When life gives you snow

Last November, I used up all the snow that had fallen on to my parent's lot to conjure this mighty frozen beast near 8 m / 25 ft in length. For inspiration I tried to remember the appearance of the old 19th century depictions of dinosaurs after their initial discovery (image below).

Of course with my luck, the sculpture turned out to be too close to the road. The next morning, I got to witness the aftermath of, first of all, 10 cm / 4 inches of new snow, and secondly, the regards of the snowplow that came to clear the road from all that new snow. Bye bye, lizard. But for one magical night, the snow reptile was the pride of the neighborhood.

And hauling all that snow was a superb exercise and it took me 5-6 h to complete the task. It was like being a kid again. Now, I just need to have the same sort of snowfall here in Southwest Finland, so that I can maintain my "training program".

A lithograph of the famous Hawkins' dinosaurs built in the 1850's.

Remember Babylon Character Concepts

Here's a couple sketches I've been recently working on for Remember Babylon, a post-robot-wars story. Someone might recall the short comics I drew under the same title a couple of years ago. Those stories were just small "tests", and now I'm trying to create a full-fledged comic book.

So, the two main characters, Mad Mutt and One Shot, are quite the same from before. I'm really trying to finalize HOW I want them to look, so that I can start concentrating on the story. 

Mad Mutt has now a backpack instead of a battle harness, and two revolvers instead of one. I intend to make him a gunslinger type of a character, a real old school soldier. His right eye is swollen, 'cause he's a troublemaker. I also made him extra skinny with a little tummy. His more bark than bite. You might notice the text "The man from the past". We'll get to that another time.

I've had a hard time to figure out how much of cyborg One Shot is. I thought about going with an almost complete human appearance as in Ghost in the Shell or The Terminator, but it didn't look right. A completely mechanic look on the other hand makes it harder to show emotions. I think I'll go with this "everything-but-the-face"-appearance. I'm going to cover most of him with clothes anyway.

I've also taken a new approach towards One Shot's pet dinosaur, who I've renamed Pepe (if you get the reference, you're an awesome person). The new appearance is very much more Jurassic Park -raptor-like, though I increased the crests above the eyes and shortened the snout for a unique, birdlike look. Even though I'm not a fan of the new "feathered dinosaur" appearance of real dinosaurs, I've added a little bit of feathers on Pepe. I think their pretty cool in small quantities.

Sir is a whole new character that in the new story travels together with One Shot. Sir is a mysterious bounty hunter. I like the helmet, but otherwise the characters appearance need more work. I would like to give Sir a melee weapon to counter One Shot's sniper-profile. Here it's something resembling a staff.

As a bonus, I give you the very first drafts from 2012 that I contributed for the comic collection LTT, in case you want to see what I started with. I'd like to draw a camo-cloak on One Shot, but it's devastatingly time consuming.

 

I'll catch you again next time. If you have any feedback, I'll love to hear it! :)