Saturday, February 7, 2009

HAL & AL Coming To CLEVELAND, OHIO! Starting In March!

Speaking of getting bigger and bigger... Hal & Al will soon be on the air in Cleveland, Ohio! Starting in March on Cox Channel 45! Don't know the time or how it will run yet though (could be once a week or daily) as this news is just breaking!

02/09/09 UPDATE: Beginning Feb. 16th, Cox 45 will be running it every weekday at 8am!

SCOTT INNES - "CARTOONS & COUNTRY MUSIC" Book Cover!

This weekend I sit and finish up writing Scott Innes' new book and putting the final touches on it. It's called Cartoons & Country Music - My Life in the Shadow of a Dog! It's slated for the printer and I have to get it out of here by today or Monday. It's been completely updated from the last one version that was released in 2002 and this will be the only book that he does again for a long time so I'm trying to get it right. Older chapters had stuff added to them and there are a bunch of new chapters added, such as a chapter on me and our working relationship with Hal & Al and other of Scott's PR stuff that I've done. There's also a new chapter about Hal & Al, which is quite good. Hal & Al will have their own book at some point since it seems to be getting bigger and bigger. This book will also have a LOT of photos in it, and that was where most of my time yesterday was focused on getting them in order and labeled correctly. Here's the cover art for the book. Eagle-eyed fans of mine will see that this cover is similar to the Scooby-Doo "Earth Day" comic cover I did in April 2008.

Some will ask why does Scott even have a book? Is it a vanity project? It is that, but the original book came into play because he kept getting asked how he got the job of voicing Scooby-Doo back between 1997-2002 for the movies. He got so tired of being asked it, and telling a shortened version of it, that he thought he'd write a book about it where it explained it all in depth. It's a good chapter of the book. Hanging out with him when I travel down south for Hal & Al stuff, people do still ask him how he got the part, so now he'll have this new book to promote. He has met a LOT of famous celebrities and done some cool stuff so it's a fun read. Kids would also enjoy it since it will also be in a bigger font and like a 'young adult novel' melded with a scrapbook.

Scott's still doing the voices of Scooby and Shaggy (Shaggy even more now) and has been for since 1997 for licensed products and such as the new Scooby-Doo Interactive DVD Game that came out late last year where he did Shaggy's voice. Hopefully he'll be doing the DVD movies again soon!

This new book should be out by early March and available online at his website, which is located at http://www.scottinnes.com/!

Tuesday, February 3, 2009

THE LONE RANGER Rides Again! - Pen & Ink Artwork!

Here's a Lone Ranger piece of art I did the other day as a warm up. I just got the The Lone Ranger: 75th Anniversary - Seasons 1 and 2 from Amazon and it's a great set that features the first two complete seasons of the original TV Show! It's expensive, but worth it!Clayton Moore was great in the part! This piece or art was penciled on cheap paper and then I taped it to the back of a good piece of art paper and 'light tabled' it for the inking stage. All told it was done in about two hours. Enjoy!

Sunday, February 1, 2009

The Year That Was POWER RANGERS JUNGLE FURY!

As I type this, the last of my final artwork for Power Rangers Jungle Fury is being uploaded for the final approval stage. This is the last project I'll be doing (unless they wish to do more) and I expect it to approved in two weeks time with no problems. Candace Bell did a great job helping me get this all done and colored on time and we think it came out great!

It was February of last year that I started doing work on this version of Power Rangers and I have to say that it was fun. From looking at all the years and designs that I've seen from previous versions of Power Rangers over the decade and a half that it's been around, Jungle Fury has the best designs out of all of them and had me interested in it from the beginning. I can see why kids are enthralled with it since it has aspects of all the cool stuff that I had growing up such as Godzilla, Shogun Warriors, Ultraman, and a dash of Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan mixed in.

When I was first offered the Rangers, it was the day after I turned in the last of my Handy Manny artwork on November 1st of 2007, I knew that I would be working on it then and I decided to see what the show was going to look like. I was hesitant at first thinking that it might be like a lot of the designs for the earlier versions of it, and it didn't really thrill me, so I thought that it might just be a job with a really nice check. One of my artist friends, Chris Bailey, who was the CGI Special Effects Supervisor on the Alvin and The Chipmunks movie told me early on that the new designs were great for the show and that I'd have a lot of fun with it. He was right in the end. The show has run it's course with the storyline ending with 32 episodes and they did leave it open-ended to bring it back. So who knows what they will do... At any rate, I post this this pic as a teaser for some of the newer images I'll post here soon. I posted the rough sketch of this artwork a while ago and now here is the final art for it! Enjoy!