Painting Rough: Weeping Angel

I've been catching up on the Doctor Who thanks to Ruby's Netflix. She's a big Doctor Who fan so i think she gets a kick out of me discovering all the aspects of the show fresh. I've heard a lot of the Weeping Angels, so when i saw the episode(s) I thought this would be a great image. Hopefully I can get the painting done sometime this week. I may end up doing a digital piece as well as a painting. Be great to have on your wall; just make sure you never Blink.

Painting Rough

A digital rough of a painting i'm hoping to get done in the next week or so. Too bad I can't paint at work. Probably would get written up for that.

Sketches: Cat & a Hat.

[Image: ink on bristol; Canson Make Your Own Manga Book]

I saw the new Alice in Wonderland movie this weekend. After I had found it wasn't a remake but a more Alice Returns to Wonderland. It's an good movie; not great, but like other Burton movies it's fun to watch. The characters are great; the actors and animators bring awesome subtle nuances to everything. Johnny Depp really brings a broken element to the Hatter. And the interaction with him and the Cheshire Cat is awesome. It's a movie I'll probably buy on DVD.

Joker: Golden

Something i worked on during some slow times during the recent Dallas Sci-Fi Expo. I haven't unpacked my convention bag in a while so i have all my paints in it still from the last Heroes4Heroes live art show. Just mucking around, most of the paints were applied with my fingers as i really didn't have my proper brushes or water. Sadly the gold doesn't show up very well in the scan.

Acrylic paint, ink, prisma markers on bristol.

New Paintings

This blog has gone too long without art. So here are some paintings that i have done recently over the last month or so. Sitting at home looking for work gives me a lot of free time to draw. Most of these will stay as is, some may get changed up between now and whenevers.

Elvis Costello: NYC
Ink and acrylics on 15x20 matt board (the rectangles are
photos that were already pasted to the board).

Painted Helen: NYC
Ink and acrylics on 15x20 matt board (the rectangles are
photos that were already pasted to the board).

Viet: Political (GIFT/NA)
Ink and acrylics on 15x20 matt board (the rectangles are
photos that were already pasted to the board).

These are ink wash, watercolor, gouache, and some metallic paint on 5x8 Cresent hot press. The Delirium piece was a gift to a friend.

Art Drop

[image: The Blue Raja from Mystery Men]

[image: Kaniugian Islands]

[image: Ref'd photo of nude model Justine Jolie; photo warped with photoshop to get that fish-eye distortion]

[image: Ref'd photo, random find; also warped with photoshop]

Sadly, my french gray set is running a bit low. The debate now is to either buy another set from Prisma; or "upgrade" to Copic, but then i would have to figure out what would be their color equivalents.

Inked Ghost Rider

[image: Ink on 5x8 Cresent hot press]

I don't know a lot about Ghost Rider besides the basics. I think the only book i have that he's actually in is "Hearts of Darkness" where he is teamed up with Wolverine and The Punisher. Romita's line work in that is what I associate Ghost Rider and Punisher with for the large part. And with Ghost Rider, he's really, really easy to draw: skull, fire, POOF! done. I'm trying out some feathering and hatching in this piece instead of doing a wash as a means of modeling. This was one I worked with entirely with a Pentel brush pen. I rediscovered it's awesomeness thanks to Mitch Breitweiser's inking tutorial. It is a great brush pen filled with terrible, terrible ink. It's a great line tool but not so good as a hatching tool. I never got the hang of using nibs which is why i stick to brushes/pens. There's a few brushes i want to try out that are a bit shorter with a bit more of a spring to them. It's funny because Evan is looking for a Photoshop brush that works like a real brush; and i'm looking for a real brush/pen that works like a Photoshop brush. For some reason I always looked for that one perfect brush that did everything: line, hatch, shade, paint. Now I'm way more open to have several brushes with each for a specific task.

I'm not sure about some of the hatching though; there are a few spots that it doesn't work. I put down the lines then went, hmm, well that didn't work out. I wish life had a CTRL+Z.

Ink Washings

Ink wash (and acrylics on the top one) on 5x8 Cresent hot press. The second on is inspired by Dream from The Sandman; the helmet is a bit off though. The top one is inspired by Destiny, but not exactly him. I always loved The Endless, they're really fun to draw and interpret in your own way.

Board

I recently dug through the ol’ way-back machine in the studio. And by way-back machine I mean the canvas bag that carries my oversized supplies like paper, pads, and such. I found some really old illustration board from my typography days; I guess they were spares I had made just in case I messed up on the project. I won’t go into why I hated my typography class this time around; I’ll just say that I was very, very glad the teacher left the program after that semester.

Anyways, I’ve also recently discovered the wonderful world of poster art via OMG Posters!. It’s a great site with daily updates with wonderful poster art. It really makes me wish I had taken a printing class of some sort in college. I wonder how my career would have differed if I had known about this sort of community in my high school years. Anyways, I thought It would be cool to start doing little posters on illustration boards. Ideally I would print the lineart onto the board then hand color it; but 1) I don’t know how to or have the equipment to screen the art onto the board, and B) illustration board won’t feed through my Canon printer. Trust me, I tried. So I’ll just do some little posters by hand until I figure that out.

On the topic of illustration board, I have a terrible memory for the specs. I’m a bit more tactile when it comes to selecting paper and such. So when you ask what sort of paper I’m using; I have a hard time calling it on the spot. Cold, hot, rough, pounds, gsm, ply, smooth, vellum, etc; it gets all jumbled in my head. So I try to stick to what I already know… if I can remember what it was.

This piece is just me playing around with the materials and surfaces. Trying to figure out the best way approach to this. Dick Blick has a minimum order of 10 boards for the ones I’m looking at so I’d rather get what I can work with than have a bunch of sheets that I don’t like. Excuse the scuffmarks; working with digital media has made me a bit sloppy. You never have to worry about smudging ink in photoshop. And you can’t really undo an accidental ink splotch. Oh how I wish I had a CTRL+Z for real life.

Manga Studio

[image: Rouge pinup by Randy Kintz]
For the first time in a while I had some freetime to play with some programs. I've been holding off on using Manga Studio for a few reason. First off, a lot of the projects I was working on needed a fast turnaround and didn't give much leeway for experimentation. So I stuck with Photoshop which I've used since version five. Secondly the brush/table was offset by like three inches, which was really odd. Though all I had to do was reinstall my Wacom drivers which fixed everything.

Manga Studio is an interesting program, build exclusively for comic book production. I haven't messed with all the functions in this, but i've heard good things. So I just wanted to get my feet wet and work on some quick pinups. Randy Kintz has a some great, fun work. And he seems to have a similar inclination to draw hawt girls as I do. His pencils/pinups that he's posted on his DA site are tight enough to follow but rough enough to allow for some interpretation. And there's a level of complexity to them that is fun challenge to me. It allows me to work on some different lines than I normally wouldn't get the chance to. So with me caught up on projects for the most part, I was able to find some time to play with some new line-art that would be a challenge without making me cry on a new program that offers its own challenges.



[Another piece by Randy]
So, after reinstalling the drivers, Manga Studio worked like it should. It's an interesting program; much more control than PS, acts much more like a pen/brush for this sort of work. I had to tweak out the brush settings because it was trying to think for me. But I finally got it to work in a way that i can handle it. Hatching and feathering is much, much easier in MS than Photoshop. It also offers real time, arbitrary rotation of the page that doesn't muck with the lineart. This a godsend that baffles me isn't in the Adobe Suite. It's in nearly every other art program i've run into: ArtRage, Painter, MS. Free range page rotation is natural part of drawing because we use a different natural line. It also keeps me from craning my neck at odd angles to rotate my visual plane. The program is aliased so that's something to get use to; though it would make coloring/flatting a much easier process. So far, thumbs up. I'm going to play with for a while longer before I jump into it for a project.

Work Doodles

This is how i doodle/sketch; these are usually done at work whenever there is some major down time. The recent contract I got wasn't every involved on my end so i pretty much tore through a few scrap sheets and half the ink in a new ballpoint pen. This particular one was done on the back of a rejected table top sign. As you can see, my natural drawing style is a bit different from what the photo-referenced stuff. I've been looking a lot at Trent Kaniuga's environmental designs thanks to his blog and his books i got. I've always done a lot of hatching and such in my traditional pen drawings. I didn't do a lot of coloring back in the day so everything was in black and white. Hatching was the only way i was able to add any sort of gray shading to a piece. I'm thinking about getting a nice moleskin sketchbook and filling the whole thing with nature studies (trees, ferns, forests, water, etc). It would help me get back into actual drawing again at least. With the amount of traveling that could be involved in my foreseeable future, it would at least help me kill some time. Well, moving forward.

Design: Sister's Graduation Card

This is a quick graduation card I designed for my middle sister. It took me a while to get down properly because a) I've been juggling a few other things at the same time and b) I've been over thinking the card for weeks. That balance between something that looks cool and something that works for the client is difficult to maintain. Then I realized it was just my little sister and not some corporate client; she could care less if there were multiple layers of messaging involved. It just needed to be cooler than the ones you get from Jostens, simple enough to print at Kinkos by herself, and economic. So I just made sure it reflected her (hence the panda and the green, it pretty much matches her apartment) with a nice clean look. I kept it simple with some tone on tone so the dark text and panda would pop. Plus I'm a fan of things wrapping around edges; I feel it connects panels/sides together to create a better dynamic experience. Anyways, I think she liked it. She mentioned looking for cute envelopes for them, which to her is probably the most important aspect of the invite. Sometimes I just gotta let go of the higher, conceptual designs and just do something fun. Though I think I just caught the Apostrophe Atrophy in "ten'clock". ::sigh:: Eric Ligon would be so disappointed.

Sadly I won't be able to make to my sister's graduation because I'm already signed up to do the CAPE! show here in Dallas. Though she said to make up for it I'm going to have to get Robert Kirkman to sign her hardcover copies of Invincible. Those of you in Austin may know her, she use to work at one of the comic shops around there. Go to her graduation and throw things at her for me =P