bad fan art of the 80s and 90s
Mar. 25th, 2012 12:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
davemerrillWhere have I been? I been working. Worked last weekend and missed one of the screenings of Nausicaa at the TIFF Bell Lightbox. Worked this Saturday for a few hours, spend the rest of the afternoon basically sitting in traffic trying to run errands through the rain. I know the Toronto FC brings a lot of business to our neighborhood but it makes it impossible to get OUT of our neighborhood in a timely fashion. Squeezed between a rail corridor and the Gardiner, access is tight at the best of times.
So anyway I have been going through the ol' files again, getting rid of junk (I used to make two and three and four xeroxes of all my artwork, for some reason - I guess I felt like I was hauling the stuff down to the Kinko's, I might as well make the trip worthwhile) and I dug out some old fan art, so I figured I'd share.
I was never that successful at it, mostly because while I had the desire to be a fan and to draw fan art, I also had the desire to do my own work, to not slavishly copy the style of others. So while this is bad fan art, it's bad in its own way, not bad because I suck at aping the work of others. Most of it was inked with various markers on various cheap design boards or Bristol-type paper, and it all dates from 1987-1993 or 1994ish.
This is some early 90s Yamato fanart for the Starsha APA, I think. I love blowing the white paint onto black to make the starry background. Probably overdid it here. My Desslar is stiff and the Starsha is getting kinda abstract, and boy, did I love to crosshatch. How can I be so lousy at something I loved so much?
Here's a halfway successful Harlock piece. Notice the tear in the screen tone behind the Harlock silhouette - that's an actual tear in the actual screentone on the original. Which is one of the reasons I wasn't that sad to see screentone replaced digitally. Kei Yuki needs to comb her hair, too.
In this Cyborg 009 piece the design elements of the wrinkles or whatever the hell is going on here are starting to overwhelm everything else, and as such it ALMOST makes this piece interesting.
In THIS 009 piece we learn that one of the body parts removed from 003 during her cybernetic surgery was her booty. Seriously Dave, try and pretend that's a human body you're drawing there sometimes, okay? Nice sketchy hatching on Joe's hair, though.
There's a similar sketchy thing going on with this Prince Planet fanart piece, one of my favorites. It actually almost works, almost.
This Wildstar-meets-Rat Fink piece is also a favorite. Working in the Rat Fink style is fun, and the Cosmo Zero is probably the best looking space mecha I've ever drawn. The background is xeroxed from a Matsumoto Yamato manga.
Kamen Rider Black here is the earliest piece - and one of the most successful, I think, merely in terms of simplicity and impact. It's actually a smaller trial sketch version of a less successful larger piece. This one is sloppy and messy and works much better than the more restrained "finished" piece. It's tough to capture the energy of early sketches.
I did this Mazinger Z art on a huge piece of board, took it to work when I worked at Ad Props and shot stats of it at a 50% reduction. Still have the stats, too, of which this is a scan of. The "breast fire" beam is made up of different layers of cheap black spray paint - mask off one line, spray one layer down, let it dry, mask it another line, spray it down. Koji's face here isn't nearly as interesting as the rest of the piece, because of the wimpy skinny line it's inked with and the lack of shading of any kind.
This other Mazinger is part of a color piece I did for a thing Project A-Kon was doing that involved a playing card deck illustrated with anime fan art by fan-artists. I did the piece, somehow got it scanned in and sent in as a .tif file (this was the early 90s and I had no idea what I was doing), mailed it in on a floppy disc, and when I got to A-Kon I flipped through the cards and my piece was not in there. Instead it was a lot of super generic "here's my fantasy character" fanart and funny drawings of staffers dressed as Klingons. Kind of put me off fanart for a while. There's a Koji attached to this piece but it's not nearly as successful as the Mazinger Z, which came out kinda nice.
The sad part is that this is more or less the best of the bunch. There's a LOT of much, MUCH more inept fanart that I won't be scanning in any time soon, believe me. As the 90s rolled on I got more focused on drawing my own comics, particularly the Ozone Commandos and aesthetically I moved away from the convention art show world of "tasteful watercolors of cat-people in medieval garb casting spells on suits of armor" art and more into a visual mindset that would allow me to draw giant Jesus robots crushing overweight fanboys, large handguns blasting holes in things, and Death Blimps; following my bliss, as it were.
So anyway I have been going through the ol' files again, getting rid of junk (I used to make two and three and four xeroxes of all my artwork, for some reason - I guess I felt like I was hauling the stuff down to the Kinko's, I might as well make the trip worthwhile) and I dug out some old fan art, so I figured I'd share.
I was never that successful at it, mostly because while I had the desire to be a fan and to draw fan art, I also had the desire to do my own work, to not slavishly copy the style of others. So while this is bad fan art, it's bad in its own way, not bad because I suck at aping the work of others. Most of it was inked with various markers on various cheap design boards or Bristol-type paper, and it all dates from 1987-1993 or 1994ish.
This is some early 90s Yamato fanart for the Starsha APA, I think. I love blowing the white paint onto black to make the starry background. Probably overdid it here. My Desslar is stiff and the Starsha is getting kinda abstract, and boy, did I love to crosshatch. How can I be so lousy at something I loved so much?
Here's a halfway successful Harlock piece. Notice the tear in the screen tone behind the Harlock silhouette - that's an actual tear in the actual screentone on the original. Which is one of the reasons I wasn't that sad to see screentone replaced digitally. Kei Yuki needs to comb her hair, too.
In this Cyborg 009 piece the design elements of the wrinkles or whatever the hell is going on here are starting to overwhelm everything else, and as such it ALMOST makes this piece interesting.
In THIS 009 piece we learn that one of the body parts removed from 003 during her cybernetic surgery was her booty. Seriously Dave, try and pretend that's a human body you're drawing there sometimes, okay? Nice sketchy hatching on Joe's hair, though.
There's a similar sketchy thing going on with this Prince Planet fanart piece, one of my favorites. It actually almost works, almost.
This Wildstar-meets-Rat Fink piece is also a favorite. Working in the Rat Fink style is fun, and the Cosmo Zero is probably the best looking space mecha I've ever drawn. The background is xeroxed from a Matsumoto Yamato manga.
Kamen Rider Black here is the earliest piece - and one of the most successful, I think, merely in terms of simplicity and impact. It's actually a smaller trial sketch version of a less successful larger piece. This one is sloppy and messy and works much better than the more restrained "finished" piece. It's tough to capture the energy of early sketches.
I did this Mazinger Z art on a huge piece of board, took it to work when I worked at Ad Props and shot stats of it at a 50% reduction. Still have the stats, too, of which this is a scan of. The "breast fire" beam is made up of different layers of cheap black spray paint - mask off one line, spray one layer down, let it dry, mask it another line, spray it down. Koji's face here isn't nearly as interesting as the rest of the piece, because of the wimpy skinny line it's inked with and the lack of shading of any kind.
This other Mazinger is part of a color piece I did for a thing Project A-Kon was doing that involved a playing card deck illustrated with anime fan art by fan-artists. I did the piece, somehow got it scanned in and sent in as a .tif file (this was the early 90s and I had no idea what I was doing), mailed it in on a floppy disc, and when I got to A-Kon I flipped through the cards and my piece was not in there. Instead it was a lot of super generic "here's my fantasy character" fanart and funny drawings of staffers dressed as Klingons. Kind of put me off fanart for a while. There's a Koji attached to this piece but it's not nearly as successful as the Mazinger Z, which came out kinda nice.
The sad part is that this is more or less the best of the bunch. There's a LOT of much, MUCH more inept fanart that I won't be scanning in any time soon, believe me. As the 90s rolled on I got more focused on drawing my own comics, particularly the Ozone Commandos and aesthetically I moved away from the convention art show world of "tasteful watercolors of cat-people in medieval garb casting spells on suits of armor" art and more into a visual mindset that would allow me to draw giant Jesus robots crushing overweight fanboys, large handguns blasting holes in things, and Death Blimps; following my bliss, as it were.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2012-03-25 05:25 pm (UTC)The first Cyborg 009 pic, and the Mazinger pics, actually look pretty decent.
no subject
Date: 2012-03-25 06:21 pm (UTC)while I had the desire to be a fan and to draw fan art, I also had the desire to do my own work, to not slavishly copy the style of others.
Well, the best fanart is done in the artist's own unique style, after all.
no subject
Date: 2012-03-25 09:04 pm (UTC)I like that Cyborg 009 with the 'tiger stripe' lighting, but I think that would work better in color.
The Prince Planet illo is very dynamic. That's exactly what it should be. :)
no subject
Date: 2012-03-26 05:57 am (UTC)I did a big Devilman picture that I splashed red paint onto that I traded to Tim Eldred for something at, what, A-Kon 2. I should re-do that one, it was kinda awesome.
no subject
Date: 2012-03-26 06:33 pm (UTC)No, no, kidding. You should hear me pick apart Space Fanzine Yamato some time, the laundry list of things I should have done better blah blah a mile long. :)
Seriously, that picture, I think your copy somewhat diminishes the power. The original feels much more dynamic.
no subject
Date: 2012-03-26 09:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-03-26 11:41 pm (UTC)And just uncovered, vintage art from the Japanamation years! My room sign for one of the Michigan media cons. Ah, wayward youth! :)
(not that *I* drew it oh god no. I can't draw two lines together.)