I was invited to participate in this years Halloween art show at Meltdown Comics in Hollywood 😀 Special thanks to my buddy, Francisco Dominguez, General Manager at Meltdown for producing this awesome event. If you’re in Los Angeles this weekend come to the opening on Saturday. You can see my latest giclée print in full size 13 x 18 inch glory. I ran a limited edition of 12 hand signed and numbered prints that are available for purchase. I won’t be there because I live 400 miles away but many of the 28 artists will be in attendance. Meltdown is LA’s premiere comics shop and nerd HQ so it should be a good turnout and definitely fun. The opening is free and the show runs through November 1st. Alegría Food Truck will be there in case you get the munchies.
This is my latest giclée print, The Dickens. Get one at Meltdown Comics on Sunset Blvd in Hollywood now through November 1st. Second edition giclées, posters and postcards will be available at my Etsy Shop after that 🙂
Once I was harried by hawks. Yeah, that’s a thing. It was nighttime and I was sitting on the edge of some scrub flats watching distant lightning. Most hawks are solitary predators but Harris hawks are known to hunt in packs. They also seem very territorial. I didn’t know any of this the night one swooped out of the desert darkness and right up in my face …startling! I hollered and he flapped off but a second giant flappy bird came diving in so I sprung up from the dirt berm I was seated on. I came to my feet flailing and flapping, still hollering. Hawks are freakin’ FAST! I’m in full-on bushman warrior mode now. My eyes are tracking the circling silhouettes against the almost moonless sky. I see there’s three of them as the third is taking his turn dive bombing me. I jerk sideways throwing up my arms to seem as huge as possible while I hit ’em with my best war howl. Right about then a lightning bolt flashed in the distance directly behind the unintimidated, angry flapper. A perfect sliver of crescent moon completed the scene like an illustrated adventure story. Despite my panic, I thought it all looked really cheesy in a 70’s rock album, Frank Frazetta sort of way. I also thought, it’s the future so why don’t I have a cyborg camera eye? It all happened so fast, a photo would have come out blurry anyway. Later I thought about making a painting but I don’t have that kind of time. It was freaky, I had to document the event somehow. I settled on this quick pen drawing; a bushman’s gotta keep steppin’ :/
The last big team project I worked on was published in 2003. It was a (third person shooter) robot video game called Metal Arms: Glitch In The System. I was the Lead Artist on the team from concept development through final beta which is when art and code are finished but the game is being bug tested. My video game career ended at that point with debilitating carpal tunnel syndrome and subsequent surgery. The pain still gives me occasional grief thirteen years later :/ …Metal Arms broke my arm! Luckily I’m hard as fuck and kept on hustlin’. Making art is what I dig; video game graphics just kept the lights on for a time. I’m still making art and I obviously have electricity, so whatever.
I was recently contacted by a couple of awesome Metal Arms fans who are keeping the robot uprising alive 🙂 They’ve even started working on a self developed sequel! A fine DIY inspiration, guys. Everyone else: kick up yer grit, laggards. You can join the fun on their Facebook page or donate to the cause on Patreon. They asked for some pointers on concept art and a peek at any preproduction materials I might have. I made games for nine years and I was always disappointed that the graphics had a shelf life limited to the games ultimate obsolescence. I was happy to oblige their requests.
< Click or tap anything to enlarge it: >
I’ve been digging (deep!) through the archives to retrieve any Metal Arms stuff I can find. I know I possess copies of MUCHO artwork representing every stage of game development but there’s two career artists living in this small house amongst thirty years of crap we’ve made and tons of art materials. It’s going kinda slow… So far I’ve found some printed promo stuff and a bunch of production sketches. I’ve yet to find any digital stuff but I know there’s butt-loads on these (totally useless until I find a Zip drive) super floppies. Remember these? They were called ‘Zip disks’ and they were super-floppies because they held up to 250 mb of data instead of the normal floppy limit of 1.44 mb. Back around the millennium it was common for digital artists to transport large art files on these disks because it was faster than burning a CD and these little shits are rewritable so you could reuse them. So now the problem is finding my old external Zip drive and connecting it to my year old computer which doesn’t have the ancient parallel port necessary to plug it in. I’m working on it so you’ll want to stay tuned because all the detailed color stuff and 3D rendered art is digital.
In the meantime, be stoked and enjoy some original Guy Sparger preproduction design sketches. I’m scanning shit like a crazy scanning fool. It takes awhile. I have to scan, crop, auto adjust and compress each drawing so I’m doing it in batches. The first six sketches are batch number one. I’ll keep adding batches to the gallery as I find and process them. I have many more drawings in the stack currently on my desk.
I hope you enjoy the drawings. Metal Arms fans can share this post and it’s graphics freely 🙂
I’ve been working up a new batch of lowbrow print designs (Along with a dozen or so other projects). Counter-culture punk rock junk because I can’t help myself. This is the first one going to press (today). 6 inch jumbo stickers coming soon!
*UPDATE: The stickers are done and they look fantastic! Go get some @ my Etsy shop 😀
