#tcri

(Ink-tober/TMNT-tober 5: Map/Adventure)

The boys’ mission of trying to investigate the Kraang and their origins gone very wrong. They definitely weren’t expecting a reality defying maze of corridors that send you walking in circles indefinitely, lol, they’ll figure it out eventually.

Hi! Here's the speedpaint of my illustration for the cover of my story: April and the Ninja Turtles available on Wattpad and Fanfiction.net!

Summary: In this re-imagined Ninja Turtles story, we'll be moving through history from a more human perspective through the eyes of April O'Neil.

The whole universe and its characters belong to Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird, and I'm just having fun rewriting an alternative history.

There is likely to be a romance in the story.

An Abandoned Homage...

So, it’s no secret that I LOVE making homages to my favorite cartoonists and comic artists for “Finding Dee”. I’ve done a bunch for strips that inspired me such as “Garfield”, “Peanuts”, “Calvin & Hobbes” and more. I’ve also done a few for different styles of comics, like the work of Mike Mignola, Walter Simonson and even Al Williamson. Those, however, are a little different. In those, the “model” for my cartoon avatar is basically still the way I draw it, with the rendering style of the artists I admire pasted over them. Those are kinda more… style OVERLAYS as opposed to direct style homages. And, it turns out, there’s a very good REASON for this. A reason that became abundantly clear with a strip idea that has since been abandoned. See the above piece… That was to be an homage to Frank Miller’s classic “Batman: The Dark Knight Returns”. It was a massively influential book on me and one I had a script for a strip that I wanted to homage. This was… to put it mildly… as far as I got. This was the 3rd attempt, with the first two having proportions MUCH closer to Miller's famous cover of issue #2 of DKR. Those I outright loathed seeing, so I altered the proportions more to my own model sheet, trying instead to just overlay the rough, craggly line style Miller used on the comic. This was coming out fine, but was causing me some AGRESSIVELY uncomfortable gender dysphoria drawing. I couldn't look at it without seeing the image I really try to NOT see when I look in the mirror, and not in a good way. It was making me hear every jerk and transphobe snickering in the back of my mind, and that is NOT a good or healthy thing. I poured over Miller’s work, and found a remarkably thin selection of women that weren’t his specific brand of hyper-sexualized cartooning or… well… women that looked like bloated tree trunks. There was not a lot of middle ground. I did not want to draw an entire comic strip where, in order to homage the Dark Knight Returns, I had to draw myself like a gnarled, knotted rhino-mutation. That would NOT do well with my sense of self-esteem. I mean, I’m not always kind to myself in cartoon form, but I’m not this:

Curse you, TCRI!!

when you have free time at work and access to autocad and feel like dusting off old cad skills from 10+ years ago to model something so you can use it to make new merch.....