Thursday, January 08, 2009

88-08: Looking Back Part 1

2008 was the 20th anniversary of my local comic book store, Star Clipper, and to commemorate the event they asked local comic artists to contribute two pieces each for an art show on their premises. The parameters were pretty broad but at the heart of it was the theme of "20 Years". A couple of the artists, and myself, latched onto that and decided to go with the concept of finding pieces that were 20 yrs old and then reimagining them through the lens of 20 years of experience we've had as artists. The following 2 drawings constitute my first piece. I'll post the second one in a few days.


When going through my old drawings I was looking for this above piece in particular. I thought it was drawn about 20 yrs ago and to my surprise and joy, when I found it, it actually had "88" written on the drawing. Slam dunk.
I was in the eighth grade when I drew this and the concept was to take the Arthurian legends (which I, to this day, know very little about--I never let ignorance get in my way) and then, out of those legends, create a superhero team. Thus, Merlin and the Marauders was born!
I don't even know where to start with commenting on this drawing--give me a break, I was 13!

With the following image I wanted to stylistically go in a completely opposite direction to offer a distinct contrast. I wanted to try something in color and I was, in the composition, trying to evoke some static 16th century painting. Only, with pens and watercolor. Anyway, I had a lot of fun reimagining my eighth grade drawing and I was pretty happy with the way it turned out.
Hope you enjoy!

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

hey, that's pretty cool brian! it's fun to see some of the things that go on in the minds of young artists. your current rendition of your original idea is very cool, too. thanks for sharing!

-andy v.

ron said...

I hadn't noticed before that Firebird was a member of the Marauders.

Doctor Fantastic said...

Your watercolors on this piece are kickass, Brian!

Ashlee M said...

This was lovely thanks for sharing this