Artists I Like: Les Toil

Brian Clarke, aka Les Toil, is a Californian artist I first encountered in the early days of my internet life, c. 2000 or something. I don't know for sure.

What drew me to his work was that he was drawing Toil Girls... big beautiful women. Like for real, really wonderful, beautiful, actual women. He used to (still does?) take commissions from real models to do their Toil Girls portraits. And man, they are grand.

He's also got a boat load of Big Daddy Roth type of vibes going on that I admire, even though, in those days, I didn't know who Roth was. I didn't grow up in that culture and any vibes I got from it were secondary.

This is the portion of the post where someone might discuss Toil's influences. But I have recently realized I suck at doing that. It happened when I heard someone say that "Magenta Mountain" by King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard sounded a lot like the Flaming Lips. As soon as they said it, I heard it. But if they hadn't said it I never would have thought of that. Even though it kind of feels obvious.

I'm the same with a lot of visual art. Of course Toil has influences, one of them being the late great Duane Bryers. But who else influenced Toil? Is he into fantasy artists like Boris Vallejo? Does he love some Robert Williams? I bet he likes some Coop. I'm not sure. I could probably research it and find out. Or just go to Facebook and ask him directly. But I'm pretty shy and I likely won't do that.

Anyway... let's wrap this up. Go check out some Les Toil art, even the fun animal stuff if you're not into the lovely ladies.

Black Pudding Heavy Helping Vol Two

Black Pudding Heavy Helping Vol. Two is now available!

In this volume you get issues 5-8 of the zine plus some new pages and handy indexes. Everything is arranged into sections, just like in Vol. One, for your ease of use. Because I care about you.

Let's see... what is in this thing? Here are a few tidbits you'll find...

Some comics, character sheets, character classes (alien, flamer, goon royale, rat bastard, etc.), monsters (troglozyte, monstrous toad, octonods, etc.), the wizard Zasto Filistian and his cohorts, many hirelings from the Bleeding Ox (Emma the Sage, Uulf, Chuck the Mucker, Iko Rain, Umber Jon, etc.), adventures (Marigold Hills, Rat Queen, Ghiki's Hole, etc.), a bunch of random tables, a setting (Yria, with its dozen gods and entities, map, city descriptions, etc.), cover gallery, indexes.

There's an 8 page adventure called Underground Down Below based entirely on a lovely map by Evlyn Moreau.

Overall, it's a 127 page black and white hardback you can whip out at your table and use however you like. Great fodder for a sandbox campaign.

Artists I Like: Jeffrey Catherine Jones

This week's entry is a figure with which I am only marginally familiar, though I've seen her work all over the place.

Jeffrey Catherine Jones, born in 1944, did a ton of book covers in the 60s and 70s. Luscious work, rich in somber colors and visceral figures. When I see a Jones piece, I usually am reminded of old 70s books I saw as a kid that had those muted colors. There a King Arthur book I had... no idea what it was called or how I got it. And the art in it was similar to Jones's vibe, at least in my memory. The figures were dramatic, and the themes kind of morose and dark.

Jones seems to have lived as a man for most of her life, transitioning in the 90s. I can't imagine how hard it would have been to grow up in those times and struggle with something as deep, fundamental, and confusing as gender. And to have the courage to speak to the world who you are... years before the topic became a mainstream discussion? Amazing.

She did work for Creepy, Witzend, Vampirella... and had some collaborations with my favorite artist Vaughn Bodé.

Making Zines!

I've been making zines. Kind of obsessively. I have no idea what triggered this, and that's fine. I tend to strike while the iron is hot, or I try to. If I don't do it that way then I don't get shit done.

Zines. I've made about six of them in the past week. Mostly sketchbooks and comics. Stuff I already had lying around and decided to paste up into little books, print on my shitty old laser printer, trim with my shitty old paper cutter, and staple into zines. Maybe add some dashes from paint pens on the covers.

I've written about this before, but I consider my first encounter with the concept of a zine to be from around 1980 when I got my wee child hands on some mini-comic sized DC origins comics. I remember thinking "wow... you can make comics this small?" Later, around 1987, my friend in high school introduced me to some proper small press zines and APAs. Proper zines... 8.5x11 sheets of paper with photocopied pages folded and stapled into digest sized books. A revelation!

I created lots of them in the 90s. Traded with other zinesters. Had a grand ole time. Then the internet came along and changed literally every fucking thing in the world.

Anyway... I've been making zines again. The only real difference in my methods this past week is that I'm pasting up in Photoshop instead of with scissors and tape.

The first one I made is the 24 page Hymla the Horn sketchbook. I had just finished drawing two dozen or so drawings of this plump barbarian wench in my square sketchbook, so the drawings were all in a square format. I printed these on 8.5x11 and then just trimmed them down to their final 4x4 size.

Once I held this on in my hand I knew I had once again been bitten by the zine bug. I had to make more. After all, I have a metric ton of material lying around I can use to create these little books. Let's have some fun, then.

Next up, I created another square format book collecting various recent sketches and drawings. I called it Swim With the Fish based on a drawing of the same name. This one was also 24 pages, as were most of the ones I made this week.

Then I created one called Space Run, which is a bunch of doodles of weird space people and ships.

After that, I kept going. I made I Am a Robot... Can you guess what's in it? Oh, there's a follow-up called My Metal Head but I don't have one printed out right now to photo. Also about robots.

So the most recent one I put together I just finished a few hours ago. It's called Yria. That's that name of the implied setting of Black Pudding (explicit in issue 7). It features a 16 page comic about Zarp, my little red devil character. The idea here is that I'll do an issue now and then featuring comics that take place in this world. Fun, right? This one is a digest sized zine, larger than the others.

Yeah, so this has been a hoot. I would like to put all these up for sale on my website soon. I just need to sort out the shipping method and costs. I know you can drop a single mini comic into a standard envelope, which would be the price of a single stamp. But mailing all of these at once would cost a bit more. I'm thinking somewhere around $5, media mail, in the USA.

I'll post about it when I can. Anyone interested in getting these can keep their eyes peeled. Each copy is unique because I'm adding a bit of paint color to the cover and signing them. Plus, as is the nature of hand-made zines, each is necessarily unique because you're printing and trimming by hand. Also, my old laser printer has spotty blacks... which I kinda like. Gives it a bit of texture.

More later. If you are a zine fan, let me know about your zines or your zine collection! I love that stuff.

Artists I Like: Duane Bryers

I already posted about Duane Bryers here, and this post is largely a re-posting of that same content. Also, it's my birthday and what better thing could I ask for on my birthday than Hilda?

You remember good old Hilda? Calendar girl Hilda? Yeah, she's the creation of Duane Bryers, may he rest in peace.

I think it was the early 2000s when I laid eyes on Hilda, a 50s pinup girl of the finest order. Unlike most other pinup girls, Hilda had some junk in the trunk. She was chubby, and lovely, and fun.

Bryers' style is akin to a lot of painters at the time and, to my eyes, reminds me very much of Norman Rockwell. Because everyone who painted in that style at that time reminded everyone of Normal Rockwell. Rockwell was the Frazetta of American culture painting.

But I think it's more fair to say Bryers was akin to Gil Elvgreen, a contemporary whose style is more similar to Bryers than someone like Alberto Vargas... all of whom are best known for painting pinup ladies. God bless 'em.

I don't know much about Bryers outside of his Hilda work, but here's a great interview with the late artist by another artist I love, Les Toil. I wish I owned some of those old Hilda calendars. I wonder how much they go for on eBay?

Well, would you take a look at this? Les Toil has a bunch of Hilda stuff!

It it interesting to me that though Hilda was often painted in comical situations, such as farting next to the stove, wearing a flour sack for a bikini, and falling off of logs, she is quite often painted in quiet, peaceful moments of bliss or even in overtly sexy poses. There's a shitty trend in media to present the fat girl as comic relief or a figure to be aided by the protagonist to make them look better. How often is the fat chick on TV allowed to just be hot? Or to just be, for that matter?

Hilda is great. I'm happy Duane Bryers created her and dedicated so many paintings to her adventures.

So... In the back of my lizard brain I'm thinking about my character Hymla, who is basically a chubby, rude, violent, but kind of sweet barbarian, and how much she is probably inspired by these classic Hilda images.

GOZR Drawing

Working on some new GOZR stuff.

One thing I loved about making this game was just how liberating it was. I was inventing a new game right there on the page, drawing and noodling and doodling all on the canvas as I went. I didn't have a ton of preliminary thought on this. I just kind of went into it wild.

I created the entire project digitally, drawing it with my Intuos 4 tablet and Photoshop 7. This is old tech, now. Most of you who use digital tools probably use much more recent hardware and software. Hell, PS7 came out in 2002 for fuck's sake. What the hell am I doing using 22 year old software?

Because the shit works for what I do. It's not like they didn't understand how to make drawing software 22 years ago. They did. And PS7 was very good for drawing (the way I do it).

Anyway, software and hardware aside, it is very liberating to draw digitally. I know I've been talking about how much I absolutely love drawing with traditional media for the past several years, but I'm also a big huge lover of drawing digitally. And I'll tell you why.

When I was working on GOZR pages I could let my creativity go nuts because of the great benefit of the medium: nothing is permanent. Lay down a bunch of strokes that you don't like? Undo. Or erase. Either way, they're gone. Do some different ones. You put that d6 table too close to the edge of the canvas? Nudge the whole thing over. Or you can just shove words or sentences or images around willy-nilly. You can reduce the size of something a little bit so you can fit another d6 table. You can fade something into the background so you can put some words over it.

In a word, this is fun.

Not that I'm abandoning all those brush pens I yak about.

You see, that's the beauty of being a free spirit artist. You don't have to marry one thing or the other. You can draw on your tablet, then shove it to the side and whip out a sketchbook. And I do that all the time.

Currently working on some GOZR revisions and a comic. Have a great Sunday.

Artists I Like: Wayne Reynolds

Ok, this entry in the series is a little bit different because I'm not a huge fan of British artist Wayne Reynolds' art. But I do like most of it, I even love some of it. The main reason I wanted to include him in the roster is that he used to get shit on a lot.

Remember the good old days of Dungeons & Dragons 4th edition? If not, don't bother looking it up. It was a tumultuous time when the world's most popular game underwent a massive edition change, morphing from the already heavily-modified 3rd edition (that was quite popular) to an even more radically-modified 4th edition that embraced the computer gaming trends of the 2000s. To be specific, it seems to have been designed to play more like World of Warcraft than Dungeons & Dragons.

This change didn't sit well with many fans of the game. But it did mesh with many other fans. So it was a mixed reception. And here's the thing to remember when you fuck around with a beloved nerd culture's shit... they will complain. Loudly. Repeatedly. Often irrationally.

Enter Wayne Reynolds, the primary artist associated with the 4th edition brand. His work had the look and feel of modern computer gaming. I confess when I first laid eyes on one of his paintings I thought it was digitally-rendered. And while I didn't have any bias against digital art, I recognized that such a look contributed to the perception that D&D's new direction was feeding too heavily off the CRPG market... a market that exists because of Dungeons & Dragons and constantly borrows heavily from it!

In reality, Reynolds' art from that time was quite traditional, with real paint and brushes. He was prolific and dynamic. His figures, to my eyes, looked heavily inspired by 90s comic art. You know... exaggerated anatomy, huge weapons, and far too many pouches and belts. But it was cool.

A lot of folks really hated this art. They saw it as WoW art invading the sacred spaces where should reign Larry Elmore, Jeff Easley, and Brom. But I never quite understood the vitriol. Reynolds did fine work. He was popular with most folks. He went on to be the primary artist for the original edition of Pathfinder, which was itself a clone and carryover of Dungeons & Dragons 3rd edition. So many of the nerds complaining about the changes to D&D, and often about Wayne Reynolds, jumped ship to a game that played more like their beloved classic and was itself heavily illustrated by Wayne Reynolds.

Anyway, that's my perception of the era and how this artist existed within it. My memories are imperfect, I'm sure. Here's some art by Wayne Reynolds that I dig.

 

Artists I Like: Earl Norem

Earl Norem is a legend. From men's magazines to baseball to toys to comics, he has illustrated more covers than I have eaten Milky Way bars... and that's saying a lot.

When I was a teenager I discovered Savage Sword of Conan and, of course, Norem eventually showed up on a cover (he did at least 48 SSoC covers!) and, at that time, I was not as blown away by him as with Joe Jusko or Michael Golden. It felt like I was seeing an older painter at work and his style was out of synch with what I expected.

But he won me over. I kept seeing Norem covers and kind of fell in love with his textures and colors and old school aesthetic. I can't say just how much his work has influenced me, to be honest. Maybe not that much. I don't know. But he's been in my head canon since the 80s so there must be some osmosis happening.

Earl Norem died in 2015 at the age of 92. A WWII vet, and a massively accomplished and respected illustrator.