following the footsteps of a rag doll dance

[turtlesoup]

So this was kind of the weirdest Halloween ever. Growing up, I remember getting a dusting of snow around this time of year once or twice, but nothing like ... stepping outside the American Legion building in White River Junction for a breather during the Dust Ball and watching the world filling with white. We were really fortunate up here; back home in Western Massachusetts, some of my friends are still without heat or electricity (my parents just got theirs back today) ... courtesy of huge amounts of unseasonable wet snow being dumped on leaf-laden branches. Which was clearly entirely awful. :( Here in Vermont, the few inches we got just made things a little extra weird.

Actually, it was pretty fabulous time; toonies know how to do the holiday right, and the costumes were all amazing. I was pretty proud of mine, simple as it was:



Here are a few more odds and ends for you! We're working on some longer comic projects at the moment, so content here's probably going to slow down again while I'm focused on producing all that. However.



We were assigned to draw a romance comic cover in the style of various decades; mine was the 1970s. I wanted to do something a little ... different, while still fitting the rather skewed sort of style employed by the genre at the time.

We were given the opportunity to work with live models for this assignment, which was kind of fabulous. I'd love to be able to do this more often - the session was a really fun time in itself, and it was super helpful (even though I did wind up changing things around a bit). Here are the fabulous Jen and James obligingly posing for the cover design I chose:



They posed a whole lot more than that, though, because I found myself oddly really into this assignment. At some point, I might have to do fully realized versions of all my ideas, or even mess around and create a whole spoof romance comic (some mythical day when I have more free time). I picked the design I did because it was the most dynamic, but it was a tough decision:



I guess I'm just a romantic. ;)

Also, one more quick oddity: last week we put together some composite creatures. We passed around a variety of nature texts, chose four animals and birds together at random, and stitched them together to create new beasties. This was a really interesting assignment for me, because I generally have a lot of difficulty drawing animals (not to mention inventing them)!

The animals I wound up with were a llama, an egret, a rooster (wound up with an all-bird book the third time, so I had no choice but to include two), and a langur. As it was an in-class exercise, I had to work fast (my kryptonite), making this model sheet pretty messy and all over the place. But you get the idea:



In spite of the double-bird effect, I'm actually pretty thrilled with this critter and want to use it in a goofy fantasy story of some sort, when the opportunity arises. In the meantime, the second part of the assignment was to pass the sheet off to a classmate to draw from. My lovely friend Rachel knocked this out in no time flat (she is absurdly speedy):



It's PERFECT. Exactly the sort of thing I was imagining. Also, that's meeee! :D (Fanart, as I discovered when I was still a teenager drawing a lot of faux-anime, is pretty much the best thing ever.)

Well, that's all she drew for now! Practically a drive-by sort of post. I need to go play with androids, fifties hairstyles, swords and swamp creatures ... it's an odd balance of stress and sheer fun around these parts.