Punked & Skunked

One of the more busy challenges from The Rotten School books was this cover for Book 11, "Punked & Skunked. The story was hilarious, and the visuals were a fun mess of contraptions from these kids' own inventive minds...of course, they really came from the twisted and genius mind of R. L. Stine himself. This cover needed Bernie Bridges with a contraption on his back that (in reality, this scene never really occurred in the book itself) was going quite hay-wired. I loved putting his dog, Gassy in wherever possible - and here he's getting his own auto-wash...and if you look at one of the shocks closely, you'll see that Bernie's own arch enemy in the series, Sherman Oaks, owns and makes these very shocks. Typical, he owns everything else.

The pencil had to be done quickly as this was one of the last books done in the series (before they were extended to another four more).

A first pass of color, although always ugly, just lays out the palette of colors with which to work. Knew this might be a bright yellow cover, so I needed highlights of that.

And the nice addition of the "construction/warning diagonal stripes" in black and yellow were a fun touch here and there.

I always loved how the art broke out from the boarders of the books' frame. This was no exception.

New Underwear

In this Rotten School book #4, "Lose Team Lose," (probably the best and most funny in my opinion) Bernie Bridges has two wars going on - one fighting the girl of his nightmares hunting him down, and the other a series of huge, monstrous opposing football teams. To him, they're just as bad. But I loved depicting this character with practically no shoulders in huge pads, and it brought his Hershey's Kiss-shaped body into a neat, opposing triangular shape.

(Here's a secret - I'm not very organized, no really, not at all) But I make myself get that way or things get really messy. With every book, project, etc. I break out a binder and sleeves, shown here, and just keep every tearing, every shred, and piece that makes it into the scanner, 'cause you just might need it later. Here you can see the pieces that went into this page alone:

The first issue here was the player behind Bernie, although menacing, he looked too old. Note several tries at it above.

A smaller chin helped, and I went overboard a little by giving him an almost babyish look and added big, puffy cheeks. The only thing not really babyish here is the tough, lower lip. You teach yourself things at the strangest times...

Although I loved the big guy's build, I was willing to sacrifice most of his presence by making him bleed off the page with his huge shoulder pads. So my suggested layout was below. But in the end, we went with keeping his whole silhouette within the crop. Still worked.

One of my all-time favorite tools in Painter is the Digital Paintbrush Splatter Water tool! It's rare you get a chance to really pour it out there, but with this guy, the great thing about it being in B&W was that while it gave the impression that he was covered in splashes of mud and grime, it also gave the creepy impression that it could also be blood from last week's game.

One Rotten Character.

With Bernie Bridges, the lead character in the Rotten School Series, his head was just plain huge. He had very small shoulders, a wicked grin, and all the confidence in the world.  This pose had to shriek out, "check your wallet."