It's Shrunken-Head Joe's 8x10 publicity photo.
Joe was a character created by my pal KW Monster back in the 1990s. We collaborated and produced a Joe comic strip that ran in the local free paper for about 2 years. We both wrote it, then I would pencil it and KW would ink it. It was apparently pretty popular; to this day people still tell us how much they liked it.
Then one day the editor of the paper actually read the comic, was horrified by it and we were fired. We also had quite a fancy Shrunken-Head Joe website for a while. Maybe someday we'll revive him.
This was my attempt to make a 1940s-looking film noir publicity photo of Shrunken-Head Joe like all the movie stars used to have.
I was just looking at this thing for the first time in years and noticed there seems to be a lot of empty space above Joe's head. I was thinking, "Wow, what horrible spacing by 1998 Bob, but then I remembered-- the extra space is intentional. He's got a shrunken head. His head is tiny. It doesn't take up as much space as a normal head. That 1998 Bob was a genius!
They always seemed to be leaning into the frame in those old shots, and there was always a shadowy, amorphous background.
And quite often they were shown smoking in their publicity photos, as if they couldn't put down their coffin nail for even the 1/30th of a second it took for the shutter to open. I drew this in Photoshop, circa 1999, on a couple hundred layers. I didn't have a graphic tablet at the time, so it was all drawn with the mouse. Don't ask me how.
You drew that with a mouse? Bob you got mad skillz!
ReplyDeleteYeah, somehow. I must have used lots of layers and erased a lot.
ReplyDeleteI've been drawing on a tablet for so long now that I don't think I could do something like this with the mouse anymore.