Back in the early 90's, a good friend of mine named Gary Smith showed me a picture where he had drawn where the character was a colored cutout overtop an airbrushed base. I figured that I'd give it a shot. Hah. I pretty much went overboard with it. I did a lot of these cutouts in various sizes from that point until about 2002. I'm going to post a few pictures of these because I really don't feel like scanning them all. You'll soon figure out why after looking at the photos on this page :)

Alright, here's a selection of the smaller cutouts. I've got far more than these, but I just put up a few of the ones that I'm not embarrassed about. These cutouts range in size from 2 to 4 inches tall. You'll also notice a wide variety of characters looking as the looked in the mid-to-late 90's. Not only are there comic characters, but video game characters from games like Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat and just one Tekken character. The Iron Man and Beast cutouts were later scanned in, modified a bit by computer, and put on crappy backgrounds here and here.

Out of all the small cutouts that I've made, Hawkeye is the crown jewel. Why? Well, for one thing, the actual drawing came out pretty good. Then, I did a decent job of coloring it. But the real reason that I like it so much is because I actually cut around the bowstring that I drew without breaking the paper.
That took some serious concentration and slow-motion cutting with an Xacto knife :)

Here's a close-up of Hawkeye next to a mechanical pencil. This is to show the scale I was working with.

Here's the next size of cutouts. The Transformer cutouts are mostly 7 inches tall, except for Bumblebee, who I tried to make in scale with the rest of the Transformers. I didn't put the rest of these on backgrounds and scan them because I wanted to wait until I had more backgrounds. Ironically, the only other unused background appropriate for Decepticons features the wing of a flying Decepticon battleship. This was made for Starscream, but I didn't like the finished product of that character. I drew a better version, but I have NO idea what happened to the picture **shakes head mit der shame**

I was going to make some cutouts of Soundwave cassettes that could fit inside the chest. To make sure that SW was ready for this, I cut the cassette door frame and a Decepticon symbol off a second copy of the picture and colored them. I also cut out a piece of transparent acetate film in the shape of the door with a flap at the bottom. I pasted the frame onto the acetate film. I took the main Soundwave cutout that I colored and used an Xacto knife to cut a hole at the bottom of the doorframe just wide enough to slide the acetate film's flap through. I slid it in, aligned it all just right and glued it on the back. As the final touch, I glued the second Decepticon logo onto the front. All that work for something that I never ended up doing. Still, it was fun to do... in a weird artist kind of way, that is.

All of the characters on this page are property of their respective owners.