Gotta start somewhere

Ok. This is where I will be posting my musings on comics, trading cards, fiction (mostly SF & fantasy, but other stuff too), animation, art, music and whatever else comes to mind. I'll also be posting some of my original artwork here. And maybe some of my own fiction, too. And from time to time, I'll try to talk up some of my ebay listings in hopes of generating a few sales.

CARYTOWN COMICS began as an idea for a comic book shop in the Carytown area of Richmond, VA around 1992. My wife and I were living just a couple of blocks away from Cary Street back then. Being broke at the time (and most of the time since), we never actually started a brick-and-mortar store. But in the mid-nineties, I started selling a few comics, books, games, trading cards and laserdiscs (remember those?) on ebay. My seller name there is carytowncomics-n-cards. I've got a few listings there now. Hopefully, I'll be adding more soon. Check them out here.

I've been drawing since I can remember. As a young child in the Richmond area during the early 1960s, I used to watch Sailor Bob on channel 12 almost every day. Sometimes he would show his viewers how to draw various cartoon characters or caricatures of real people. Aside from the Popeye or Looney Tunes cartoons, this was my favorite part of the show. I also used to try to copy (NOT trace) some of the pictures in my coloring books and comic books, or in the newspaper comics. One of my earliest ambitions was to be a cartoonist. I'm still trying. Of course, I also wanted to be an astronaut. That one didn't work out.

Here's a caricature I did of myself a few months ago:

This was drawn with a regular #2 pencil on construction paper. I colored it with colored pencils. Then I scanned it and, in GIMP, adjusted the contrast and the color saturation. I'm pretty happy with the results. And no, my head in not that large in proportion to my body. This is supposed to look like a bobble-head.

Lately, I've been playing with 3D modeling. I did the following picture in Bryce 7.1 and enhanced it in GIMP.

It's a little rough, but then I've only been working with Bryce for a little over a month.

Finally, I've been trying out some other 3D programs too. I did this next picture in DAZ Studio and tweaked it in GIMP.

My next endeavor with DAZ will be to attempt to animate this scene. Within the next couple of weeks, I hope to have a short clip on here of my barefoot swordswoman trying to take out this beast. If not, I'll at least have fun working on it. Like they tell the kids in school, "Learning is fun!"