FAILED-PROJECT FRIDAY: The SPIN magazine spot illustrations, pt.2

Found a few more of these! The first one above, by the way, is by far my favorite of all of 'em.

To repeat (or, more accurately, to cut & paste) from our previous Failed-Project Friday: 

I'm stretching the definition of "failed project" a tad with this one, as my work for this particular job did, in fact, see print. The only "failure" involved was the sad reality that I eventually lost the job.

Anyhoo, for a time in the late 90s, my buddy Joe Rosas and I did a series of illustrations for SPIN  Magazine. I drew the line art, and Joe colored 'em (on photocopies) with markers; at the time, he was one of the kings of marker-based color guides at Marvel, in the era before Photoshop took over the coloring of comics and rendered his technique sadly obsolete. As you can see, though, Joe's skill level with Chartpak and Prisma Tri-Tone markers was g-d amazing.

More specifically, I drew pieces for SPIN Magazine's tech-related "ICON" column, in which I had to take one of the column's  subjects and crank out a related illo that featured a "cute anime babe." This proved to be somewhat problematic at times, given that some of the  techy topics did not lend themselves especially well to the depiction of "hawt manga-style chicas"; thus, some of my pieces wound up rather puzzling and abstruse.

A few notes on each of 'em:

Not only did Joe color the illo above with markers(!), but he also broke out a li'l airbrush to create those rays of sunlight cast over the main figure. Nice!

Dig my old PC and its CRT display, long gone but immortalized in this illo! The SCHWA T-shirt the "Anime Babe" is wearing comes from merch I used to see in the back pages of  Fortean Times magazine in the 90s, based on the work of artist Bill Barker.

The image above is based (loosely) on photoref I shot of my friend Elin Winkler, who posed for Roxy/ Freefall ref pics used in my Gen13 projects Grunge! The Movie and Magical Drama Queen Roxy. However, note that she's not wearing That Leather Jacket, but a conventional motorcycle jacket; you can tell the difference from the sleeves, which are comparatively rigid and tubular here, as opposed to the softer, "drapier" sleeves of That Jacket, which is made of a much lighter form of leather.

I'm still hoping to find the last few of these SPIN Magazine pieces, which you'll see in a future "pt.3" FFF installment.