Game of Guns 1

Alrighty! It’s time to highlight what I’m packing, or rather, what my characters are packings. This week, it’s all about pistols! All the guns displayed here are complete works of fancy on my part, but real guns/pistols/six-shooters from the late Victorian era was used as reference.

We start off our odyssey of pistols with Mrs. Applegarth’s weapon, rarely seen, but a doozy nonetheless. It’s the biggest and largest caliber of the collection of guns I created for C.O.G. Chronicles. It is brass-plated and deadly. I figured I would start with a BANG!

Mrs. Applegarth's Pistol

 

Myles’s Arm-Apparatus

Today I an very happy to show you Myles’s Arm-Apparatus in all ti’s detail! I did several sketches of this before I finally locked in on this design. Actually, the front of this was completed BEFORE I did the pin-ups. However, the Back came later and is featured here with the front, as it should be.

The Arm-Apparatus is brass plated and features the innards of the gears works. I am still developing the gear pattern that will go into that portion of the Arm-Apparatus. The Arm-Apparatus is primarily used to aid Myles’s work inventing, particularly the gloves with the tool components that extend from from the top of the hand down the length of the fingers. The design is lovingly embellished with a boar’s head for a pocket watch attachment and crimson tassels. Myles, despite his other failings, does have a certain sense of innate style when it concerns his work, though he rerely elaborates on why that is. The Arm-Apparatus does have offensive and defensive capabilities hidden within it’s workings. This was not it’s original function but over the years Myles has been forced to make these adjustments for his own protection. However, since the hiring of Rosejack, he has used these functions rarely.

Myles's Arm-Apparatus

 

C.O.G. Chronicles Wallpaper

Alright, for the few of you already watching this blog, here is a wallpaper design featuring the inks I did of the initial cast. It has been jazzed up with a parchment texture and the names and titles of each characters. This size is intended for a 27″ large format iMac. If you have a smaller screen, feel free to shrink it at you discretion. Like on the image to download.

C.O.G. Chronicles Wallpaper

 

Sailor Twain Or the Mermaid in the Hudson

This is a great online comic series that is Victorian and magical. For those of you looking for something different and fascinating this is a great riot. Click on the image to take you to the comic!

Sailor Twain

 

Myles’s Glasses

Here is a quick study of Myles’s glasses or spectacles. They have a variety of moving parts and can fold into themselves for easy storage.

The “sunglasses” disks can move to the inside of the side frames when not needed or swung behind the spectacle portion. The spectacle glass has a hinge on the bottom that makes them swing forward so as to be moved out of the way when needed. Myles is near-sighted, which means he has a problem seeing objects far away but can see things perfectly when close. Since he uses the magnifying attachment on the glasses when working on his inventions, he just swings the spectacle glass down out of his way when he uses them instead of getting a completely new set of glasses to do the job. When Myles wishes to stow the glasses away, the hinge in the center arch swings inward until the sun & spectacle glass lay next to each other and then the ear stems fold in and over until all the parts make a small easily compact shape that he can put in his coat pocket.

I know, complicated. Usually I will have more complete schematics of items, but this image make perfect sense to me so I don’t think it will be likely in this case.

Myles's Glasses

 

A Lady’s Hair is Her Life

Like today, ladies fashion and hair have varied and changed with the times. The 1870’s had it own specific looks.  Some sites that highlights these looks are:

http://demodecouture.com/hair/ – Various eras of hair goodness showcased

http://www.lphouse.com/1870s.htm – More hair of the times with original photos to highlight the looks.

Lime most things in C.O.G. Chronicles, I am happy to adjust and change things to suit my purposes. That is the chief advantage of making and alternate reality. However, I still like to see where it comes from initially so that I can make those changes purposefully, not accidentally.

 

 

Empyrean Industries Logo

What we have here today is the logo design for Empyrean Industries. This is Myles Ballantyne & Dr. Cavendish’s company. They are based out of Scotland, with both Myles and Cavendish living and Edinburgh and their factories in Glasgow. Thus is used a lot of Scottish crest iconography for it. I also used a compass rose image as well because Empyrean Industries specializes in vehicles and transportation. I am still uncertain if I will be using elements of his image as the official Masthead logo for the comic itself.

Empyrean Industries Logo

 

The 1870’s

I have chosen the 1870’s as the era for C.O.G. Chronicles. I’ve made an alternate history for the comic, and thus most of the real events of that era will be glossed over. What will be more closely regarded is the fashion of the time and looks of the city of Edinburgh in particular. I have found some varying resources, but some of the better ones online I found was these sites:

http://amyellecartwright.blogspot.com/2011/07/fashion-in-1870s.html – A london based costume designer who nails the 1870’s with words and photos.

http://www.bustledress.com/cgi-bin/z.pl/index.html – All things bustle and a great resource for looks!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victorian_dress – Never knew Wikipedia could be useful? But it is! Lost of great plates and art form various times frames of the victorian era.

 

Names, Names, NAMES!!

Where do I get the names for my cast? Form a variety of places, including from the air, books I’ve read, people I meet and more. But when the spark of inspiration doesn’t appear, I’ve some staples I like to search:

http://www.20000-names.com/ – This is a great resource even if its drowning in ads and pop-ups. It’s not very easy to use, but give it the time to dig, you will find gold.

http://oobleck.org/steam/ – I nice name generator for steam punk when you’re in a pinch. I prefer to make my own name combos but this someone gives you gems.

http://www.parenthood.com/babynames/baby-names.php – This is a babyname site but the search engine is very useful! It has it’s limits but it’s worth using to see if you can get what you want.

http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~poindexterfamily/OldNames.html – This ia a great resource for Victorian names and thus steampunk.

While I use these a lot for C.O.G. Chronicles, most of my favorite names are ones I find randomly and I just sort of keep in the back of my mind to be used for ideal projects like this one. That is where names like Ballantyne & Rosejack come from.

 

Cast Inks

Today I show you the Pin-Ups fully inked. I did these images separately on A3 / 11 X 17 paper. They were hand penciled and hand inked. However, they were cleaned up on the computer. Generally I use a blue pencils (which i turned grey in the previous post for easy viewing) and then use various inking techniques to get the desired effect. For these drawings, I mostly used repidographs for my line work and I just a brush pen for the dark hair. I twas inked in white paper and the ink was black. I turned the ink brown and the paper beige on the computer for effect.

Added to this list is Eddie Youngblood. Eddie is one of the villains in the story and technically is NOT one of the major ones. However, I REALLY wanted to design him and went ahead and splurged myself one extra character just for the hell of it, lol!

Cast Inks