Fun Stuff:
The Art Gallery

After a long absence, the Art Gallery has returned! Although not necessarily GPF related, this page showcases some of my art talents that aren't otherwise exercised in the simplified style of the strip. Click on any thumbnail to enlarge the picture, then use your browser's Back button to return to this page.

This little critter is not a photograph, I promise. This is perhaps the work I am most proud of. I drew this way back in 1992, during my senior year of high school, with Prismacolor colored pencils on black paper. I worked from a photograph in a nature magazine and blew up a tracing using a cellophane grid. The original hangs in my parents' den. I took a series of high-resolution scans of it back in 1997 but didn't have the computer processing muscle to stitch it together into a composite picture. I recently rediscovered the archive containing those files and pieced him together.

Here's a pencil sketch of Randi the Wonder Kitty as a kitten. I didn't know her back when she was this tiny, but my then-fiancée gave me this photo of her while I was away from home on a summer co-op in college. I drew the sketch as a present for her, and it currently hangs framed in our office at home.

This is a higher resolution copy of the final planel of this Sluggy Freelance strip. Back in 2000, several Plan Nine artists joined forces to draw Sluggy Freelance for Pete Abrams to give him some "paternity leave" when his daughter was born. The resulting "Sluggy Freelance, Where Are You?" story is a wild and crazy ride that both thrilled and outraged Sluggites everywhere. Trudy only plays a minor part in the story when she is asked to play the role of Bun-Bun and subsequently uses this as an opportunity to try and take over Plan Nine itself.

So why is this in here? Well, I did all the digital editing in all the strips in this story that contained photographic elements. (And let me tell you, there's a lot of them.) I'm especially proud of this panel, in that I took a number of elements (a photo of the office, a drawn Trudy, and the photo of David Allen's legs) and combined them into this almost seamless picture. There are several other similar panels where "Stick Figure Shirt Guy Tom" is edited into photographic elements. See if you can find them!

Now this is a parody a lot of Faulties were begging for early on. Way back when, I actually planned to do an X-Files parody in the strip, but rejected the initial idea because... well, the script was pretty lame. However, I did like a sketch I did of Nick and Ki as "Mox Folder" and "Sana Dully," so I inked it and colored it as you can see here. Also note the date at the bottom: September 28, 1997, over a full year before the comic actually launched online. (That ought to tell you how long I had been working on this thing.) By the way, GPF Premium subscribers can actually read the rejected "W-Files" story arc in our exclusive Jeff's Sketchbook feature.

Here are some nicely colored pin-up shots of Absolutely Incredible Man and Plasma Woman from the bonus story in our first book. Of course, I don't want to spoil any surprises for anyone who hasn't read the book, but let's just say we get to see Nick's own artistic abilities when he creates a group of superheroes based on his friends at GPF Software. These images were also a test bed for the coloring technique I started using on Sunday strips and, starting with Year Six, every strip.

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