Here is the last of the three pages I am doing for this story. This page takes place a day or two after the last one. The guy with the mohawk is starting to build his lodge on the edge of the tribes new settlement. Starting tomorrow I will begin to share the color pages as I finish them. 
Here is the second of three pages I am doing for The Adventures of Browser & Sequoia. More digital inking goodness.
I spent the better part of the day inking this page. The "inks" were done digitally. I have scan of my pencils on one layer in Photoshop at 50% opacity and I "ink" on a layer above it. The background trees were done on a layer in between. This way I don't have to cut the background from the foreground if I want to do some kind of FX. Big time saver.
I hope everyone enjoys a happy day filled with family, friends, lots of good food and thankful thoughts. Color pencils in my sketchbook.
This is not going to end well for our lemmings. Do smart phones make us dumb? (I'm not going to say anymore because I use an iPhone) ;)
Just a warm up from early this morning. I figured I should get a jump on a few images for Valentines Day. Just a little red Col-Erase pencil in my sketchbook. About 20-30 minutes.
A meeting with a client this morning and three full color illustrations from roughs filled up my day. Only had time to take a red Col-Erase pencil to my sketchbook this evening. :)
I try not to work too much on weekends. But with a holiday coming up, I figure I needed to put more time into work since I will probably not work on Thursday. Well, except for this blog of course. Today I did the digital line art for another illustration and colored it. I have three more to go for that part of a job to be done. AND I penciled this page for Browser and Sequoia. (Yesterday I started the digital inks on the first page.) All in all a productive day. Tomorrow morning I have a meeting with a client, and Tuesday afternoon I have a meeting with another client. So though it's going to be a short week, I have a busier than average schedule.
Today I finally got around to getting the Space Ghost line art onto the illustration board. In order to transfer the pencil drawing I did, I printed out a small copy of it at about 4" x 6". That is the size my Artograph opaque projector, pictured above, can handle. I projected the image onto a piece of 15" x 20" Heavy Weight Crescent Cold Press Illustration Board. Then proceed to trace my line art onto the board with a H pencil lead.
And here is a digital picture of the board after the transfer. I also put one inch painters tape all the way around in order to give the final piece a nice clean edge. Background painting tomorrow.
Just some sketches I did at lunch to break up the 8 illustrations I inked. I was inking with a brush today and that can be a bit painstaking at times. The concentration has to stay up there. So a time out with the sketchbook is really good in order to loosen up. Then dive back into inking. :) Have a good weekend everyone!
About 10 years ago or so I did a couple of comics entitled The Adventures of Browser & Sequoia. It is a fictional account of life around the Saltville, Virginia area pre-ice age. The creator of the series has kept the characters alive in a science book for elementary schools, some plush toys, and a novel. The last of which is in the production stage. It will be incorporating some story pages from the comic. This is where I come in. I am doing three new pages for the book to cover some back story. Pencils, inks, and colors.
I haven't drawn Dejah in a while, so here she is. I just reached in the flat files and pulled this paper out and went with it. It's fun mixing it up. This was done on a 12.75" x 18" Canson Paper. I would say the paper color is warm gray, but my scanner had a heck of a time matching it. I had to mess around in Photoshop to get it close to the original. I used Microns, Pitt Brushes and a Winsor & Newton Series 7 #2 brush with Winsor & Newton Black Indian Ink. Like I said, mix it up.
A little lunch sketch for today. I like drawing Swamp Thing. I was a fan of the 1970s series but I discovered the series when Nestor Redondo was drawing it. So, while I like Wrightson's work on the series, Redondo is the man. I would love to own a Redondo Swamp Thing page. Or Rima or anything really. :) This was done in color pencil on 12" x 18" B&R Charcoal paper.
I'm working on a couple of jobs that I can't show at this time. And keeping busy. All I can show from today is an inked panel from PLANET X that I did at lunch. I thought I would show the whole tier and not just the panel, just to show the roughs too. Another thing that ate up some time tonight, (but I didn't mind at all) is...
I thought I would show a couple of pieces that didn't make the cut on a recent job. For various reasons these didn't quite capture the idea or were too detailed in execution. It's more difficult to do visioning illustration like this for print versus the quick visioning I do on white boards. With the latter, it's just me and my take on it. With the other, it's a back and forth of refining the concept and the message. With this project, the client gave me some ideas of what they wanted and after I drew the first pass roughs, it made them think of things they didn't think of the first time. Or even made them realize that maybe this isn't message they wanted. Like I said, it's a back and forth of conversation and ideas. As an artist/business person, you can never take any rejection personally. You just move on. Ultimately I think we ended up with some nice pieces that do sell the ideas. As always, the process leaves a few unfinished ideas behind that may come into play another time.
Today we have a couple of panels from PERILS ON PLANET X. I am trying to squeeze inking the second issue into my schedule. Chris is planning to have the third and last issue script to me this month and I would like to start on it by the new year. These two panels are from a page that is almost done. I spent a few hours on it late last night and early this morning.
Here is the last of the Christmas Cuties. All six have been sent to CILM. With any luck maybe I can get a front page push on their site. I will be pimping the new images on the CILM Forum. My next batch will be for February. I will probably throw a couple of Valentine Vixens in that batch, but it won't be all Valentine images. This piece was colored in Photoshop CS3. Have a good weekend!
Today was a good day. Finished up the illustration work for the Annual Report I was working on. And I worked the White Board Jungle of the Labs too. It was nice to get a project out the door and always nice to invoice. My workload is still pretty heavy though. Not a complaint, believe me. I know how fortunate I am to be doing what I love and being able to make a living at it.
This is a rough for the last of the Christmas Cuties. This was done with a red Col-Erase pencil on 8.5" x 11" copy paper. I will enlarge this file and print it out on tabloid size copy paper. Then ink it on the light table. Scan and color in Photoshop and ta-da! Oh wait, just saying it doesn't get it done. Back to work!
I posted the North Pole Dancer as a sketch. Here is the final inked version. I will color her and a background digitally. She is the fifth of six I need done by next week. Whew.
And here is number 4 of 6. I posted this before as a series of process posts. Here is the finished piece with the string of lights in place.
Here she is finished. Today I was inking several comic strips for a job I am doing so I worked Supergirl in after I finished. This is done with Micron Pens on 11" x 17" Canson Bristol Board with watercolor background. Back to the grind tomorrow. Oh wait, I was doing that this weekend.
I've been inking comic strips for a project most of the day but still managed to finish this idea I started yesterday. I was shooting for a graceful pose of flying. Art Saaf and Bob Oskner both had the ability to make Supergirl look like she was floating through the skies. Even in action she was graceful. . Not an easy task. This is pencil on 11" x 17" Canson Bristol Board.
The Fantastic Four's Sue Storm drops in for a visit. This is a just-for-fun piece, which also makes it a up-on-eBay-right-now piece. :) This is ink on 11" x 17" Canson Bristol Board. The lines were done with Micron Pens and the black were filled using a brush. The gray background was done with watercolor. I did this so she wouldn't disappear into the white of the background. :) For anyone interested here is the eBay link.
Here she is all finished and sitting pretty. The final image is watercolor on 12" x 18" Strathmore 140# watercolor paper. I will be putting it up for sale in my CAF gallery. Here is the link for anyone interested.
Just a quick update today. I put some time into this painting today. I am working in watercolor and I didn't bother outlining the image with paint or ink. Just the pencil lines. And those will float away as I paint. That is the reason I used such a hard lead, because as the water and pigment hit the graphite, it lifts and blends with the paint. A soft lead like a 2B could make some light colors gritty and muddy. So far some places have been blocked in with color and other areas are more refined.
Here is the pencil art for the Space Ghost commissioned painting I am working on. I made a minor change to my original idea of having them on a planet. They are now on floating rocks in space. This opened up the background for me to be able to render more of the ship. Also, I flipped the ship over so we have a view of the top and see into the cockpit. This artwork was done in pencil on 8.5" x 11" copy paper. I will take this and project it on to the 16" x 20" board I will be doing the final artwork on. Things will progress pretty quickly now. Next up is doing a digital color comp.
We had a good run of pin-up stuff but today it's just lemmings from my sketchbook. Though I was incredibly busy today and accomplished a lot, I can't show any of it now. But I can show lemmings. In one of the projects I worked on today, I needed to draw lemmings and so armed with a sketchbook, pencils, pens, and Google, I sketched a cartoony version of lemmings. And I managed to learn a bit about them too.
The T-Bird was an example of a no background piece. The paper is a lot whiter than it looks in this image. So when you see the original, the red just jumps off the paper. This was done entirely in watercolor on 10" x 14" Winsor-Newton Watercolor paper.
The 1963 Ford Galaxie 500XL image is a mix of things. The car was shot at the Pomona Fairgrounds outside of Los Angeles. The gas station is (or was) on the west side of Cambria, California. Cambria sits on the Pacific Coast between Santa Barbara and San Francisco. I used to spend a week or two in Cambria every year back in the 1980s. I photographed the gas station because it had a lot of character. Everything around the gas station is made up. The real gas station was inland and you couldn't see the ocean from there. I like to think it would have loved my location for it more. The rocks in the background is inspired by the coast line in that area. This piece was done in watercolor on 20" x 14" Winsor-Newton watercolor paper.
I felt like drawing a cute version of Supergirl, as opposed to overly sexy. So with a Faber-Castell PITT artist brush that was on it's last legs, I sketched out the above. It was fun just going for it, doing my constructing lines with this dried up brush pen on a piece of tabloid sized copy paper. Streaky was an afterthought and I ended up penciling him in a few times until I got the pose and placement right.
I light tabled the line art to a sheet of 12" x 18" Strathmore 400 series 140# watercolor paper with a "F" lead pencil. The lines are really light and though I tried all the scanning tricks I know, I couldn't get a better image than the above. Still you can see what I will be doing with it someday soon.
Doctor Doom, that is. This is the last of the Conventionless Convention sketches. This is also the first time I have drawn Doctor Doom and I have found that with my abilities there is a fine line in making him look cool or making him look ridiculous. Overall I think it worked out but this is the fifth one I sketched out. So I have decided to title this piece "My Last Doctor Doom Sketch." :) Below is how the two pin-ups look together. Thanks to Andy for the commissions. This is done in ink on 11" x 17" Canson Bristol Board.
