Jelly of the Month: The Silhouette

This month's subject for the Jelly of the Month blog was, appropriately enough, Watchmen.

I figured everyone would be doing portraits of Rorshach, The Comedian, etc., so I decided to tackle one of the minor characters--the superheroine The Silhouette, who was one of the original Minutemen.

She only has a few scenes in the book, and dies off-panel, but something about her really stuck with me--and it was a treat to see her whole story arc conveyed in the Watchmen movie, which I saw over the weekend.

I'm not particularly adept at illustration action or fight scenes, so I thought it'd be cool to do a static shot of the character in the form of a poster, since the P.R. aspect of being a superhero is one of the themes of the series.

And of course, I can't resist adding old-timey text.

Jelly of the Month: Jack White

Since there's no inherent limit to the number of submissions you can send in for Jelly of the Month, I thought I'd try another ten minute exercise, this time tackling a genuine portrait.

And since I knew I had (very) limited time, I thought The White Stripes' Jack White would be a good candidate, since the color palate would be so obvious!

Jelly of the Month: Fist

Usually there's more time between my submissions for Jelly of the Month, but since I didn't get around to doing the January one (theme: Favorite Villains) until nearly the end of the month, it was only a few days before Jelly's admins announced the theme for February: Ten Minutes.

"Ten Minutes" meaning you only had ten minutes to work on whatever it was you were going to submit, whether it was finished or not. That way no one had an excuse not to submit something, since, hey, it would only take you ten minutes!

I thought that was an ingenious idea, and before I started in on another Time Out New York portrait, I set aside 10-15 minutes to work on this (I wasn't counting what I call "prep time" against my ten minute time budget).

My first oh-so-clever idea was to have a picture of an alarm clock, repeated over ten panels, each with the minute hand moving one minute forward per panel. When I realized that would break the ten minute rule, I abandoned it, since without the payoff it wouldn't look like much of anything.

So I had this other picture in my head, of a cartoony fist raised in anger (or solidarity, or revolution, or something), and its loosey-goosey feel would be perfect for only having ten minutes in which to execute it.

So, nine minutes and change later, I was done--I had stuck to the rules, and I had completed something I thought was cool looking. I titled it "Revolution in Ten Minutes."

Jelly of the Month: Two-Face

I belong to an online art blog called Jelly of the Month, where the admins of the blog pick a theme, and every artist involved submits a piece related to that theme. I've been doing it about a year now, and it's a lot of fun, since there's really no pressure.

This month's theme is "Favorite Villain" and for a few weeks I mulled illustrating one of my favorite bad guys (Black Manta, Ming the Merciless, Dick Cheney) but finally decided to go with someone that has always inspired me visually--Batman bad-guy Two-Face.

When working on this, I liked the idea of putting the scarred side of former Gotham City D.A. Harvey Dent almost entirely in shadow, and I think it came out kinda cool. The portrait isn't based on either actor to portray the character (first, Tommy Lee Jones, then last year Aaron Eckhart)--I didn't want it tied to a particular famous face.

And yes, fellow comic nerds, I am aware that I put the scarred part on the wrong side of Dent's face. Fifty lashes with a copy of Batman #400 for me!