Bottling the Run

Having such a busy week, I waited until the last minute figuring out what I wanted to do on this.
What stood out in my mind was the memory of last year’s game. The Herd was favored, but somehow found itself in a tight battle down to the wire.
A great opportunity to put it away was foiled when mulit-threat QB Joe Webb got the crucial yardage on a fourth-and-ten play. The drive continued and the Herd lost.
This season, Webb is again tearing up the ground on teams.
Some of the ideas I had early, such as a cowboy and dragons round-up in a corral, or lassoing dragons in a rodeo, were a little too involved for a mid-Friday. So I’ve kept it simple, stuck the dragon in a bottle and gave Marco the mallet.


Secondly, here’s the image from last weeks game against WVU. Just thought I’d point out what I did in PhotoShop to pull this off. I did the image of Marco and the Mountaineer pretty much as you see it. Knowing I was going to be blurring the Mountaineer’s legs a bit, I didn’t draw them complete and the actual drawn part was not too far below where you see it. I clipped the Mountaineer portion out and pasted it on a separate page. From there I just did a simple horizontal motion blur with an 800-pixel distance. That smeared the image unrecognizable other than some color and provided a nice lightening on the ends. I copied this blur, went back to the original drawing, selected the entire background and pasted the blur inside. After positioning it to line up with the running Mountaineer, I erased the portion of the blur that extended in front of the Mountaineer. I then flattened the original and blur layers together, then smeared parts of the Mountaineer to blend the transition of the blur to him. It was a pretty easy effect.
Oh and incidentally, “speed” ended up not being much of a factor in the game.

Avoid the Wave finish

Its always fun to sketch big sweeping waves of green water.
As I was working on Tulane's homecoming queen, I'm thinking to myself "OK, how do you make a pelican look alluring?
Good luck today, Herd.

Avoid the Wave ruff

OK. So Marshall had a rough homecoming loss to defending conference champion East Carolina.
At first, I was thinking this was the time the Herd would get complacent and take it easy on a softer opponent, only to end up finding itself in a dog fight, and ultimately losing. It seemed to happen last year way too often. When you’re a team trying to earn the league’s respect, you don’t have the luxury of mailing it in — ever. The best teams never mail it in.
Anyway, I originally had Marco in a boat labeled “complacency” with the pelican riding the big green wave of confidence. Tulane had an optimistic off-season but opened with two dismal losses. It has now bounced back and is riding a two-win resurgence.

Now usually the Homecoming opponent is a mismatch and an easy contest. So here Marshall is as Tulane’s homecoming opponent.
I remember years back when Marshall was the homecoming opponent for the at-the-time lowly Buffalo Bulls. In that illustration, I had Marco running off with Buffalo’s homecoming queen ~ that was fun.
Now it’s the Herd’s turn to steal the queen from Tulane.

Ride That Float, Baby!

Snyder was fun to do although the image was a bit small and with the 3/4 angle view of his face, I couldn't really accentuate how close together his eyes are. I may do a better one later ~ just for the fun of it.
Good luck today Herd.