Had kind of a poignant morning. Drove down to Mike Melrose's apartment with Kathy to meet Mike's brother Tim who flew out from Iowa to clear out his brother's apartment. Tim asked me if I wanted any of Minnesota Mike's Western collection so we went down and had a look see.
Mike had some good art and some of mine (ha), lots of True West back issues and even a Buck Taylor print. Took those, and also took the Steve McQueen "Tom Horn" movie poster and a Lon Megargee "Cowboy's Dream" poster.
I was going through some of my Mickey Free reference files last night and I found a bunch of photos of my staff at the magazine, stuck in amongst some Fort Apache shots (on the same roll evidently). Here's a candid photo of Mike, taken maybe two years ago. He seems to be thinking, "This could all end very quickly." Of course, hindsight is 20/20, but the guy was sitting on my couch helping me to recover last April and now he's gone. Yikes!
![](http://blog.truewestmagazine.com/weblog/melroselast.jpg)
Worked most of the day on an image of Major Bullis, who replaced Captain Pierce at San Carlos and is kind of a villain in our Mickey Free story. He made radical changes on the res using mostly Buffalo Soldiers to do the grunt work. I wanted to portray him as the new army so I borrowed one of those WWI caps officers started wearing I believe around the turn of the century. I also wanted to give him a twentieth century look, sort of the anti-Remington idea of a cavalry officer. Here he is pontificating to Mickey Free, whose on horseback, or should that be mule back, (you can see his reflection in the window):
![](http://blog.truewestmagazine.com/weblog/bullis_01.jpg)
I spent part of the morning trying to find the right photo reference to portray him as a bad guy. I found a couple old illustrations from Century Magazine (1904) but they were too civil. Then I found the right reference:
![](http://blog.truewestmagazine.com/weblog/bullishitler.jpg)
"If you're going to steal, steal from the best."
—Steven Spielberg
No comments:
Post a Comment
Post your comments