I just got finished signing and numbering a series of new prints called "Dark Psych". Here are a few of them. They haven't made it to my website yet, but I posted a cuple to ebay. Hopefully I will have some takers. Or buyers. Full sets are to follow with printed black envelopes. These are freakin' nice. Patent Pending Industries always does a fantastic job. 4 of 8 prints:
Fafhrd is the pseudo-viking hero of Fritz Leiber's Nehwon books ("Swords and Ice Magic" ; "Swords and Deviltry" etc.) It's the only fiction series covered in this edition of Deities and Demigods, though Michael Moorcock's Elric series and Lovecraft's Cthulhu were covered in earlier versions.
Text reads:"Will you recognize grandma and grandpa?"
The above is my interpretation of a Crypt Keeper type character for the relaunch of my blog. Penguinx is an alias that I perform a lot of work under, so it's nice to put a visual to the text. I'm redesigning the site to look like an old, EC Horror comic, so it's only fitting.
Just completed for the comic book to go along with the 500th episode of Chica-Go-Go! I did that Pedro Bell drawing for the same project. I'm stoked to see the final. I think this is one of the better comics i've done, i was super satisfied with the moshing Ratso in the first panel.
Here is an early in progress example of a very large digital collage I'm working on. This is part of The Land Of The Moth, an epic storybook that takes place in a strange fantasy world filled with cults of magicians that ride giant black wolves, cities of puppets, all varieties of the living dead and countless miracles, atrocities, Gods and creatures. Inspiration is taken largely from Lewis Caroll, Joel Peter Witkin, Clive Barker, Alessandro Bavari and Hieronymus Bosch. Other examples from this digital series can be found at The Imaginary Museum. The folks who run Ligotti.net have been kind enough to host a gallery of my work there. You can see in this early version many of the place holder images that work well for me to guage the compositional elements before devoting a lot of time fine tuning elaborate digital constructions. A good example of a really bizarre scene from this picture is in the upper right, that odd mutated barn animal will have that cannon grafted onto its body, becoming some sort of living breathing war monstrosity that shoots cannon balls from its snout. Before its done there will be hundreds of odd characters fighting across the landscape and all variety of tanks and machine gun creatures running about with peculiar features.
My name is Ray Frenden and I draw things for a living. I'd be drawing something anyway, so this works out pretty well. I've worked on games, comics, editorial images, and the like.
There's not much I won't make a picture of for money.
I've been drawing for about two and a half years. I doodled a lot in high school, but I shelved all that sort of frivilous stuff and set out to earn a living in a variety of mundane jobs that never really lead anywhere. I fell into graphic design and that brought me full circle back to drawing. As soon as I got my hands on a Wacom tablet, I started to draw and haven't stopped. All of my work is digital. I never use analog drawing materials because, well, I didn't learn with them and they don't suit my method.
I met the gang of blokes, here, via mutually occupied forums, and Aeron was nice enough to toss an invite my way. I hope you'll dig my illustrations as much as I like making them. With all that blathering out of the way, hope to see you around.
Oh-Kuni-Nushi is patron of heroes, Raiden is god of thunder and patron of fletchers. There's a bonus illustration of Raiden fighting some sort of giant Japanese samurai monster thing.
I switched here to a finer sharpie, which worked much better.
"Blossfeldt's photographs were made with a homemade camera that could magnify the subject up to thirty times its actual size. By doing so he revealed extraordinary details within the natural structure of the plants. "
here's some recent stuff, the mutilated simpsons strip was inspired by working on a page for Paul O' Connell's 'Dialogue' comic that may be hiding in here somewhere... http://www.soundofdrowning.com/strips.html
Like the title says, we're into Japanese mythology; Amaterasu Omikami, goddess of the sun, and Daikoku, god of wealth and luck
This is also the point where I switched from ballpoint pen to sharpie. I initially was using a pen that was a little too thick, and so the first thing you'll notice if you look is that the detail here is a lot less fine than in my last couple of efforts.
Text reads, "I fear the grape I just ate was warm because you had just been sucking on it."
Man it's gotten quiet in here since Luke disappeared...
Another one of those fantasy illustrations I'm working on at the moment. I'm almost done with the commission, then hopefully I'll have time for some personal work.
Vishnu is god of mercy and light; Garuda is "king of all birds". I'm not really sure why Garuda is out of alphabetical order...I'm sure there's some reason....
Text reads, "Mommy's at work, Daddy's at work, Pappa's at work, Nanna's here with me."
I was looking at this page about the excavation of an old WW1 tank and got a great idea for a short horror story. I love generic zombie flicks like Nightmare City,Zombie Lake (not safe for work) and Shock Waves. So what if they dug up some old German tank full of dead nazi soldiers that were part of a weird war experiment. The tank would be left in a storage building over night at which time the nazi zombies would wake up, drive their tank through the wall, then start kicking nazi zombie ass all over the place. I don't know where it would go from there but man that's a good fucking start.
edit - I love the idea of Hitler's brain still being out there somewhere, presumably locked up in a Russian vault that nobody knows about. So maybe these nazi zombies can sniff that brain out and by eating it they become SUPER NAZI ZOMBIE SOLDIERS! Just when you thought things couldn't get any worse! And let's assume somewhere underground there's hundreds of thousands of nazi zombies that are trapped due to a cave in caused by allied bombings. Well at some point those mothers are going to get loose!
I've decided to take a couple of months to finish up a project. Hopefully, I will return in TRIUMPH! So, yeah, no posting, no interweb, etc, for me , for a while. Talk to you guys soon. -Luke P.
Agni is god of fire and lightning, Kali is the black earth mother, Karttikeya is the demigod of war
In the book, Kali is a "lesser goddess". I don't know a ton about Hindu/Vedic religions, but I do know that calling Kali a "lesser goddess" is a bad idea. You don't fuck with Kali.
Text reads, "I remember playing with the bicycle and also frogs."
I was subjected to the black out that hit 300,000 some people across America in the past few days so I had to draw this in candle light. I could barely make out what I was drawing so the next day when the sun went up I was surprised to see a drawing that turned out decently. And Jon, I'm mailing this one out to you this week, hope you dig it. You're getting the only drawing I've ever made and hopefully ever will make under candle light!
I am having a very "man above time" moment these days. I was worried that i had deleted the following image... but i found it! Here is one of the places i'd like to live, rendered in the 8 BIT stylings. I am having a discussion with Dennis Dread about art & he mentioned the amount of work it takes to convince people that his bic pen drawings are art! The art world is a load of bollocks! It has nothing to do with the actual true energies & people that create good work. But that's fine with me, why would i want a bunch of rich assholes to invest in my work after i'm dead anyhow? Here's a better idea, invest in me now & i'll make this stuff into real life & your kids & grandkids will get to live in it. There's a real investment. This also got me thinking about being told to not use markers for my work & how "real mediums" were better. Once again, this is trying to make me follow rules for the game that i'm not playing. For me, art is exploration. If i become stagnant & regimented, it means i've stopped doing what i love to do. Rules are for the uninspired & lazy.
I recently posted this bit on the TCJ messboard.It's response to an incredibly idiotic review by Kent Worcester. It can be found here.
"As one who’s studied 911 and the events surrounding it, I read with great interest Kent Worcesters’ review of the 911 REPORT : A Graphic Adaptation, printed in TCJ #279 . Forgive my late response; I only just recieved the issue . I must state that I did not expect Mr. Worcesters’ piece to comment on the well-founded controversy surrounding the official story of 911. I expected a pretty dry assessment of the volume in the context of comic book criticism, and that’s mostly what we got , and that’s fine. Problem is, when one takes on a book with such historical wieght, such direct political and social relevance, that person takes on with it a responsibility that goes beyond comics. Like any other criticism of similar import, I’d expect at least some cursory explanation of the method by which this narrative was created. How did this narrative come to be, exactly? The history of the commission was not remarked on ; that it’s very creation was vehemently opposed by our beloved “decider” and his co-horts, Only after the vocal insistence of family members of victims did they agree to the foundation of the comission, that their first choice for comission head was good ‘ol Doc Kissinger ( who, after a round of questions from the families of victims felt compelled to redact himself from the board due to a very apparent conflict of interest, unable to answer a question about wether or not he counts any Saudi royalty or members of the Bin Laden family as clients..).Philip Zelikow , a member of Bush the firsts’ administration , co-author of a book with Condi Rice and member of this presidents Foreign Intelligence Advisory board, was selected as the “Executive Director” of the commission and thereby the behind-the-scenes steering committee of one. They went on to hand-select each member of the board, who seemed only vaugely annoyed that Bush and Cheney, Condi Rice,etc. refused to testify under oath, with the added stipulation that no official record be taken of their testimony. Requests for information were routinely spurned by many involved parties. I could go on and on. And what is the story told in the 911 REPORT? Where Mr. Worcester failed , I’ll pick it up; It is nothing but the streamlined version of narrative cobbled-together by various cherry-picked testimonies.It does not include any mention of the numerous contradictions found in the actual 911 report, contradictory testimonies often from the same individual. Let’s be clear; this narrative is the commissions attempt at creating a viable story, with any and all contradictory information simply left out. No mention is made of the third collapse of that day , that of WTC7, for instance. Is this what you mean by “instructional”, Mr. Worcester? It’s as “instructional” as a prosecutors’ recreation of events in a murder trial. It is, like the ‘conspiracy” theories you self-righteously dismiss , just another theory. Unlike the truly relevant and incisive conspiracy theories, the ones that simply point out the contradictions and ask tough questions , this official conspiracy theory was designed for a very specific purpose; to present the cleanest narrative of 911 possible, the one that ruffles the fewest feathers. Yet another failure , in my opinion, is Mr. Worcesters’ lack of comment on the intended audience. Might it be relevant to question who the target demographic for such a comic book might be? Is it safe to assume that the target might be children? I can only guess that this book might seem a very attractive choice for those parents/adults looking for a good gift for the comic-reading kids in their life; it isn’t, after all, some flashy fantasy ( or is it?), it’s something that might be useful, educational, even “instructional”. The final paragraph is the truly inciteful one, and it seems intended as such. Gears shift with a screech and we’re in Andy Rooney, nieghborhood op-ed turf:
“What if the 911 plot was hatched at Langley rather than in an Al-Qaeda training camp? Are comics industry veterans Jacobson and Colon part of a larger conspiracy to frame radical Muslims and instigate global resource wars? As someone who witnessed the second plane smash into South Tower (and it was definitely a plane, not a missile), I have a hard time swallowing some of the more dramatic claims that have been advanced in documentaries and websites about 911. A few days after the attacks, an undergraduate gravely confided to me that “no Jews” died in the towers. The fact that the earliest conspiracy theories were anti-Semitic and contradicted my own experiences and observations, makes me weary of putative theories hat link policymakers to controlled explosions and aircraft hijacking. Whatever happened to Occams’ Razor?”
That Mr. Worcester goes on to conflate , implicitly, anyone who questions the official narrative ve of 911 with anti-Semites and tin-foil hat wearers because, well, he heard some college kid say something anti-Semitic, therefore the “first” 911 “conspiracies” were too. I’m glad the opinions of eighteen to twenty-two year olds doesn’t have such an effect on me. I’d be at da club instead of the library. I’m disturbed at how one who employs such logic is in the ostensible position of educating at the collegiate level. Does Mr. Worcester honestly think us ‘conspiracy nuts’ would have Colon and Jacobson in an underground bunker, getting top-secret info from Bin Laden and Cheney so they can make a more effective comical book? I doubt it. It’s an easy, talk-jock maneuver. I’m sure it seemed like a good gig for these guys, one that might help out against the Brown Peril and get their names in the NY Post, nothing more. The first “conspiracy theories” related to 911 in fact occurred months before 911, when various alternative media researchers, including radio host Alex Jones, stated that elements of our government were in the process of manufacturing a terror attack that will be blamed on their “patsy”, Osama Bin Laden. A video of this can be viewed online( *). A few “theories” after 911 probably did include vaguely anti-Israeli sentiments, but conflating those with every other theory, without looking seriously at their logic, is an ignorant, knee-jerk response, one that , in a self-serving manner, confirms ones own bias. It’s like you imagine a single team, hiding in the background who get together and decide which new crazy theory they present next. Ridiculous. The diversity of opinion, background, religion, race, etc. in the 911 Truth movement is as diverse as America itself. Similarly, the “missile hit the tower” theory, as far as I can tell, isn’t a theory at all. I’ve never heard or read this before you stated it. I thought I was up on all this too. Where did you hear this one Mr. Worcester? It seems you’ve chosen two very flammable straw-men ( one of which you may have invented whole-cloth) to represent the 911 truth movement. It’s an easy trick and it belies your all too apparent , shamelessly ignorant malice. From TIME : “A Scripps-Howard poll of 1,010 adults last month found that 36% of Americans consider it "very likely" or "somewhat likely" that government officials either allowed the attacks to be carried out or carried out the attacks themselves. Thirty-six percent adds up to a lot of people. This is not a fringe phenomenon. It is a mainstream political reality. “ (**) Is this some sort of Anti-Semitic conspiracy that we’re all in on , Mr. Worcester? What all of these people agree on is very simple; we do not know the truth about what happened on that day, nor the events leading up to it. And we, as free-thinking adults, need to open new, effective investigations that do not avoid potentially damaging outcomes.It’s very, very simple. I invite those of you who’re interested in exploring the very real and very relevant questions regarding the official story of 9/11 to view 9/11: Myth and Reality Featuring David Ray Griffith (***), a renowned professor of theology, who presents a very clear and concise speech on the subject. Even Kent should give it a watch, that is, if he’s not too busy on hold with the ADL, exposing the anti-Semitic conspiracy.
Note: I am unable to get online very often- usually for an hour or so every other day, so I might not be able to respond in a timely manner to questions or comments."
Nike is the goddess of victory (not of shoes); Odysseus is a hero in a boat. This one wasn't my favorite at the time, and it seems a bit lackluster still.
The text reads, "When I say "I love you," you say, "Mommy's at work."
Here is an early in progress example of a very large digital collage I'm working on. This is part of The Land Of The Moth, an epic storybook that takes place in a strange fantasy world filled with cults of magicians that ride giant black wolves, cities of puppets, all varieties of the living dead and countless miracles, atrocities, Gods and creatures. Inspiration is taken largely from Lewis Caroll, Joel Peter Witkin, Clive Barker, Alessandro Bavari and Hieronymus Bosch. Other examples from this digital series can be found at The Imaginary Museum. The folks who run Ligotti.net have been kind enough to host a gallery of my work there. You can see in this early version many of the place holder images that work well for me to guage the compositional elements before devoting a lot of time fine tuning elaborate digital constructions. A good example of a really bizarre scene from this picture is in the upper right, that odd mutated barn animal will have that cannon grafted onto its body, becoming some sort of living breathing war monstrosity that shoots cannon balls from its snout. Before its done there will be hundreds of odd characters fighting across the landscape and all variety of tanks and machine gun creatures running about with peculiar features.
These images have been a great inspiration to me for many years. 
Another one of those fantasy illustrations I'm working on at the moment. I'm almost done with the commission, then hopefully I'll have time for some personal work.
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