Unfinished

Wow -- had a blast at the con, even though Sunday was real slow for me and guys in our little corner of artists' alley.

The above is an unfinished con sketch of the Hulk.

I might be able to show some preliminary work on my next project soonish -- possibly by the end of the week.

~Richard

Keiji Iwakara

Just about to head out for the last day of the 2008 FanExpo.

Having a great time -- really enjoying sitting and sketching. Well, the chairs aren't that enjoyable, but you get the idea.

The above is one of the con sketches; Anthony wanted a drawing of his favourite Batman statue (by Keiji Iwakara), but updated to the darker, more modern suit (not the Grant Morrison recently revived Batman of Ka-la-loo -- yeah, I know that's not the place. . . ).

I also got to draw Terror Inc. for the first time in 15 years -- heh.

~R

Old Stuff

About ten months back I moved my studio to a different room in my house, but I managed to leave piles of books, comics and old work behind in a space that's intended to become our library. We've been working at it a great deal lately and a large amount of artwork long forgotten has emerged. Here's a few peices I thought were reasonably blog worthy:

The dinohead-thing was some sort of self-promo piece and the asshead from Midsummer Night's Dream was some illo for an educational publisher.

One year later. . . .

My long-time friend Mike Wieringo passed away a year ago today.

I meant to start the day with a quick sketch in his memory, but doing that overloaded the process and a quick sketch took all day with dozens of false starts.

I decided that the Flash sketch would have to do, weak as it is, since Flash was the gig Mike started shortly after we first met at a New York comicon.

I knew Mike for over 15 years, spending most of that time talking on the phone for way too long every week or so. I never bother with speed dial settings on my phones, I'm kinda lazy that way, so I have a print out of my frequently called numbers -- Mike's name & number is still on it.

Jack Magic

Years ago I was invited to be a part of the initial B&W Image line Jim Valentino was starting up. This was around 1996-8 -- can't really be sure. At the time I was already playing around with a creator-owned project. I was calling it Jack Magic and I was juggling two versions of it; one a very light stranger in a strange land version and a darker version that owed a lot to weird mix of reading on darker faerie tales, Northern Ireland and video game development.

I did a few pieces as I played with it and the one above is one of them, just today uncovered from a pile of stuff in my old studio space. Family stuff got seriously in the way of my following through with Jack Magic, so the above piece just ended up on my website of the time.

Weirdly, it attracted some strange amount of attention; twice I had film producers contact me with interest in optioning the story (since there wasn't anything more to it than that, nothing happened) and I was asked by some Northern European RPG company to use parts of the image for their website and mascot.

It was a real quick watercolour & pencil crayon piece and was a pile of fun to do.

Marvel Masterworks Artists Proof Cards

Artist's Proof cardsI have two sets of 10 artist proof blanks from the past Marvel Masterworks sets I contributed to and haven't done a one of them. I'm about to get really really busy, so I want to do these before I get swamped again.
They look like this:


I'm going to do these as commissions, charging 40.00 for black and white and 80.00 for full colour. I'm only making 9 from each of these available as I'm planning to do one from each set in colour and make them available to a comics-related charity.

We're coming up on the one-year anniversary of the passing of my good friend Mike Weiringo, so I'm leaning towards choosing one of his preferred charities.I have to work within the restrictions of the regular set: no smoking, no animated or film versions of the Marvel characters, no Howard the Duck, nude versions, zombie versions or licensed characters Marvel published.

Upper Deck and Marvel will have to approve all of these before I deliver them, of course. PM me or e-mail me at richardpace (at) rogers (dot) com or something to let me know what you want.

I'll prolly keep updates of how many and which ones are available as this proceeds.Oh, Paypal will prolly be the payment mode of choice here.

~Richard