Dennis Jones

Suiting Up THE FEW

Developing the character costumes for THE FEW COMIC BOOK SERIES was an interesting riddle to solve.

The Few takes place in a distant future, so the characters needed to have some sort of distinctive futuristic look. The tricky part was that a four part film based on this story (with real live actors) was going to run concurrent with the release of the comics. The film was not scripted yet because the film people needed the comic book story to work from and the comic book story was still being written.

With everything up in the air, I tried to design character costumes that the film people could recreate in some form or fashion for their actors. The outfits are based on everyday items you can find. An army surplus store could supply all the harnessed looking gear, hockey shoulder pads, tight fitting compression sport gear, fingerless bicycle gloves, carpenters tool belts… with a bit of modification all these items could be turned into FEW character clothing. The film decided to go in a more manageable direction and created a prequel film which eliminated the need to create elaborate futuristic sets and costumes. Smart.

So the good news is, it will be super easy for cosplay enthusiasts to create their very own FEW cosplay outfits using everyday items… and yes… Jeron does have Little Debbie Swiss Cake Rolls taped to his shoulders.

JeronModelSheet

Paypal + Internet = Danger!!

I have discovered an extremely alarming situation concerning Paypal and the internet.

Let’s take a random example… an unsuspecting fellow is haphazardly looking at things on the internet and stumbles upon a page for an Indiana Comic-Con that is taking place an hour away from his house. One keyboard click leads to another and badda-bing badda-boom, the internet and his active Paypal account have ensnared this pitiful, wide-eyed hoosier. He is now hopelessly signed up to participate in something called Kokomo-Con on Saturday, October 18 before he can rationally think through the fact that he has never actually attended any kind of a comic-con in his entire life, much less have any idea what to do at one. Oh, the insidious peril of cruising the internet with an active Paypal account…

…on a totally unrelated note, have I mentioned that I will be appearing on Artist Alley at Kokomo-Con in beautiful Kokomo, Indiana ( home of the world’s largest preserved steer AND the world’s largest sycamore stump!! ) on Saturday, October 18? If you’re in the area be sure to drop by, say hello and for goodness sakes, while you’re in town… go see that stuffed cow!

Walk Into My Future Day

Yesterday was “Walk Into My Future” day at Huntington University. I would conservatively estimate that there were 47 to 48 gazillion kids there. The university had all sorts of things for these youngsters to learn, see and do… and one of those things was a ten minute, how to draw lesson from me. Here are a few of my exceptional art students!

The Brother Jones Blog

It was December 2004 and the Jones clan had gathered in Missouri to celebrate Christmas together. While there, my nephew Keegan told my two brothers and me that he had built a blog for us. We said, “Hey that’s great! …what’s a blog?” Blogging was brand new at the time, so Keegan attempted to explain the concept to his knucklehead uncles. I traveled home to Indiana, big brother Doug traveled back to Tennessee and little brother Don went back to his home in Missouri and from three different states we created BROTHER JONES – Mighty Fine Art – Neapolitan Style.

Today there are several different places on the internet where you can punch a couple of buttons and be blogging within minutes. You could not do that in 2004. Keegan built our blog from scratch using Adobe Flash. With neapolitan ice cream as our inspiration, we were assigned different neapolitan colors… Don chocolate, Doug vanilla and me strawberry.

Each brother had his own individual page to write on with a comment section where we could talk back and forth. We had no spell check and no way of controlling the comment section (which was WIDE OPEN) so that literally anyone in the world could jump in and voice their opinion on any topic. This made BROTHER JONES a pretty lively place on occasion. Anyone could say anything (and I do mean anything) and it would IMMEDIATELY pop up on our pages. I specifically remember one profanity laced argument a Christian and an Atheist had (much of it misspelled in the heat of battle), which made a short appearance on my page. It was the wild, wild west. All we could do was delete offensive comments AFTER we saw them PUBLISHED on our pages. You never knew what you were going to get when you fired BROTHER JONES up in the morning.

Even though we were billed as an “art” blog, we seemed to talk mainly about tv, movies, football and food. My postings started out as longwinded tomes, but quickly became much shorter. It seems that I spent most of 2005 posting random weird stuff as I tried to figure out what to do with a blog. I focused in on watercolor painting in 2006, took notice of digital painting on the web in 2007, tried to transition to digital painting in 2008, and by 2009 had bought a Wacom Cintiq and totally converted from being a traditional watercolor painter to being a digital artist.

Keegan created a beautiful web site for us and it won many awards. Sadly, while BROTHER JONES was cutting edge technology at the time, it quickly became obsolete. Spam became a huge problem on the site and ultimately killed it. I hated to see BROTHER JONES totally disappear because so many people had such a good time with it, so I have republished my pages..

…and it is indeed one odd little time capsule to behold.

To see my old BROTHER JONES pages, CLICK HERE AND TAKE A LOOK.

The Gospel Of Luke Project

I’m starting a new online project which is surely doomed to fail. I’m going to attempt to illustrate the entire Biblical Book Of Luke… IN MY SPARE TIME. I will start at chapter one verse one and work my way to the end of the book. I will post one new image each week with the text that goes with it. We can all read the Book Of Luke together… or we can all watch Dennis experience a colossal epic fail around Chapter Three… either way, it’s a WIN, WIN!

If you would like to follow my weekly progress and see how long I can keep this thing going, click over to The Gospel Of Luke website, look down the right column and click the FOLLOW button. You will receive my little epistles each week in your very own email box. To go to The Gospel Of Luke web page CLICK HERE.