The Animated Lone Ranger Poster!!

One of the last Ranger posts I did (not here but on social media) was an animated style poster. I was never really ok with it. They were doodles really and I had larger plans. I might even say that I "phoned it in". My apologies. So I decided to go big with it. I was going to go all out and push myself! I wanted to really design the characters and do an entire poster as if it was hanging in a theater for a fully animated movie!! Working on my iPad I am able to keep working the pose that I selected and add layer on layer and push the drawing around. Much faster than re-drawing it every time. The six shooters I got from Sketchup and was able to patch the drawing and splice them in. Such a timesaver and they look much better than me drawing them. The part that actually gave me the most trepidation was the background art. Drawing landscapes is usually not my thing but I do it. Since I was going "fully animated" here, I did quite a lot of research on backgrounds and styles and found one that I thought would not only work the best but turned out to be really fun to do as well! Then, when I thought I was headed to the finish, I got the crazy idea to add more characters. I tried to talk myself out of it but it was no use. It was the way to go, so back to the sketchbook. I mean, every hero needs a villain so drawing an evil cowboy just seemed like fun anyway. The other character I added would obviously be the female in the story. She is not based on any actual character from Lone Ranger lore so she is really an amalgamation of my own concoction. I call her Penelope Red if you must know and figured she's be the "saloon girl" with the heart of gold. I had already made a clean, vector version of the old Lone Ranger comic book logo so I was able to grab that and put it in too. I am SO thrilled how this came out! Here is my finished Lone Ranger Animated movie poster and a detail shot to boot. I thought it fun that I could do things in the poster that would more than likely not be allowed today with the guns and gunfire, the busty saloon girl and the villain is not only smoking, but blowing a smoke ring!

 
Enjoy!!

Strange New Worlds!

 I previously wrote that not only am I a big Star Trek fan, but that Captain Pike has been my favorite character since first seeing him in the two part episode that was cut from the unused pilot. So naturally I was thrilled that he was FINALLY getting his own show! I have previously posted a few pics of him and his crew but I figured it was time to do a new one based on the actual show. So I set about to design it and I even found an old Star Trek piece of art to use as my inspiration. I started gathering all my reference and even started work. And then stopped. Then started again. And stopped again. I was stuck in a rut. I felt like working on the picture was like a visit to the dentist. I just didn't want to do it. Sometimes this happens because I get distracted and want to work on a different picture so I figure I will just come back to it, but this was not the case. I didn't want to make ANY pictures. I was burnt out. So it sat. After some time, I felt the itch to do things again but unfortunately this was not it. I did open the files and saw that I did have enough done to use and it actually looked better than I remembered it. I am actually quite pleased with the outcome and maybe it was right for me to stop when I did. Originally it was going to be a very complex piece with all the cast members but I only had the main three done and the backdrop. Truth be told, I like this version better than what I had planned! I hope you like it too.

Enjoy!