Burnin' Ring of Fire

Another experiment - this time marker & Prismacolor on brown paper bag and then a bunch of Photoshoppery:

Doodlin's

Just some misc. meeting doodles from my notebook:

What's Old is New Again

Here's a quick sketch I did to experiment with style & texture. I drew it with pens and a black Prismacolor pencil on canvas paper so that I could get the graininess of the paper to show up. I added the zip-a-tone look and spatters in Photoshop and then laid down some flat colors to finish it up:

This closeup shows the texture a little bit better:


My inspiration to try out these new (to me) techniques came from several sources. I was looking at some movie posters from the '50s when they started using more graphic styles (like this poster for Vera Cruz), also some of the illustrators of the same era who were experimenting with looser rendering techniques (like Mitchell Hooks here), as well as a contemporary comic book artist named Dave Johnson who uses a lot of these same inspirations & techniques but gets a very modern feel out of his work (like this cover for 100 Bullets).

For as little time as I put into it, I like the results, though I need to see if something like this would work on sequential pages. It might be too abstract to look at page after page.

Jack London in Paradise

I take the train to work everyday and I use that time to make up for years of not reading by plowing through as many books as I can.

Right now, I'm reading "Jack London in Paradise" by Paul Malmont. His first book, "The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril", is one of my favorites. He seems to enjoy taking his favorite writers and dropping them into the types of stories that they wrote. I'm sure it's been done before, but I really enjoy his approach to it.

I never knew much about Jack London before starting this book, so I've been reading a bit about him and looking at old photos online. I gave myself 15 minutes to knock out a sketch of him and another 15 minutes to 'antique' it a bit:

Pulp in Progress

I'm slowly chipping away at inking the group sketch of pulp characters I posted a few days ago so I thought I'd post a little work in progress detail of the Spider, the Shadow and most of Doc Savage's widow's peak. I know that Doc wasn't portrayed that way until James Bama started painting the covers to the reprints in the 60's, but that's the way he'll always look to me:

I Love a Mystery

I get tired of listening to music while I work, so I've started listening to some of the old time radio shows. The internet archive has a huge collection, but some of the files are in such bad shape they aren't worth listening to. Fortunately, there is an OTR fanatic who runs a site called Broken Sea Audio and one of the things he does is restore old shows so that they can be enjoyed again.

Lately, I've been listening to a show called 'I Love a Mystery' which is more of an adventure show than a mystery show done in a very pulpy style. The serials have great titles like 'Temple of Vampires' and 'Pirate Loot of the Island of Skulls'. The thing I realize as I listen to these shows is that maybe radio dramas were the ideal format for pulp stories. I've tried reading some of the old books and while I love the concepts, I can't get into the writing. Same goes for the movies, even the modern ones like Sky Captain - nice visuals, but not quite right (though The Rocketeer was great, as was the Rocketeer comic book). These radio shows somehow hit the marks that the books and movies miss. I suppose it has something to do with the concept of the 'Theater of the Mind' as they used to say in the golden age of radio.

Anyway, I was inspired to make a fake vintage newspaper ad for the show:


One interesting thing about these old shows is the advertising. This show was sponsored by Fleischmann's yeast which wasn't being advertised as a baking ingredient, but as a health food. You either mixed it into tomato juice to make a 'vitamin cocktail' or just ate it straight - blech!

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.

Artchives 3

I've been putting in a lot of hours on a project for work, but I'm in the home stretch - just in time for my wife & I to go visit some friends over the long holiday weekend. Here's one last batch of old miscellany before I try to get back to a normal schedule.

These first three were for a story that I tried to get off the ground for a long time, but got away from me. Maybe someday I can go back to it with fresh eyes:




This one was for a pitch someone was putting together for a horror themed multimedia site, this character was going to be the host, in a simlar vein to Svengooli (get it? vein? horror?):


These last three were character designs for a video game about mobsters in space:

Artchives 2

The game I worked on for most of the last year is coming out on May 14th. It's called Texas Cheat'em - a poker game where cheating is not only allowed, it's the only way to win.

It was a very different project than what I had been used to, but it was a lot of fun. As the only artist on the game, I was responsible for every pixel you see on screen. The game has a lot of interface, so I did a lot more graphic design work than usual. I also got to do a lot more cartooning than I've ever done before on the player avatars. Here are some of my favorites:














Some of the avatars are specific to certain cheats (like the burglar=chip steal) or to certain mini-games (like the strongman=strength tester), but most are just meant to be funny. Also, creating these was where I learned digital inking since it was going to speed up my production time quite a bit, so some of the early ones are a bit rougher than the later ones.

Early on, we were planning out a story mode where you would play through a character's career as a gambler from rags to riches. At that point, we were toying with the idea of using animals as the characters and since our company mascot is a hippo, the main character was going to be a hippo. Here are some storyboards I did to try to get a feel for what all that could have been like:









Ultimately, it was decided that it would have been too much work for too little added value, so it got scrapped but we had some good ideas that would have been pretty fun to work on.

Artchives

I've had a fairly big assignment dropped on me at work that will keep me busy and pretty stressed out for the next two weeks, so I'm going back to post some older stuff from the archives in the mean time.

I don't generally post work related stuff on here, but I've had the chance to work on some cool things over the years, like these screens from Mortal Kombat: Deception. Each character had their own story arc and if you played a character all the way through the game you got to see an end game scenario related to that character. We didn't have the time or resources to make animated cut scenes for these so I put together these stills instead.

The character and environment models were all created by other artists - my job was to storyboard the scenes, pose everything, light & shoot the scene, render it out and then give them a 'spit & polish' paint-over pass to add special FX, extra detail and generally try to make them look like stills from a big budget movie.

There were about 24 characters in that game and I spent about 6 months on the ending renders. It was a lot of work, but it was also a lot of fun. Here are the original storyboards and then the final renders:








Here's an example of a raw render compared to the touched up version:

Illustration Fridays: Theater

Another quick one - this week's theme, theater:

Illustration Fridays: Impossibility

Another quick take at an Illustration Friday challenge - this week's theme was 'impossibility'.

I've always liked the imagery of David vs. Goliath, so I thought I'd run with that.

Illustration Fridays: Fleeting

This week's Illustration Friday theme - fleeting:

The Good, The Bad and The Freakin' Weird

I'm on my own this weekend, so I've had movies playing while I putz around the house. Yesterday was western day - I watched For a Few Dollars More (a classic), Django (rough around the edges but fun), and El Topo.

El Topo is a 'mystical western' written, directed by and starring Alejandro Jodorowsky. Jodorowsky is a Ukranian who was raised in Chile and is best known for writing French comics. The movie has some interesting visuals, but man is it weird. It starts off with in the fairly standard "man with no name" scenario but quickly goes off the rails and ends up with a cave full of deformed midgets with a lot of flute playing, dead rabbits and old men wearing make-up along the way. Not for the faint of heart:

Illustration Fridays

Every once in a while I'll draw something based on sketch challenges I find online, just to mix things up. I just found out about a site that has a weekly challenge, Illustration Friday. It's nice that it's a regular thing and seems to have a lot of participants. I'm dipping my toes in the water with this week's challenge 'talisman'.

I'm taking the approach of working with the first image that pops in my head based on the theme and then knocking something simple out. Just keep it quick, fun and hopefully better with each passing week.

It's a long way from Oa to Abiline

I was looking at some art blogs and someone mentioned doing a commission for a collector who always asks for a western take on a superhero. That sounded like an interesting exercise, so I took a crack at the Green Lantern re-imagined as a lawman from the Old West:


It's no great shakes, but this has been a crazy week and I just needed to turn my brain off and draw for a bit. I really wanted to do this on paper (my inking brush has been calling out to me), but time only allowed a digital drawing.

Only The Shadow Knows

Just a quick Shadow marker sketch today: