GUEST POST: Aliens and the UA-571-C

In this guest blog post freelance artist Jason Lenox talks us through his love for Aliens and shares one of his projects with us.  If you want to grab yourself a free 8Ball tee for writing us a blog post then get in touch to sm@8ball.co.uk!

I think obscure weird stuff is awesome. I also think Aliens from 1986 is awesome as both an action and sci fi film. It’s always fun to connect my love of both of these items with other people that care about the same things.

When you combine those together, you have some really incredible items, one of which is a deleted scene with a auto cannon that strafes a hallway for the Marines in the film, clearing it of aliens. The gun is called “UA-571-C” and 8Ball.co.uk made an amazing shirt that has a technical specification for that very gun on it. As a fan of Aliens, this is something that resonates with me as being “too cool to pass up”, so I of course ordered one last winter to wear around and show my Aliens fandom to the world.

A few months after I got my shirt, a client asked me to do a commission of Aliens: Colonial Marines and it clicked in my head to base the composition around the UA-571-C gun. After weeks of working around a static cannon as the central focus of this artwork, it finally came together in a blistering war zone of Aliens, guns, and a marine having a close encounter with a facehugger. I think one of the most entertaining things for me about making this art is going to be wearing my shirt while I have the print for sale at comic cons in the northeast United States.

The first con I had this artwork at in March of 2014 was amazing when a fan recognized the gun, and I told him my above story, and he said “I HAVE TO GET THIS SHIRT” to which I totally agreed and gave him the link to get one. What he told me after I gave him the link was amazing, so Ill share it with you- when he was a kid in the late 80’s he saw the deleted scene on a laser disc and told his friends about it- and they didn’t believe him, only years later did he actually have a dvd of the now restored scene to show them, and for years it was a point of contention in their endless geeky discussions! I realized that the UA-571-C was more popular, and caused more arguments, than I had ever imagined!

So if you are reading this, do the same and get a UA-571-C shirt to rock out when you watch Aliens, or have the guts to talk to me on the road when I am drawing my pen and ink monsters behind a cramped table!

Here are my finished inks on this project, so check it out, and enjoy the violence, and seriously, order a tee from my friends at 8Ball, I normally dont shill for items, but this one is worth it to get for your closet.

And here is my website and contact information so you can monitor me online and on the road:

www.jasonlenox.com/events

www.facebook.com/jasonlenoxillustrator

@lenoxartist

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