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Thom Zahler Art Studios

Art With an Attitude

  • LOVE AND CAPES: HOME FOR THE HOLIDAYS
  • Works
  • THOM'S BLOG
  • The Legend of Thom Zahler
  • Conventioneering
  • Art For Your Eyes
  • Thom Zahler Store
  • Newsletter
  • Patreon
  • PRE-ORDER A COMMISSION
  • Threadless Store
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Wayback Wednesday: Another Swimsuit Story

Quantum Leap CoverMy good friend and fellow Kubert School student Sean Tiffany has been doing a series of "From the Vault" posts on his blog. In these, he brings out some old piece of artwork from school or early in his career. Always one to steal from someone smart, I'm going to do the same thing here with Wayback Wednesdays. The Wayback MachineFirst up is a project from my "senior" year at Kubert. (Kubert was a three year school, but I hate saying "third" or "last" since it sounds like I didn't finish.) This was actually in Joe Kubert's class. We had to adapt a TV show into comic book format, doing a cover and a couple of interior pages. I did Quantum Leap. Innovation was doing a comic at the time, and I figured this might be a nice set of samples to show them. Plus, I was a fan of the show and wanted to do the scene that they could never really afford to do.

Quantum Leap had Sam Beckett leap into the life of another character, usually at in inopportune moment. When he got there, Sam's reaction would inevitably be "Oh, boy." So I threw Sam into a skydiver. Sam leaping into someone who, literally, was leaping through the air was too good, plus the things you could do with Al were too much fun to pass up.

The cover was a parody/homage to the Kathy Ireland Sports Illustrated swimsuit cover, which had come out a couple years before. It was iconic enough, and lent itself well enough that I thought it was a great fit.

As it was The Old Days, the artwork was done on bristol board, the lettering done by hand, and the colors done with Dr. Martin Watercolor Dyes on a photocopy pasted onto a piece of illustration board. Ah, pre-computer color. There's some aspects of actually brushing wet color on paper that I miss, but all things being equal, I much prefer computer coloring.

And, as always, click to embiggen!

Quantum Leap Page OneQuantum Leap Page 1

tags: kathy ireland, kubert school, sean tiffany, sports illustrated, swimsuit issue, wuantum leap
categories: Caricatures, Cartooning, Comic Book, General, Hotsheet, Love and Capes, Wayback Wednesdays
Wednesday 02.17.10
Posted by Thomas Zahler
 

NYCC2009 - Day Three, a bit late

I never did finish talking about New York, did I?

I should be used to this. It's so hard to write up the last day of a show because it tends to be your getaway day. And then you get back and you're busy and you just don't have time. Plus, things were really crazy back home with work that came in.

The Con Before the Storm

She really does have cool hairAnyway, the last day of the show was pretty good. The crowds were still thick, and I sold pretty well that day, too. I think as a lot of these shows max out and become almost exclusively 3-day attendees, Sunday becomes a huge sales day. After all, if you have until Sunday, why buy until Sunday? Well, because Love and Capes: Do You Want to Know a Secret? was almost sold out, of course. By 1:00 or so, I was sold out, and only had single issues left. I'll have to keep that in mind when I go to San Diego this year.

Jennifer Kale-- who's that?I did a couple more caricatures, including Jennifer Kale from Marvel's Man-Thing. Yeah, I had no idea who she was either, but the customer had reference, which was good. There were a couple more that escape me, too. Kale and the Spider-Woman that I did are now colored and here on this page. Make with the clickin' and embiggenin'.

Let's review: I did a panel, sold out of a product, did some sketches, and lined up some work. Yeah, I think it was a success.

Bob and I helped Toon Tumblers take down their booth in trade for borrowing some space in their van to get our gear back to the hotel. I had a taste for pizza, so we wound up at Antonio's next to where the Late Night With David Letterman show tapes. It was pricey and it seemed to take forever, but the pizza was good, and it was a great end to a great show.

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On the way back, I wanted to stop at the Kubert School to buy some brushes. Good art brushes are hard to find, and the Kubert art store stocks a lot of them. I kind Cha-ching!of need to see a brush before I buy it as there's a whole process to choosing one. They only had one of my current brush, the Windsor Newton Series 7, but they had a selection of the Rafael, a brush I hadn't used since art school.

I bought three.

I even got to go into the school, which had been extensively remodeled since I'd been there. Ah, the memories, wait this is new!The school, the old Dover High School, had been lopped in half and a chunk of the JKS parking lot had been sold off. Kubert had a lot of unused space in it, including a full auditorium and a gym. Now those are gone. Computers are all around, the windows have been replaced (a source of contention for all of us in the old days) and they even have air conditioning now.

Man, these soft, coddled artists today. In my day I drew in the cold and the heat and lived off a box of Captain Crunch because I couldn't afford it and... well, I hated it, but I did it anyway.

Mike Chen was kind enough to give Bob and me a tour, and we even dropped into a couple classes. Bob had asked if I got the shakes coming back into the building. Truth be told, I did get the wiggins when we waited in the waiting room. I don't think I'd been in there since my first day at the school, or maybe when I came out for my interview when I was applying. That room brought back some worries. Everything else was fine, though.

When I was here we didn't even have a sign!Bob also said he had to get used to seeing classrooms without desks and instead with drawing tables. That never occured to me. I'd just gotten used to it.

The school looks good. The students seem the same, bantering with Mike when he brought us in. Well, there is one big difference: girls. The school got girls since Iwas gone. There were I think three women in my first-year class of 150. Now, with the success of manga and the like, there's a bigger female component, which is very cool. The school even has dorms for them now, which previously they weren't able to provide.

Big thanks to Mike Chen for taking the time out of his day to bring us around the school. It was a great time.

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Now I'm back and working again. I've got a couple of weeks before my trip to Orlando for MegaCon, so I'm trying to clear some things out before then. Thankfully, Love and Capes #10 is done, so it's just doing client work, of which there is a lot, thankfully. I've got some cool things coming up, which I'll tell y'all about as soon as I get a chance. So stay tuned, cool things are happening.

tags: commission, Commissions, convention, Conventions, kubert school, Love and Capes, new york, new york comic-con, toon tumblers
categories: Cartooning, Commissions, Conventions, Drawing Table, General, good times---good times
Friday 02.13.09
Posted by Thomas Zahler
 

The Rock of Love

My cousin's been getting a bunch of the The Rock of LoveShowcase Presents collections from DC and has been passing them on to me. It's been great to read such blocks of comics, a lot of which I've never read. The World's Finest collection was great fun. Brave and the Bold was just goofy 6-'s fun. Now I'm reading Sgt. Rock which I never read, despite going to the school founded by his best known artist.

There's a bit where Rock lectures his soldiers on love. It's my favorite bit so far. Click on the artwork the read the sequence.

tags: kubert school, sgt- rock
categories: General, good times---good times, Randomness
Tuesday 07.08.08
Posted by Thomas Zahler
 

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