Timmons and the Lumpy Bumpy Monster

Doing some backups, I stumbled across a group of pages from around 1997 which were on one of my old archive drives.

NOTE: Several years prior to this story, I tried to do another children's book.
After my uncle passed away from his bout with Leukemia, he became the inspiration to my first children's book idea, Bobby's Biggest Bubble. I poured all my time into making that story get published back in 1994. But after years of receiving rejection notices, I told myself that I would one day go back and do that book again. (But that's another story.)

Jumping forward to 1997: At the time, I kept on creating more stories in my head. The story ideas came fast, but developing the characters that would fit into those tales took a long time.

Page three of Timmons and the Lumpy Bumpy Monster

Above is one of the first pages my story about a boy named Timmons, his pet hamster Hairy and the magical monster that was in his bedroom closet. I worked on this for years as a side project in my spare time. I also wanted to generate a series of stories to go with these characters, so I wrote ten stories; creating fuller and deeper personalities and background history.

Original pencil sketch

Digitally Inked and Color Testing

For years I kept working on these characters, mostly on my train rides to and from work in NYC, drawing hundreds of sketches, fleshing the major characters out until it they had the right look I wanted. Once I knew these were the characters for my story - I started sketching pages for the first book. It was a slow process, but I felt the changing and development of the characters and story were improving. Taking time developing these characters over the year seemed to be a good idea . . .

That was until Pixar came out with Monsters Inc. in 2001, my concept of a monster that used transportation doorways was now part of a major successful film. If I did my book and showed it to the publishers in 2001, they would say I was copying the Pixar's film. Even though my monster and stories were totally different, too much of the story was parallel with Monsters Inc. This truly deflated my motivation to go forward . . . because this wasn't the first time I had similar concepts prior to Pixar releases. (see Home of the Brave  for another example and I will tell of my 3rd Pixar conflict in a near future posting.)

Fast forwarding to today, I've my first kid's book on the way this year. Special thanks to all the great people who helped with the KickStarter Project.

It feels like my stories will finally have a chance to be made. Enough years have now passed that I don't think my story would be directly tied to the Monsters Inc. concept anymore.  The chance for Timmons and the Lumpy Bumpy Monster to see print seems better and better . . . 

Illustration Friday: Weapon

Illustration Friday: Every Friday a word is given on the website, IllustrationFriday.com. Artists and illustrators then submit an image that represents that word all during the week.

This week's word: Weapon

For this week's submission, I simply took from an old image I did of my character Hairy. The page had Hairy getting ready to battle a monster in the closet, using the best toy weapons he could find.

Hairy loaded and ready for battle. Image taken from one of my oldest picture book stories.

Below is the original full image from which this image was taken from. This page is  #14 from the story, "Timmons and the Lumpy Bumpy Monster" back in the early 90's.

Original full colored dummy book page from "Timmons and the Lumpy Bumpy Monster"

Throwback Thursday: L.B. Monster sketch found

REPOST DUE TO CORRUPT AND/OR LOST IMAGE FILE:
Many posts labelled with Throwback Thursday suddenly missing or corrupt images.
Why is this happening Blogger (aka Google?)
Originally posted on 6/24/16

UPDATE: Color

Marker comp: Coloring LB slightly different than usual . . . testing the waters

UPDATE: Inked version

Brush pen inked version of the found Lumpy Bumpy Monster pencil sketch 

Originally Posted on 1-7-2016 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
It's a strange feeling to find some of my work from the past. There's this sense of seeing it with new eyes again as if looking at someone else's work. This one in particular really surprised me. It was hidden on an old hard drive I was cleaning out to scrap.This image was sketched sometime back around 2003.

An old pencil sketch of my series's main character called The Lumpy Bumpy Monster ( aka L.B.)

L.B. (short for Lumpy Bumpy) is one of my oldest and favorite characters to draw. It took me nearly a decade to mold him into the character he is today. Yet, while I have 100s of sketches and drawings, I've yet to ever really do anything with him (and his supporting characters.) L.B. was originally intended to be part of a series of books for children. I felt I needed to be established in the publishing world before I could ever do the tales I wanted with L.B. and Timmons.

I'm sure I will be finding more hidden works on old sketch pads, hard drives, floppy disks and CDs. If I ever get the time, I'd like to clean up and ink this image ...

Timmons

One of my oldest characters done in digital pastels.
I really like the texture and look of pastels for a kid's book. I know a story I have written that deals with food characters that I will do next year . . . I believe this is the style I will use for that story.

Recovered Image: Playing Yuk-Zee

Recently found some old sketches that I don't remember doing (happens a lot.) This one was very strange because it was colored with watercolor pencils, something I rarely used when I was younger. It's not dated, but I'm guessing by my style and the characters in the image, this was probably done around the early 90's.

Found image of L.B., Timmons and Hairy playing a game of Yuk-Zee in a water color pencil sketch 

Another strange thing about this image was that I drew it on watercolor paper, which meant I had the intention to actually add water to the image, spreading the water color pencils to look more like a real watercolor painting. But this image was never wet. Nor was it finished, as seen by the light pencil sketch of a window in the background. The entire top of the sheet is roughly torn as if the sheet was quickly torn in half.

So my guess is that I was going to experiment with the water color pencils, sketched this scene, colored the characters -- but then stopped, because the look just wasn't what I was wanted. Probably torn the image out of the pad and threw it aside onto the pile of images I had stored away until this moment.

Daily Quick Sketch: Sword Fightin'

Been a long time since I posted something here. Work is getting stressful and I'm having a very hard time getting the work done lately. It's probably a combination of burn out and simply doing seasonal concepts over and over again. The market is still in recession, and no one is risking on ordering anything remotely new or different. This makes it hard to do postings here, since my creativity for this type of work usually comes from less stressful times. But enough with my belly aching . . . 

The revamp version of  an old pencil sketch I call "Sword Fighin'!"

This is a revamped version of a very old sketch I did of Timmons, L.B. and Hairy. Back when I worked in New York City, I would often sketch my characters while commuting on the train to/from work. It was a nice way to practice fleshing out and fine tuning my characters.

The original sketch with all it's gritty and fading pencil lines

I hope to one day compile all of the trial and error it took to create Lumpy Bumpy to what he looks like today. (FYI: He's the big alien dinosaur laying down in the background.) L.B. is totally different from then when he was first conceptualized many, many years ago.

I also hope to start posting more images here on the blog again.
I can probably handle posting pencil sketches, but coloring images is too time consuming at this point. Hopefully things will slow down in the upcoming months and most posts here will be back on track.

Inktober 2016: Rock (#08 of 31)

For the 8th day of Inktober, the word of the day is Rock. That reminded me of my rock people characters . . . And my favorite is King Mudsok.

Blue pencil and inked character design of King Mudsok, the beloved leader of the Molten People.

Mudsok is one of the many characters I have been developing for a humorous story that takes place underground. His name is King Mudsok. Not sure where I got the name, but it popped into my head as soon as I finished drawing him. He is the king of the Molten People, a tribe that is at war with the Mucklugs, (a tribe of underground plant people.)

I see his character as being one who intimidates those who meet him. His voice is deep and rough, and his size is pretty impressive. He speaks with a loud, aggressive tone that vibrates the surrounding area. But underneath all that tough persona lies a very passionate, loving and caring soul. He really is a softie -- made of stone.

King Mudsok is a part of one of my many children's book stories for my "Timmons and the Lumpy Bumpy Monster" series. I'll try to find the Mucklug leader, Zoobi-Dang and post it when I can.

More: Timmons and the Lumpy Bumpy Monster

Found several more dummy pages in my archive drives.

These images were saved as GIFs, which explains the grainy-pixel texture of each image. These are pages 6, 8 and 14 to the 32 page story.