Unwanted Valentines: Alien Face-Hugger

Unwanted Valentines:

Alien Face-Hugger

Happy Valentine's Day!  Well, here's the last of my series of Unwanted/Vaguely Inappropriate Valentine's Day Cards for this year.  I may return to it again when February rolls around next year... :-)  This one features the Face-Hugger from the Alien movies.

And, yes, that is my face being hugged, sans glasses. :-)

Here is the pen-and-brush original, which was scanned in and digitally colored in PhotoShop.  I used a No. 1 size scripting brush and Speedball Super Black ink.

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Done with brush and ink on 8-1/2" x 11" paper and colored digitally.

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Unwanted Valentines: The Thing: Split-Face

UNWANTED VALENTINES

The Thing: Split-Face

This Unwanted Valentine features Split-Face from John Carpenter's "The Thing" (1982), where Split-Face was a charred mess on a dissection table when MacReady and crew were trying to figure out what happened at the Norwegian camp.  Split-Face's origin was explained in the 2011 prequel.

Here's the brush and ink original, which I scanned in and colored in PhotoShop.

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Done with brush and ink on 8-1/2" x 11" paper, colored in PhotoShop.

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Unwanted Valentines: The Thing: Crab-Head

UNWANTED VALENTINES

The Thing: Crab-Head

This Valentine Card uses the Crab-Head creature from John Carpenter's "The Thing".

I first saw John Carpenter's "The Thing" when I was a teenager and thought it was awesome!  I always loved monster movies--and the monsters in this one were ultra-creepy, almost mangaesque in their horrific body distortions--and this version was an exercise in tension and paranoia.  While I saw the 2011 prequel to "The Thing" and thought it was pretty good, the John Carpenter version will remain the canonical version to my mind.  Most of the practical effects hold up pretty well, although, with that said, I wished they had gone through and digitally "sweetened" some of the effects when they released "The Thing" on Blu-Ray.

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STEP ONE:  I did some rough pencils using a blue-lead on 8-1/2" x 11" paper, then inked it with a No. 1 size script/round brush.

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STEP TWO:  After I scanned it into PhotoShop and cleaned it up, I created a Duplicate Layer, set it to MULTIPLY under Properties and colorized it, then added the lettering and called it DONE!

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Done with brush and ink on 8-1/2" x 11" paper and digitally colored in PhotoShop. 

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Unwanted Valentines: Flex Mentallo

UNWANTED VALENTINES

Flex Mentallo

As it just so happened, iFanboy is having a contest to create comic book related Valentines.  Luckily, I had the Man-Thing Valentine chambered and ready to go and sent that one off right away.  I thought I would send along a second one featuring one of my FAVORITE characters in comics: Flex Mentallo, the Man of Muscle Mystery!  I've been a fan of Flex since he first showed up in Grant Morrison's run in Doom Patrol as a parody/satire of the classic Charles Atlas ads, and his 4 Issue Limited-Series by Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely is in my Top 10 Favorite Comics of all time. 

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STEP ONE:  I penciled the image using a blue leaded pencil (the scan above is in gray-scale).  I was originally going to ink it with a brush and ink--that way, when I scanned it in, the inked lines would show up, but the blue lines would drop out.  But, then I got the idea to digitally ink half of the picture and then mirror the other half, which would work perfectly for this pose.  Also, as time was of the essence, I thought this would help me get it done quicker.  I'm sure it turned out the be the same amount of time either way.

So, I drew a divider line down the center of the page and penciled half of the pose.  I also included a three-quarter turned head just in case I wanted to make a slight change to the pose, figuring I could ink that separately and paste it over top if need be.  However, I think the original pose worked just fine... and I ran out of time for that, anyways.  Sigh...

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STEP TWO:  Here is the digitally inked layer.  I drew the left half of the image, copied it, and flipped it around so it mirrored the other half.  I had to rotate the halves of the picture a little bit to get them together properly, and there is a little something about the face which looks a bit like it was mirrored, but it generally worked pretty well.

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STEP THREE:  I created a new layer, digitally colored the drawing, and added the lettering.  I also changed his "Hero Halo" into a heart for the holiday.  Why not?  :-)  

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Blue line pencil on 8-1/2" x 11" paper, digitally inked and colored.

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Unwanted Valentines: Man-Thing

UNWANTED VALENTINES

MAN-THING

Over the next week, I hope to have a few more Unwanted Valentine's Day cards.  Stay tuned!

OK, this joke is just really obvious and I'm quite sure it's probably been done a kajillion times already...  Not that it has EVER stopped me before (nor will it in the future, alas).

Yes, there **REALLY** was a series published by Marvel Comics titled Giant-Size Man-Thing, which starred the titular character, Man-Thing, and had about three times as many pages as normal comics of the time (hence the term "Giant-Size").  This spawned many an obvious joke to those of us with the mentality of a 13-year-old (like myself).  The tagline for the comic was "Whoever Knows Fear Burns at the Touch of Man-Thing!"  So, of course, I had to work that into the card, as well...

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Here's the original pen-and-ink drawing which I scanned in and colorized.  I appropriated the logo from the "Giant-Size Man-Thing" comic, and did the lettering in PhotoShop, as well:

This was done with pen-and-ink on 8-1/2" x 11" paper and digitally colored in PhotoShop.

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