Officer at the scene...

This is the first time I've posted any artwork in here so I hope I've done it right.

Superquad's awesome black and white rendering of Officer Murphy in action reminded me I had this piece kicking about which I did way back when the first Robocop movie came out. It's not traced - I placed a grid drawn on acetate over the original cinema poster and then scaled it down to an A4 piece of paper I'd drawn a grid on to get the basic shapes and proportions transferred over in pencil. Then I let my OCD run riot on translating the shades into line details before inking the whole thing with a bog-standard basic black ink pen. Nothing fancy here.

It's a lot of work but I'd happily turn out one of these a day. Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Back to the Future, I'd take a popular poster of the day and make it into one of these. Then get photocopies and colour them in because I'm a sad nerd. Unfortunately this seems to be the only piece that's survived the years. I had a flood from the water tank in my attic about fifteen years ago and it destroyed about 95% of the artwork I'd got stored up there.

Anyways, at least I have this one left to show. I'm not sure I'd have the patience to do this kind of thing anymore. My regular artwork nowadays is less sophisticated.

Attached Thumbnails

 

Did you do this in negative, or did you use chiaroscuro shading on this, or something else entirely?

Didn't do it in negative. I just copied it. Then decided what I should make blocks of black and what should remain white. Then everything in-between I just kinda decided when I came to it if it should be little dashes or squiggles or whatever to translate the original shading and colours into line work I could do with just a pen.

I'm ashamed to say I don't know what 'chiaroscuro shading' means. I've always just kinda drew rather than done any learning about it. I'd just do what I felt would get me the result I wanted. It's probably got a name but I don't know it. It's a bummer I only ever got a 'C' grade in my final art exam. But then I never did like drawing the things they told me I had to in the ways that they wanted so I guess they marked me down for going outside their mandate. Always trying to enforce their art rules on me. Once I left school and did my own projects I improved apace. Like most things actually. I hated school. Learnt far more about everything once I'd got out of it.

*waffle*

Don't be ashamed, I only know about it because of a joke in homestar runner.

Chiaroscuro - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

In the context I meant, it's like in Sin City and some other comics where the absence of color/lines, rather than their presence, define the image. So basically everything is black except what you're trying to highlight, and you essentially define your lightsource and detail by not doing anything to it, rather than by adding more lines.

Ah, right. I think I understand. A bit like the Hellboy artwork where it's like you start with a completely black page and then pick out the lit sections to make up the image? I don't think I was doing that. It was more if there's an outline to a shape then I make it a line, and if there's detail or shade or graduation then I put a line of some kind there to represent it. And then finally if I think an area feels like it's missing something I'll just throw in a random extra detail that I think will tie that area down even if the original image doesn't have it. You know how you can keep dicking with a single line because it doesn't feel right to the eye.
Really I don't think too much about what I'm doing. It's usually my eye going 'That bit needs something' and then adding a something and hoping it's right. I really like those little 'flicks' in black and white work where a couple of tiny small lines come off of a main line at a ninty degree angle. It may not need to be there for any technical or accuracy reason but it just looks nice to the eye. An example being on the top of Robocop's forearm and the top of his hand in my pic above.

This poster image is so iconic of the whole fiction, just as the image of Robo shooting Emil's bike.

I really enjoy this work, especially after working on my own sketch. I really hope you do more, and share some more of your work

[TF 4 SALE! -VINTAGE G.I.JOE SALE! - WANTS - FEEDBACK - PHOTOBUCKET - NC@TFW (NC TFW2005 SOCIAL GROUP)]

Originally Posted by Venksta Get the F out. Then his name can be "The Allen".

Thanks, mate. There probably won't be anymore like this as there just don't seem to be such iconic movie posters these days and it was only ever a poster thing for me. Drawing isn't much my thing anymore since my hands got crushed, although I do still dabble. Now I prefer to write the stories of my stuff instead.

But since I went for a dig through my old artwork to find this one, thanks to your inspiration, I do have some other regular pieces of various old projects I'll post. I don't seem to have ever really settled on a single specific style and two pieces from the same period wary wildly in quality. There's a huge amount of scribbly crap in my art folders.

Hands crushed = not cool

More artwork = very cool

[TF 4 SALE! -VINTAGE G.I.JOE SALE! - WANTS - FEEDBACK - PHOTOBUCKET - NC@TFW (NC TFW2005 SOCIAL GROUP)]

Originally Posted by Venksta Get the F out. Then his name can be "The Allen".

yeah, this is a great image!