May 26, 2011

MACHO WEEK!!! (Part 2 of 3, The Moldy Oldie Edition)

MACHO WEEK continues, with a piece of vintage nerdery from my archives, drawn and colored in 1999. TWELVE years ago.

Let's think about this people. That was before 9-11, before the dot-com bust, before the (still ongoing) energy crisis, before I owned a car or a DVD player. I was fresh out of college, just starting out full time at the day-job after interning there for 2 years (same day-job that I have today, by the way), and living in a tiny studio apartment that paradoxically had a huge walk-in closet (which I filled up with comic books and action figures--mostly Beast Wars at the time).

So... I confess, this was drawn to impress a geeky girl who I was talking to at the time. Believe it or not, the subjects in the illustration were our common points of interest--and there's the Macho One himself, front and center! Oh, and I'm in the picture too, inbetween Optimus Prime in Pikachu, because apparently I have a raging ego. For what it's worth, I think the girl was in fact impressed by this. However, things didn't work out for a number of complicated reasons which I will not bore you with. You know how it goes.

click above for larger view

Man, just look at this thing. It was one of the first things I ever colored in Photoshop, and I thought I was pretty hot stuff, using the Dodge/Burn tool to render the shading. WHAT WAS I THINKING?

And yet, here we are, twelve years later. My drawing is a little better, and my coloring is much better. And I still pretty much won't shut up about Macho Man, Transformers, Batman, Pokemon, Miyazaki movies, and Bruce Lee.

Tune in on Friday for the final installment of MACHO WEEK!!!

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

You are one messy vato loco!

gavin said...

I have always liked the way you have Optimus hunched over the steering wheel in this pic. Plus, you appear to have all the elbow room you need, which is either due to your generally supermodel thin frame or your butt is hogging all the seat space.

J.Ho said...

annonymous: simon cabron!

gav: you know me, i like to keep my girlish figure!