Monday, and the beginning ink section went down on Tuesday. I finished inking it yesterday, so I'll put up a pick of that sometime later today or tomorrow.