Silvermoon's Art Blog

Cracked Actor Comeback pg 2

Buttoneyes gives a strange prophecy, and Major Tom is so over all the funky weirdness. Can you honestly blame him? Despite having the youngest features, he's actually the oldest of the Cracked Actor crew. He's been putting up with all their shit forever.

And Dog? who is the Dog? oh my goodness, his collar tags have a diamond on them...could it be?

yep. That's the Diamond Dog!

Didn't he have a ziggy face before? and a human half? He sure did, astute readers! So why the dog half now? What's got his attention so much that he's bowling poor Tom over on the stairs to go bark?

Cracked Actor Comic pg 4

I’m so very pleased with how this one came out. It was one of those art things where everything that I tried spur-of-the-moment looked great. The profile behind the dog on the second panel was totally free handed, the coloring technique on the crystal balls was something new, and I’ve been playing with the new tools on a Clip Studio Paint EX to make a more realistic hair texture. I love this program.

I love a good reason to draw alien Ziggy. Painted behind him is a depiction of one of my favorite space things: the Helix Nebula, which looks an amazing amount like a human eye. After the more subdued palettes of my more recent art pieces, it was more than time for a pop of color. Ziggy’s design here is based on a race of aliens I made up ages ago called Aresians (Yknow…but Ares= Mars). Not pictured are the pointed ears or fangs, but it was fun to give him some glowing irises and claws regardless.

Happy Bowiemas all!

It's about time we check in on the guys, whattaya say?

we're doing some things a little differently this time around. No more one-shots for this section. This is gonna be a nice long one with lots of good story stuff for you guys!

Featuring the first of the new characters: Buttoneyes! David described him as a blind oracle, so here he is, doing this thing. And Major Tom is pretty over his shit

Surprisingly, they were very well recieved! So naturally, I made more!

And to my absolute delight and surprise, so did other people! Other members of the DeviantART Bowie fandom started making their own and soon we had a whole group dedicated to the story, sharing the hijinks of the crew and making each other laugh. Here are a few of my favorite pages from @alyway221 and @iviesaur as well as another DA user called OwlishMystic.

Soon we had contests and holiday specials, all sorts of fun events to keep us writing! My art started to steadily improve as did my page quality

And all around, some of my best memories in the fandom came from working on this comic.

But then, David died. I dropped into a super deep depression, and stopped working on a lot of Bowie related works. I absolutely abandoned the comic and threw it into a long hiatus. Despite this, new members continued to add pages, but it was nothing like the amount we once had.

Over ten years ago I drew the first/pilot page of a comic I used to draw called Cracked Actor. It was drawn on mixed media sketchbook paper in pencil, manga ink pens, and prisms color colored pencils. The premise being all of David’s personas living together under the same roof and all the shenanigans they’d get up to together. It was a very well liked comic in the Bowie Fandoms on DeviantART and Tumblr, and even inspired fans of it to draw and submit their own pages. What fun!

I’ve been reminiscing on the goofball one-shot styles and while reading back through the old pages, I had the chance to see just how far my art and knowledge of pacing and storytelling in a comic page have come, and decided to redraw the first page to give myself a chance to truly compare them. It’s been so much fun returning to these guys and getting to explore their personalities again. I’m incredibly pleased with how evident my progress is between the two pages.

I’ve posted the original beside the new one. I think the pacing of the new page definitely works better, and love that this gives all of their personalities a chance to shine too. I even ended up having more ideas for other pages while drawing this, so possibly stay tuned for more Cracked Actor!

“Proud of Your Boy”

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Earls Court, 1978