Author: sparger

Co-founder of the Hungry Knife Artist Collective. Lifelong art freak. Ex-Street Fighter. Professional Adventurer. Dogs & Jeeps. Desert rat.
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Grindage

The Hangar

This is a rad skate cartoon I drew ‘back in the day’. I was moving around a lot in 1990. I had just left the candy coated bubble that is art school and was transitioning back into the default world. A friend from the local punk scene recently moved to Charleston, SC and married his girlfriend. Turns out her dad is loaded and wants to help his new son-in-law establish a legitimate income. Green Day had just been invented so being punk and having a band wasn’t a career option yet. Dude jumped at the opportunity and dad put up the cash to build a massive indoor skate park. They hired the world’s preeminent ramp builder, Tim Payne to design and build an enormous side by side double bowl in a giant metal building. I was living in Raleigh, NC at the time so I drove down to Charleston one night. My friend said he’d put me to work “doing something” which sounded more fun than working in a pizza shop, which was my current means of accruing wealth. They called it The Hangar at first because the original site they scouted was an abandoned airplane hangar. That first location didn’t work out due to zoning or something so they ended up in an industrial area and calling it The Hanger. I drew this cartoon before the name changing decision was made.

Old school skates at The Hanger:

That’s my friend, Rich with his gold Les Paul guitar.

Resist at the Rat House

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Flappy Birds

Flappy BirdOnce 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’ :/

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Anthropology, Man

Rummaging around looking for something that totally isn’t this; I found a really old notebook. It’s a little black book I toted around in the latter part of the 1980’s. We were too hard for iPads or smartphones …and they hadn’t been invented yet. I scanned some doodles from it. Some of these were amidst notes from a college anthropological studies class.

Notebook

I guess I forgot the burnt umber?

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These Arms Are Not For Hugging

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.

ZipDisks

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 🙂