Frank Frazetta Forever

Yesterday, Frank Frazetta, no doubt the greatest fantasy illustrator ever, passed away. He was 82 and had been in poor health for a while, so it wasn't a complete surprise, but there had been some very public infighting between his children over his estate recently, so I was glad to hear that he settled all of that before he passed.

I think it would be impossible to count the number of artists working today that were inspired by him to learn to draw and paint. I had the old Bantam paperback art books as a kid so I knew at an early age how high he had set the bar for the rest of us. Nobody had the imagination, confidence and ability to render raw power that Frazetta had - thunder and lightning came out of his brush.

I would like to have thanked him for setting me on the path of the artist - I hope I can find some of the freedom and fulfillment that it brought him.

Acrylic Fever

I'm still getting over the bad case of the flu I've had for the last week, but I did manage to get out for a bit this weekend and pick up some acrylic paints. Although I enjoy oils, I've been wanting to try acrylics, especially since they dry so much faster. I didn't have a lot of time or energy to do much with them, but I managed to get in a quick 20 minute sketch just using black almost like ink wash. I can't wait until I have the time to do some full blown painting with them.

One More Quest

I felt bad leaving Dr. Venture -er, I mean - Dr. Quest out of that last sketch, so here's a quickie to make up for it:

Again, just marker and blue pencil on newsprint in about 45 minutes.

It's Been a While...

Sorry about that.

It's been a busy month and the free time I've had has mostly been spent writing my western, doing a little painting and not much drawing. I'm trying to change that though, so here's a little Jonny Quest action to get things rolling:

I drew it on newsprint and spent about 1 1/2 hours on it. Nothing great, but better than nothing :)

POW! Right in the Kisser

I was messing around with some oil sketching on 9x12 canvas paper over the weekend - this took about 2 hours total:

Here's the photo I used as reference:

The proportions are all out of whack, but I had fun keeping it loose and simple.

Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter

I was in the mood to do a little speed painting and since I had recently seen the trailer for the new book Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter (yes, books have trailers now) I threw this together:

 

I haven't had a chance to read this book or any of the others in this style (Pride & Prejuduce & Zombies, Sense & Sensibility & Sea Monsters, etc.) but they look kind of fun.

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:

Projekt Ultima-tely Shelved

Still turning out some pages based on old stuff I have lying around while I do some more writing. This page is based on some old thumbnails for a story I started dreaming up about 15 years ago. It was going to be called Projekt Ultima and was a story about a team of Allied agents racing against the Nazi's to find the lost city of Atlantis. I knew even less about writing then than I do now (which still isn't much), so it was shaping up into something bigger than I could handle and I eventually gave up on it. I still feel like I have too much mental clutter from it to ever go back to it, but maybe that'll change someday.

This page wasn't actually from the story, it was something I drew up before I had the Atlantis angle worked in and is more straight sci-fi. Here's the original thumbnail:

 

Here's the page I came up with based in it:

I made several attempts at coloring it and couldn't come up with anything I liked, so I just went with a sepia tone look that kind of matches the idea of this page being based on notes from an old file.

The 'other' Avengers

One of the old radio shows I listen to sometimes when I'm working is The Avengers. Even though radio dramas had pretty much run their course by the late '60s, BBC Radio was still churning them out for the South African market, where they were apparently still popular. That's where these Avengers shows are from. Anyway, here's a quick John Steed/Emma Peel:

More Doodles from my Desk

Some more miscellany:

 

  

In case you were wondering - yes, that is Samurai from the Superfriends.

Conan on the Prowl

Just a quick Conan to zazz up your weekend:

More Chicken Scratch

Another page of lunchtime doodles:

Keepin' the Ball Rollin'

I took some time over the holidays to go over what I had done on my western comic, both in terms of story and art, and decided to do some major overhauling on the whole thing. That means it'll be a while before I have any pages to post, but since I don't want to lose the habit of turning out pages I'm going through my notebooks and looking for anything I can work up into short pieces.

This first one is an idea I had about 14 years ago when my wife and I were living in a small town in southeast Ohio - not much to set up, just a quick little two pager:

 

Chicken Scratches

Just some doodles:

A Bold Experiment

Two of the artists I work with had the idea of trading drawings that are unfinished for one reason or another and seeing what somebody else could do with it. We made the first exchange last week and here's what I came up with:

The original sketch by Cef Grima:

The finished piece:

 

I was trying to emulate the way that Dave Stewart has been coloring the Umbrella Academy books. I like the way it looks and I wanted to see if I could figure out how he does it.


It was fun to work on, and I'm looking forward to the next one.

**UPDATE**

Eric Huang posted his interpretation of my chicken scratches up on his blog. I think he did a great job on it - it's a nice blend of his style and mine. He's going to have to show me how he got that aged look on the colors.

The ball is in your court now, Cef! BRANG IT AWN!!!

BADGE - page 4

Iron Man Wants Cake

In the spirit of the DIY craft show my wife & I went to last weekend, I made this birthday card for a friend of mine (names have been obscured to protect the innocent):

It's a re-creation of the splash page from the very first Iron Man story back in 1963 - only fitting for the world's biggest Iron Man fan.

BADGE - page 3

Drink & Draw

The Drink & Draw group I go to on Tuesdays is trying to get a little more organized in terms of having a weekly theme. Unfortunately, I missed the Halloween week theme (pumpkins & brains), but we carried the gruesomeness over to this week with "draw the worst affliction you can think of." I naturally went with something with a strong visual element - Hoof & Mouth disease:

BADGE - pages 1 & 2

Reposting the first page with the second since I made a few changes:

Happy Halloween!

I managed to squeeze in a little sketch during lunch yesterday so that I could actually post something new for Halloween. I haven't drawn in my poor man's Mike Mignola style in a long time, so it was fun to tap into that for a bit:


Have a horrifically happy Halloween and don't eat too much candy!

Monster Mash-up

Some more Halloweeny stuff from the archives:


Who would win in a fight between Frankenstein and the Werewolf? I don't know, but I'd pay to see the fight. Poor Dracula didn't even make it past the first round.

Halloween Countdown

I usually like to do some special posts for Halloween, but this year I'm very busy - there's a lot going on at work and the second page of Badge is behind schedule but almost done. Luckily, I've got some stuff in the archives that hasn't been posted yet, so I'm going to run that stuff this week:

"Call it my woman's intuition."

This past weekend I got to see the newly restored version of North by Northwest that was shown as part of the Chicago Film Festival. The new print was made for the Blu Ray release of the movie and Martin Landau was at the screening and answered some questions afterwards (the title of this post is a quote from his character in the film).

I always enjoy seeing old movies in the theater, especially anything from a master like Hitchcock. It's amazing how modern the movie feels. The opening credits were designed by Saul Bass, one of the graphic design pioneers who helped create what we think of as modern style. In fact, the opening credits to Mad Men (my favorite TV show after the Venture Bros.) are inspired by the credits in North by Northwest. I was inspired to try my hand at that clean design style and whipped this up during lunch:


Graphic design isn't really my strong suit, but it was fun to try play around in that style.

BADGE - page 1

Alright, here's page one of "Badge", my western story. The plan is to post pages as I finish them, with no set schedule. Once I have a decent number of pages done to act as a buffer, I'll create a site for the strip and make it a proper web comic. Right now, I'm just trying to get into a production groove, see if the story has any legs, and to get some feedback (good or bad):


I'm producing the pages at full print resolution in the event that the story ever goes to print. Here's a full rez shot of panel three as an example:


I thought I'd go over my process (which is still evolving), in case there's any interest. I'm working from a loose outline which should honestly be tighter than it is, but I want to get this story rolling before I find more excuses not to do it. I'm drawing thumbnails for each page at about 2"x3", scanning them in, then printing them out at 6"x9" and penciling over that:


The finished art is all done in Photoshop to save time and to allow for more experimentation. The goal is to build up several simple techniques to get an illustrative look in a relatively short amount of time. The first step is the inking, which is primarily focused on form and laying in the graphical black elements. I want the story to have a bit of a rough edge, so I created a brush that gives me a look similar to black Prismacolor pencil on textured paper:


Next, I go in an lay in some medium greys, mostly flat with a few gradients:


After that, I go back in with a brush I made that has an ink wash feel to it to give the page some extra texture and tonal value:


One all that is in, I go back and do a polishing pass with digital screens (like the old zip-a-tone patterns that old comics used) for more tone and texture, some digital spatter (which I used to do with an old toothbrush back in the day), and finally, just going in and punching out some white highlights on things:


After the lettering is done, I overlay a scan of old parchment paper to give everything an antiqued look and I'm pretty much done. It sounds like a lot, but really, I'm just building up several simple steps that add up to (I hope) a lush, finished look.

When I post the second page, I'll re-post page one without all of the blabbing.

Thanks for taking a look. Like I said, any comments, good or bad, are appreciated.

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:

One Reel Wonders

I found out from a friend that the owner of a local night club is an avid fan of old and obscure films, and once a month he shows some of the movies in his collection at the club. My wife and I went last week and saw two one reel zingers - The Preview Murder Mystery & Strangler of the Swamp. Both films were favorites of film historian William K. Everson, who helped preserve lots of these non-mainstream films. Both movies had very cool visuals despite their shoestring budgets and packed a lot of story into an hour or less, but I enjoyed the Strangler the most, just because it felt like a story that might have been in an E.C. comic back in the day.

I'd been wanting to draw something based on it and I finally had some time today during lunch to knock this out:

Out with the Old, In with the New

The company I work for was recently bought by Disney and today is officially our first day under the Mouse. I would imagine that we'll have to say goodbye to some of our old characters that aren't quite family friendly, like Stubbs the Zombie:


I guess that just means that we'll have to come up with something even better.

What Evil Lurks in the Hearts of Men?

Only The Shadow knows! (insert Orson Welles laughter here)

Messing around with markers & white Prismacolor pencil on textured grey paper: