Hydra - Process and Variations

Hydra is a scary guy. He was ORIGINALLY just an ink on cardboard drawing (which I created while sitting in line waiting for the gates to open for a concert at the Oregon Zoo in Portland, Oregon, USA...) He got a bit of the digital treatment, then digital colors, and then a bunch more processing and tweaking, creating alternate reality versions of this fiendish fellow.

So why make this particular digital collage? Because, when I was a kid, I used to collect TRADING CARDS. I had Star Wars cards and Topps' Dinosaurs Attack! cards and Weird Wheels cards and all kinds of cards that parodied commercial products and cards for various movies and art cards (by folks like Bernie Wrightson and the Hildebrandt Brothers) and so on... And SOME of those series, like the Star Wars sets, would sometimes have "Behind the Scenes" cards that showed characters only partially in their costumes or with variations on the artwork for show posters---and I loved that stuff. I loved seeing that there was a guy INSIDE the robots or that the movie posters looked different for Italian or Japanese audiences. I loved these little glimpses into alternate worlds...

So this piece, MY piece, which shows the progression from ink on cardboard to the various stages of digital tweaking, is my "Behind the Scene" card! It might not be as fancy as the REAL "Hydra" piece, but it's (I hope) an interesting look at what "Hydra" might look like in another dimension. It's a glimpse into other worlds---worlds which might or might not exist. (I suppose they do NOW that I've created them...accidentally or not...)

That's it. Do you want to be the person who has the "Behind the Scenes" card, which will finally complete your Richard F. Yates set? If so, grab it QUICKLY! There's only going to be ONE!!!

Okay... Let's move on...

---Richard F. Yates (Holy Fool - And Old Trading Card Fan)