Nice Soup Strainer

While cleaning up the studio I found this little 7"x10" oil study from last year. I never could decide if I liked it or not - I guess that's why it was under a pile of papers:

We now resume our scheduled programming...

I hadn't realized just how long it had been since I had posted anything here - sorry about that. The end of last year was very hectic and stressful and kept me from working on very much 'fun' art. Things are looking up on many fronts though, including a new job.

I've been getting adjusted to working on a Cintiq art tablet, which is kind of like a giant iPad, so I've been messing around with it during lunch trying to get my bearing. Nothing spectacular, just some quick doodles, including this one:

Not much to look at yet, but hopefully, I can keep plugging away on this one - I think its got some potential.

Who Dat Ninja?

Things have been busy, but I'm still working on the writing side of my western story and I'm still trying to knock out some pages based on some odds & ends bits of writing I have lying around in the mean time.

I'm working on another 2 page story that came about after reading a post on Digital Webbing that was looking for short stories for an anthology book. All of the stories had to have something to do with ninjas. I thought it would be fun to do something a little more historically based than the usual fantasy based ninja stories. I never heard anything from the guys putting the book together beyond the initial contact, so I shelved the story until now.

Being such a short story, it's pretty straight forward so I wanted to have some fun with the visual style. I love Kurosawa's samurai films and have always admired the sumi brush drawing style of traditional Japanese art so I'm trying to combine the two styles. I'm hoping it'll be a little looser, more expressive and moodier that my usual stuff. We'll see. Here's the first panel:

Logo Loco

I'm working on some logo ideas for one of the stories I'm trying to get off the ground. It's a western called "Badge" (the first page is done and will be posted later this week) and it's very much influenced by a lot of the classic western films. There have been some other western comics that have come out in the last few years, but a lot of them are either very modern feeling stories with a lot of graphic language and violence or they are "westerns plus", i.e. westerns + horror, westerns + scifi. I don't have a problem with either approach, I just thought I'd try some thing different, something more old fashioned.

A lot of old movies (not just westerns) had really great hand painted titles, like these examples:


Lettering is not really my thing, so my results in trying to get that look are mixed, but here's some raw lettering that came out OK (by raw I mean that I haven't done any aging or outlining or anything):


I'd like to avoid using any sort of stereotypical western fonts, but I found a few that had a nice feel without looking like the Purina Chuck Wagon logo:


I've also messed around with the idea of replacing the A with an actual sheriff's badge, but that might be too cutesy:


No final decisions yet, but as the art for the story starts to develop, all of this other stuff will fall into place.

Funny but true

I realized I haven't posted anything in a while which is ironic since I've been very busy with a lot of different art projects. One of which is this Fear Agent pin-up I've been chipping away at during lunch. I wasn't going to post it until I inked it, but what the Don Heck.

A few weeks ago I was at the 2nd annual Windy City ComicCon and went out to dinner with a group that included Tony Moore, artist on lots of cool stuff but probably best known for his work on Fear Agent with writer Rick Remender. I've always liked Fear Agent - it's right up my retro alley - but I had never drawn Heath Huston or anything else from it, so that's where this sketch comes in:

Backlog

After putting in a lot of hours to finish a big project at work, then taking a short but much needed vacation, and finally slogging through the inevitable post-vacation slump I'm getting back to being productive again.

I spent most of last weekend cleaning my home studio and in the process found a pile of old, half finished artwork. Since they're all pretty far along and won't require any major effort, I'm going to try to finish them up and hopefully build up momentum towards some of the other, bigger efforts I'm trying to get off the ground.

Up first is a sketch I drew when I was reading a lot about the history of the pulps - just a goofy group shot of some of the major and minor characters of the era:


I'm going to clean it up, ink it and probably color it too. I'll post the steps as I go. I also need to go back and figure out who all the characters are - there are some pretty obscure ones in there.

Wizard & Glass: Final

Finally finished it:

Wizard & Glass Process #7

Almost there - just have to do the gun belts and whatever final touches the image needs as a whole:

I also went back and added tags to all of the older posts to make them easier to search.

Wizard & Glass Process #6

Still making incremental progress on this one - fixed the sleeve and finished most of the torso. Getting the shirt to look like suede without using texture overlay or fancy brushes is kind of tricky. I'm going to try to overlay some blotches of color to age it and make it look less monochrome:

Wizard & Glass Process #5

Not a lot of progress since last time - just working my way down the torso. The chest is done, but there's still a lot of work to do on the shirt. That right sleeve is going to be reworked since the wrinkles aren't working for me:

Wizard & Glass Process #4

After having a lot of problems with my home PC I ended up getting a laptop, which I've finally got setup for doing artwork on. Since I hadn't worked on this Roland piece in a while I decided to take the opportunity to redo what I had done on the character. He wasn't matching my mental picture of him and I wasn't really working on him in a smart way. First thing I did was to rough in some local color and very simple lighting to define volume:


Once I had that in, I went ahead and started working on the head, which is what really bugged me about the previous version:


I'm a lot happier with that - it's hard to avoid Clint Eastwood-isms in portraying Roland, especially since Stephen King describes him as looking like Eastwood, but I wanted a face that matches the voice I hear when I read the books. He's far from perfect, but better than where I was before.

In case I hadn't mentioned it before, this is all done in Photoshop.

Wizard & Glass Process #3

Started roughing in Roland today:

Wizard & Glass Process #2

Getting back into the swing of things today - I managed to finish the background for the image I started last week. Here it is with the sketch lines taken out:


I also did some research for Roland's outfit and overall look. I'm resisting the obvious urge to make him look like Clint Eastwood. Facially, I think Henry Fonda in Once Upon a Time in the West is a better match - he's got those blue "bombardier's eyes".

Wizard & Glass Process #1

I'm reading the 4th book in Stephen King's Dark Tower series now, so I have a lot of imagery from the books in my head. Yesterday, at lunch, I started messing around in Photoshop on an image of Roland, the main character, with the Dark Tower in the background.

First, just a loose sketch to lay everything out:



By the end of lunch today I had quite a bit of the background laid in. I'm just working my way from back to front on this, trying to balance things as I go:

Process #4

Here's the final version of my Charlton Heston sketch:


I laid the wash down pretty loosely - I didn't want this to feel stiff as a lot of photo referenced drawings tend to feel. The paper got too wet when I was putting in the background so it's kind of messed up. That's what I get for doing this on a piece of scrap paper.

Oh well, it was a fun change of pace.

Process #3

Got a chance to finish off the inks tonight:
Since I'm going to lay in some ink wash, I left a lot of medium & darker values undefined in the inks, especially towards the bottom of the figure. We'll see how it goes this weekend.

Process #2

Not quite done with the inks tonight, but it's getting there:


I don't ink with a brush very much anymore, so I'm feeling my way through this one. I had hoped I'd pull off some crazy new way of doing things as a result, but I'm not confident enough to let that happen. As usual, I've fallen back onto the same old crutches I've always used.

Maybe I'll redo this one when it's done and force myself to ink it differently. I'd like to get away from any and all feathering and find more varied ways of laying in texture and shadow. Why? I just think it time for an overhaul. I'll never be Wally Wood so I might as well explore some other approaches.

Process #1

I'd been wanting to draw Charlton Heston since I'd heard that he'd passed away. As a kid, we didn't have big budget CG extravaganza superhero movies coming out every week so Charlton Heston was as close to a superhero as we had. On any given weekend, you could catch a re-run of Planet of the Apes or The Omega Man on TV and of course, every Easter we got to watch The Ten Commandments and Ben Hur. I certainly didn't agree with the man's politics, but he could play bigger than life heroes like few others.

I just had time to do some rough pencils today, so I thought I'd post each step of the process. I'm thinking this is going to be pen & ink with some ink wash laid in when it's done. We'll see:

Edited to add the reference photo I'm using (a still from Ben Hur):

Creature Concept

A while back, a friend from work was planning on making a short film and asked me to design the creature for it. He wanted something that was both organic and crystaline and, as part of the story, had a female scientist fused to it. Here was the initial sketch I gave him of the full creature and a close up of the scientist:


and the final concept rendering layered on top of a photo background:


Unfortunately, the project didn't get past the planning stage, so I never got to see the design realized. I'm not normally a monster guy, so it was fun doing it anyway.

Conan Week Day 5

Trying something different today - this one was done in entirely Photoshop. It's not done, but I like the way it's going, so I'll finish it up for Monday: