More than 10 years ago I found a lot of online resources with concept art, storyboards and cut scenes for Batman (1989) and Batman Returns. I was baffled by the fact a lot of AMAZING things were left on the cutting room floor, which brings me to the unused poster below. I have yet to see an official restoration so  having already dabbled in upscaling/restoring with the Nintendo Power NES Batman Video Game, I tried my hand at this.

 

Original file (highest resolution I was able to find):

 

Bonus with added glow and red lips.

I had no idea this thing even existed and a decent scan online is pretty non-existent. This amazing piece of art was a four-page poster found in the eight volume of the now defunct Nintendo Power magazine. Archive.org has a full magazine scan but unfortunately no poster is included. Found within a Michael Keaton / Batman 1989 Facebook fan page, and thanks to Devan Gladden I was able to upscale and fix several aspects of the poster, including but not limited to: 

 

• • Re-doing the logos for Batman, Nintendo Power and its copyright signature 
• • Colorization as close as possible to other pictures of the poster itself found online 
• • Removal of creases and distortions 
• • Smoothing (tried to keep the original details as intact as possible) 
• • Upscaling for printing

Click for Full-size image. Dimensions: 5128x6000 px, File size: 3.3 MB

 The unedited version:

I saw somebody in a Facebook group related to Michael Keaton's Batman posting various smartphone wallpapers. I liked the concept very much but so much the execution. That's just fancy salty speak for "why didn't I think of it first and why am I confident I can do it better as well?".

So there you go, I may do other ones to shake off the Photoshop webs.

"Who needs the Bat signal when a card facing away from Batman will do?"

Completed in MS Paint without the "anti aliasing" brushes included in the modern version of the software. The Joker was initially a side-activity during downtime at my job, it was meant to be only a Batman logo with the Joker laughing in the background on the back of a box at my desk. The box was vandalized and I decided to go digital. What was only a face seemed bland and I decided to add a partial torso, which evolved into a background with a bit of detail by the end of the ordeal.

The Batman's pose was basically re-done from a variant poster of Batman: Mask of the Phantasm.

DeviantArt link.

For the past two months I've been trying to bring to "life" a concept I've had in my mind ever since I found some old rubbery dismembered body parts that only qualify as "toys" if you watched Dexter (not the boy genius). As a kid.

Coming up with the concept of "Art equals self-sacrifice" in a graphical manner wasn't difficult, shooting it, however, was a whole other ballpark. My dated Canon Rebelt XTi is good for some closeups and places with decent lighting. Photography with flash is hideous for the most part (the most part is when talking about the camera's built-in flash), and it is especially dated when all you've to work with are the stock lens and a pretty below-than-average macro lens. All these factors, plus the lack of space, good shooting angles and doing this by myself prompted me to have a second shoot because the first one was that awful (see below at the end of the post).

Second time around I had help from my good friend Sofia, providing the severed arm on the right, I could've used my own, like I did in my first shooting, but it was sub-par and awkward as hell. This will be submitted to an international art magazine, let's see if it gets approved.

We all wear masks, others better than others, and those who don't, just can't take theirs off.

It's been a while since I've taken pictures of-- well, just taken pictures in general. I was busy for about a month learning, practicing and finalizing the "documentary" of the short-lived punk rock band I was in, Cheap (A) Oi!, and ever since I've struggled to go out and take pictures.

Tonight was a night out and the sky was pretty clear so I went back home, grabbed my backpack and went off, because if I didn't take the chance, I was going to wait somewhere between a year and an eternity while the "muse" visited me. I have no new equipment, which should be considered a sin, so this was still shot with my Canon Rebel XTi and the Sigma DG 70-300, a nice, cheap, albeit slow lens I've had but not used very much. I used Photoshop to play a bit with the contrast and add the watermark because even using Lightroom after so long is a hassle for me (I'm reaching new heights of procrastination, I know).

So the other day I did some cleaning and found my good ol' plastic container of "Things I Should Throw Away But I Don't Want To, Yet". In it, some notebooks from my high school years (these can be anywhere from 2000-2003), and I suddenly remembered I would draw inane crap during classes so I figured "hey, I might throw these out next time I clean, so might as well keep whatever's worth scavenging".

I tried to clean them up a bit before saving them, but some are so old and faint (pencil, nonetheless) that the result is sketchy at best. No, that wasn't a pun, fuckwit. So, like the title implies, here are "Some old sketches". Keep in mind they're not remotely good, this post has more of an "archive" purpose.

It seems I'm my own best subject to work on. All humour aside, this actually speaks volumes of how I've basically been living day in day out since my "episode" in January 2014. Interpret it how you will. And yeah, I never could get the hand on the shoulder to look convincing enough, but it ain't easy when you're rushing something before the muse runs out as well as shooting everything by yourself.

This is my first "serious" photo-manip since, oh, perhaps 2011 2010 apparently. The only way I could find out was through the site itself since the original files in my computer have corrupted dates (all the way up to 2021).

The pictures, however, were taken in 2011. This was still when I lived with my mother (sad? you bet), 2 relationships and 3 places ago. A simple enough concept, a composite of two pictures, one with the pressure points on my face and another with a hand far from the face. The quality of the final product is not what I was hoping to achieve, my only excuses are that the pictures' quality was lesser than what I had expected after all these years and, that once I had achieved the main effect, I was in a hurry to finish it and most of the original concept was thrown out the door.

Originally, it was meant to have my face being stretched and ripped, much like this scene from Poltergeist:

An early concept also included my other hand grabbing the one you see, ripping it as well.  In the end, I solved it with a big "fuck it" and finished it.

And now here's Beetlejuice!

This was my first time ever drawing this guy, having around 4 pictures as reference, I managed to draw The Ghost with The Most as shown in his animated series that ran in the early 90's. As you may or may not know, the Beetlejuice movie was what made the first Tim Burton Batman movie possible. So I guess you could say I'm on a Tim Burton roll, but don't go thinking that now I'll draw that idiot Edward Scissorhands.

On to the notes, I didn't have a background planned for this one as I started it, and nothing in the Neitherworld is easy to draw, it's got that random look that looks like it was made by a 7-year-old yet it takes quite some practice to get it right if you wanna replicate it. At first I thought I would BJ's house, then I thought about Lydia's house, but I saw the intro again on YouTube and decided to go with the cartoon's logo.

As I said, I didn't have a planned background, and I had reached the end of the main character's drawing, as you know, MS-Paint doesn't have layers, so doing a background around Beetlejuice is a must. But I cheated a bit, I made the background in an entirely new document and then pasted Beetlejuice over it. I'm not particularly proud of it, but it had to be done. The letters would've been amazingly difficult to "visualize" behind BJ, thus making them unproportionate.

Not much to tell here, it took me longer to finish than Batman because towards, I was feeling uninterested, but once I started the background (yesterday) I managed to finish it.

Beetlejuice
Beetlejuice
 Beetlejuice

Here's one I should've posted along with Harvey Dreth, it's Batman: The Dark Knight's take on The Joker. With the hype of the movie, many shitty Photoshop edits started waving left and right from every corner of the Internet, there were even tutorials.

None of these helped me, because I didn't have the poses they showed in tutorials, nor were my pictures of the same quality. Consequently I directed my attention to the movie's own promotional ads, more specifically this one:

So I went ahead and took a picture of my hand with some crappy cotton black Halloween glove I had laying around with a really old Joker card from a normal card deck and grabbed an old picture that had no real purpose besides just taking space from my preciously limited Hard Drive.

I started doing this after watching the movie the day after it came out. It was mostly rushed but ended up better than I expected, but my expectations weren't that high anyway.

W.I.P.

Finished Joker

The only thing that's not mine are the teeth, which I took from some random Google Image Search result bastard.

So I've had this amazing pain on my lower back, it's really annoying. I can't do anything fun, my drum set is picking up dust and I have to remain in bed most of the time, my original desktop chair is either too old and lost all comfort or my back is that messed up and I can't use it anymore.

Either way, it gave me time to catch up on my pending crap, first one is a screenshot of Beavis & Butt-Head opening splash:



Which, needless to say, is fugly considering it was a really, really, REALLY cheap animation and it was left intact throughout the whole series. So my original project was to recreate it, with better colors and sharper lines and what-not. I mainly traced it completely because I was happy about finally learning to use the damn Pen Tool after using Photoshop since 2002 or so. The only thing I skipped was the MTV logo, I simply Google'd the render, pasted and painted it accordingly. I wasn't ambitious with this so I turned it from 640x480 to 800x600. I figured it was simplistic enough for it to look good even if stretched on higher resolutions.

The Beavis & Butt-Head Wallpaper:



Next up is something of a personal, sentimental project because I've always had MS-Paint next to my heart. It was the very first thing I got my hands on as far as editing went, and it mainly consisted of cutting and pasting certain spots to hide another spots. I learned about pixels and anti-aliasing the hard way. Nevertheless, it is overlooked because of its simplicity, but for someone like that, that has given up pretty much completely drawing on paper, this is as close as it'll get.

Now being a Batman fan is no secret of mine, I even find it creepy sometimes, but I realized, since Elementary School, I had not completed a Batman drawing, not even once! So this started out as a signature, like the one I have of Donatello (also in MS-Paint), but rapidly went out of proportions, it was only going to be Batman's head and his cape by his side, maybe a Bat-A-Rang, but as I wanted to include a cape I resized the image in order to sketch a little bitch and forgot to resize back to its original sig-size. One thing lead to another and from a small signature it went on to become a big 1024x768 wallpaper.

Batman: The Animated Series Wallpaper (MS-Paint):



Now before I get some crazy fan bitching because of the details, I must confess I made some small changes to it. Batman's eyes are smaller, I never really liked its gigantic triangle-eyes a lot, I also changed the Utility Belt's design a bit. The show's belt was really plain, just one big yellow belt with no superficial features except for a big center buckle and some odd ovals at the sides.

The grappling gun's handle was also modified for a more realistic style, the original was in a T-shape and he would put three fingers on one side and two on the other, uncomfortable if you ask me. The Bat-signal has the 'retro' style from Tim Burton's 1989 Batman film (the best in my opinion) instead of the oval-shape Batman logo found on his chest.

And if you think that because Paint has a Text Tool I'm gonna use it, you're dead wrong. You can zoom in and see for yourself that "Batman" is actually hand-made, if you use the Text Tool included in Paint you'll end up with the only thing that will have anti-alias (e.g. smooth borders) and it will look odd compared to the rest.

That's all for now. I might pay more attention to MS-Paint nowadays.

Here are the two latest Photoshop jobs (I really need to come up with a name for these) as of now. The first one is Batman: The Animated Series' Harvey Dent/Two-Face, who I always liked because he was the most violent of criminals in my opinion in the series. He was also pretty normal if you were willing to overlook the fact half his body was scarred and blue due to an explosion.



The idea came to after seeing this picture of Obama as Two-Face. I saw how easy it'd [supposedly] be, so I went ahead and burnt half of me. Here's how it was coming along at first:

I took two pictures, one normal, another with the crooked mouth, with a black Bad Religion jacket on top of a long sleeve white shirt and a crappy tie I had laying around. After fiddling with the face for the initial draft for a few days (I get bored fast), I realized the Black/White color scheme of the tuxedo wouldn't work with me. After searching for pictures, mostly fanart, of Two-Face, I decide that it doesn't HAVE to be Black/White so I go with something noticeable yet not too light. Most of the strain weint into the mouth and hair, I'm not fully satisfied with the hair but if I keep working on it I'll make it worse.

Now the second piece was for my soon to be girlfriend, she only asked for wings and "some stuff" so I decided to once and for all learn how to use the freakin' Pen Tool. Ironically, instead of using her favorite colors, I used mine. But I think it helped in the overall fantasy effect. It's my biggest Photoshop job so far, in terms of resolution.