Dennis Jones
eclectic artwork & other random things
Tackle Football
I can not believe it’s December, we are entering the final stages of the professional tackle football season and I’m last place in my fantasy football league. My strategy of drafting only players with fishy names did not work at all!
CockRoachZilla
Back in May I did character design and concept work for another Clarks Pest Control commercial. This time a giant cockroach invades the city and he’s way too much for the army to handle… better call Clark! I love the way Clayt Ratzlaff breathes life into my little two dimensional pictures.
Holy Car Collectable, Batman!
Cryptozoic is currently headed into production with the 1966 classic TV Series Batmobile. Stephan Ehl did a truly amazing job with the sculpt for this. Here’s the box cover and packaging. Rumor has it we might be working on something else fun in the very near future!
2016 Thunderless NBA Finals
I’ve only been to one NBA game in my life. I saw the Oklahoma City Thunder play back in 2009 when Kevin Durant was just a pup. After sitting in nose bleed cheap seats for a quarter, my oldest son pulled some strings and got us ushered into bottom bowl, court side EXPENSIVE seats and the game magically got even better! It was sad to see OKC get so close this years only to lose, but the upcoming rematch of Cleveland and Golden State should be fun to watch, too…
…as long as neither team is scared of the net like fish basketball teams are.
French Flies
The bell rang in the diner. I sat my spatula down, wiped my greasy hands on my apron and picked up the servers ticket… it was for an order of my world famous, piping hot french flies. I filled the order, shoved it into the kitchen window and out to my customer. Later that night when I was cleaning up, I found this one last, little french fly laying on the counter.
Hockey Championship Game
My ice hockey team (The Bluezerz) fought its way through the playoffs and wound up in the championship game last night. It was a tightly contested affair, the game got a bit chippy (things were said to me that I hardly ever hear in church) and one of our defensemen got thrown out of the game. We soldiered on without him, played from behind the entire game and then scored a goal with only a few minutes remaining in the game. We hung on for a 4 to 3 championship win! I had one goal, one assist and one slice of championship pepperoni pizza.
Parental Wisdom
I scribbled this fellow into my sketchbook last night while watching the news and then slopped about fifteen minutes of color on him for good measure… and, yes, I heard something to this effect quite often as a kid…
1966 Batmobile Collectable Statue
This was a fun project I worked on a few months ago. The good folks at Cryptozoic saw a picture I did of my very first car (a 1970 Opel Kadette) and asked me to do the same sort of thing with the old 1966 Batmobile from the Batman TV Series.
I worked up a sketch with some quick color on it, DC Comics approved the concept, I did pencil views from different angles and a sculptor digitally created my idea and really took it to a whole different level… look at those flames and smoke… WOW!
A prototype was built and shown at the latest New York Toy Fair and WonderCon and this should hit the market and be available later on this year.
Another Sketch On The Go
We flew to Kansas City over Easter and that means I was drawing on the Surface Pro 4 again to kill travel time.
Making A Guest Appearance
Quarto Publishing just released a new drawing book by Carlos Gomes Cabral and I was asked to make a “guest artist” appearance in it… and this is it.
Surface Pro 4 Pen
I just spent a great week with my Oklahoma kids helping them move into a fabulous new house. I flew out last Thursday (which was my birthday) and I killed time on the flight once again with my Surface Pro 4 tablet. This happy little redheaded birthday cat magically appeared beneath my Surface Pro Pen on the plane.
I’ve had some questions about how well the pen that comes with the tablet works. Everyone has their own unique process for creating digital artwork (so there’s not really an absolute answer that can be made) but I’ve found the pen works great for the way I personally create pictures. It comes out of the box with the HB nib (which I found perfectly acceptable) but in Denver I picked up the four pen nib set ($10.00 – cheap) and switched to the 2H nib because I have grown accustom to the slick feel of working on a Wacom Cintiq. If you prefer the “drag” of a real pencil, you can step all the way down to a B pencil lead feel. I’m very happy with this product.
RATS!
We flew out to see our Denver kids last weekend. I fired up my Surface Pro 4 on the plane and painted a picture of the stewardess. JUST KIDDING… that was a JOKE… really… well, kinda… anyway… that tablet is a really legitimate option for digital painting on the go.
More SDC Concept Work
It seems people really enjoyed seeing my rather… uhm… humble… beginnings as an artist… so I will go ahead and show you the other sketch I did last weekend.
Silver Dollar City Coloring Books
My very first professional jobs were for Silver Dollar City, a theme park in the Missouri Ozarks. I did three different park maps, coloring books, activity books and miscellaneous other illustrations for various products. For some reason, this weekend I was thinking about those old SDC coloring books. It would be really fun to have another crack at those things. I’m not a big fan of hard line coloring book art, but what if a coloring book could be created with tonal art? I had some spare time, so I whipped up a sample to see what that might look like. You can see what I came up with below, right next to my old original coloring book page…
…HEY… I was straight outa college when I did that! QUIT LAUGHING AT ME!
Soda Jerk
I’m not sure why they used to call those guys soda jerks but I’m guessing they probably deserved it.
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Dennis Jones 