A good friend to have...

Hi everyone. Welcome back after a long weekend. Hope you all had fun.

Today's piece was inspired by looking at some of Adam Hughes' convention sketches online, and wishing I was that good. And while I was feeling very lame as an artist (especially when it comes to drawing females) I had a geeky flash back to one of the first anime I watched as 'anime'.

You may be confused by that. Let me explain.

In the mid 90s, probably around 1993 or 1994 I was surfing through the channels in our newly hooked up cable television on my summer break, when I stumbled upon the SciFi channel (yes, before it was changed to SyFy). I was being shown some of the most fantastic animation I had ever seen. At that time, I had only really watched american cartoons and Disney movies, and this blew them out of the water. I caught the second half of Venus Wars, followed by Dominion: Tank Police, and lastly Project A-Ko. I was captivated. And they kept calling it "anime". I finally had something to refer to whenever I read that term in a Wizard magazine, or was engaged in a geek conversation at school. This was japanese animation.

Shortly after that I realized that I had seen anime in the past. My brother and I used to watch Robotech on TV every Saturday morning. After Battlestar Galactica. But I hadn't really thought anything of it. And then the food gates opened. I re-discovered so many older cartoons with new eyes as I realized they were anime.

Project A-Ko, while heavily edited in the marathon, was a wake up call. I had no idea you could tell a story like that in animation. Nor did I realize that people actually animated action, and yes, fan service, that well.

So I thought I'd try my rusty hand at a sketch of A-Ko. Anyway, it was done in CS3 on my MacBook using the ol' Bamboo tablet. Hope you all dig.