Working out my demons

I know it's been a bit since the last post, but I have been working on a few things off blog on my own and for other people. I have a few things coming up that will keep me busy for a while. But with luck it will set up SDCC for a better showing this year.
This is Etrigan the Demon from the DC universe.I am always a fan of the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde types, and Etrigan is their version of that. I guess I love the duality of types in each of us. What we hope to be and what we fear we are, all in one. Makes for great character development and a fantastic story.

Power Man to the people!

Here is the other half of the Heroes for Hire duo, Luke Cage aka Power Man. Luke Cage is one of the coolest cats in comics. He is continued to grow as a character since his creation. He has progressed in story line, evolved in his costumes, and developed in his personality. But I prefer his 70's Dolemite look. He just looks bad ass and feels like he would put you in your place if you give him back talk. So watch what you say about his metal headband...
Sweet Christmas!

Move like silk, strike like iron!

Happy New Year all. I hope you all had a great holiday and are looking forward to the new year. I am planning on doing more sketches and getting back on track artistically. Hopefully these head shots will help me out with that. This one is of Iron Fist. Just one of the duo in Heroes for Hire that are a lot of fun. This guy has a very 70's ridiculous outfit which harkens back to the days of Karate and Kung fu action movies. The costumes color doesn't help out either, since it is green and yellow. Not very stealthy if your trying to catch the bad guys at night. But who needs to worry about that when you have to put the hammer down on some jive ass turkeys!
Solid!

RASL-Dazzle

Hope you all had a great holiday and are planning a fun and safe New Year. This will most likely be my last post for this year, and I am pretty happy with the amount of work I have been able to produce for the blog in this last quarter of the year. I hope to continue on to draw and ink a lot more.
This one is a character from Jeff Smith's new series RASL. I don't know that name of this villain yet, but he has such an eerie appearance I had to give it a go. RASL is a really great book that I would recommend to anyone wanting something different in their comic library. Such a stark jump from his Bone series, but still maintains that great visual appeal.
Have a great New Year and I will see you on the front end of '09.

Sentinel-mental feelings

I love combing through old comics to find the characters that just seem to pop out and cry for me to do a head shot of them. The Sentinels are the most recent to be penned to bristol. The classic "Kirby-esq" shape to their square heads and the ridiculous flower petal collar make them an easy choice for me. I always thought the Sentinels could be played up much stronger just as in the Days of Future Past run on the X-men. But sadly they were always played down.
Now that I look at them again...don't they look like that old Scooby Doo villain from the opening credits??....hmmm...

Skydrawl

Looking through my collection of head shots I saw a theme that needed to be changed. All the sketches were of men! So to rectify the problem I decided to do a female character I really enjoyed. So here is Noa, from Sky Doll. I really love how this one came through. I feel sometimes I struggle with getting the image to come out on the page just as I see it. Or I only getting a hint of what I want to draw and then it seems to all fall in place when I sit down with the pencil and ink. But this one came through exactly as I had envisioned. I might even spend some time later doing a color version of this. But for now, I am happy with the ink!

Red Right Hand

Still sticking to the head shots for a bit. I guess I took the month of November off. Funny thing is, I was so busy I didn't notice. Well I guess I will have to do better this month. I was looking through some collections of Helllboy and got the bug to give it a go. And it wouldn't quite be Hellboy without the red skin. Back inna bit with more.

Boning up on ink

Did these real quick the other day when I was trying out a new brush and re familiarizing myself with F&W acrylic ink. I really like the way this ink works when doing line work. But when it comes to doing fills of larger areas I think I would rather stay with the W/N 951 Black India. It may be harder to clean out of my brushes, but the color is always stronger and has the finished shine I like. If any of you use ink out there let me know what types you like and I'll give them a try. Hope you like these scurvy dogs. They are a fierce lot!

Day of the Undead

My friend here wanted to give his greetings on his favorite holiday. They say the freaks come out at night, and they are coming out tonight in droves. So I hope you all have a safe and very Happy Halloween!

Here today...Goon tomorrow!

If your not really that familiar with Eric Powell and The Goon, you should check it out. I really like Powell's work and his sketchbooks are a great source of motivation for me. It also helps that he draws a damn fine zombie too. The ink wash he adds to the sketches are fantastic and if I had a little more time, I would try my hand at doing some of those. But for now... I'll stick with my zip-a-tone process.

It's a Mad Mad Madman world!

Continuing my stream of head shots, I give you Madman. I just love the simple design and clean way that this character is done. Even when I have seen other artists take on him, the style of the character always seems to remain clean and easily identified. I guess that goes a long way in saying how well Mike Allred created him. So in that vein... I happily throw my hat into the ring.

Dead head

I decided to switch gears here and do a DC character. Deadman has been on of my favorites for a while now. So I decided that if I was going to do a DC character it had to be him. I know I should go with one of the big heroes at DC, but I just have a love for the more obscure or D-list heroes. Maybe that is just me always rooting for the underdog.

Not a "nuff said".

Another head shot. I did this one at the same time as the last post. I am not really a fan of Wolverine, but I figured I would give it a shot. A bit of trivia about Wolverine is that I didn't start drawing, well...anything, until I saw my older brother doing a large poster of him when I was a kid. That's when it dawned on me that people actually draw comics and that it was possible for me to do that one day. So I immediately ran to my room and got a pencil and some paper and never stopped drawing. I owe him a lot for that. Thanks Steve.

Henchmen at work

Ladies and gentlemen I give you a sketch of the obscure. This is a head shot of a henchman from The Hellfire Club, villains of the X-men. I know it is completely random, but I always loved the simplistic look of these guys. They had a very BDSM look to them (no wonder if you saw what the rest of the Hellfire Club were wearing) and yet they were kind of weak and lame. I was looking through a collection of John Byrne X-men comics and they caught my eye. So in the interest of using that spark of inspiration, I did a quick sketch and inked it in. Add that zip-a-tone I have been really loving as of late and... voila!

The Mean Greens

Another headshot. This time I figured I would add the reason for spidey's senses to be tingling. Not too much to say here, more with the brush and zip-a-tone on Greenies cap and cowl. Working on a couple more of these. But I think I want to get back to more figure drawing. Maybe even use my ink brush work on some of those? Hmmm...now there is an idea....

(Web)headshot

I started doing a few headshots of some comic characters to practice my inking at work. I tried to use a brush pen to aid me in the transition from tech pens over to a mostly brush style. This is one of the products of those efforts. Then I added in some tone to give it a little shadow. I really miss the old zip-a-tone look in comics. I think we should bring that back, even if it's on a independant level. Eh, maybe that's just me. More to come!

Sample minded

Here are the final pieces I can show of my SDCC ink samples. I had another set of samples I took of Wonderdog inc. But seeing as how that has had it's release date pushed back, I doubt (legally) I can show those interior pages. But as soon as I hear that it's a go, I will let you all know. These two covers are from Dustin Nguyen and Ed McGinnis. Again I chose them because of each of their complexity. I wanted the edgy lines in the Superman/Batman cover to contrast with the soft smooth lines of the Robin cover. The contrast of the heavy blacks in the Robin piece also contrasted with the heavy negative space of SM/BM. I don't think I will go about the next portfolio quite the same way. I will probably still try and add in a range of styles, but keep them in the same over all feel. The process of redefining and refining my inking portfolio will probably never cease. But at least I will have fun doing it. And I will learn alot along the way.

GO! Baby,GO!

Here are more samples I promised to show you all. These are on the more cartoony side of my inking samples. These are from Todd Naucks run on Teen Titans Go! Like I had stated before, I wanted a range of ink samples to show my flexability. Believe it or not these almost caused more stress than the more complexed comic pages. To properly and cleanly ink cartoon work it really takes a strong concentrated effort. The lines have to add more to the characters in the absence of value and heavy blacks. I will probably continue to try and ink a wider range of samples to excercise my abilities. And when I do I will be sure to post up what I have here. But I do have even more samples that I will post up soon. Those will be more in the line of covers. Plus I have a couple of sketches waiting in the wings to post as well. Until then hope you all enoy!

SDCC ink samples '08

Here are a couple of ink samples from this years portfolio. This first set is from Amazing Spiderman penciled by Mike Deodato. The other sets will follow in progression through the next couple of weeks. I tried to choose a range of pencil samples to ink for this year. I figured with a nice array of samples I could appeal to a larger list of companies, and there for might get a better response. Well I don't think it worked. But I am not too worried about it. I do have a number of projects waiting in the wings for me after I finish up this second book for Viper. So here are the first set. Hope you all like them. If there is any critiques, I would love to hear from you all.
Thanks again.

Sketch cards

In the last post I showed pics of Matt and I doing sketch cards for people at SDCC. Well here is a small sampling of some of the cards. It was a lot of fun to work on these together. Although Matt could hammer out two for every one I did, it made for some great quick inking practice. Most of theses images are characters from Wonderdog inc. But the one in the bottom row is clearly the top of the Human Torch's head. Matt had a great time doing some extreme close ups of some of his favorite Marvel characters. We did have requests for a couple of DC characters, but they tended to be full head shots. Unfortunately we didn't get pics of any of those. These turned out to be a great way to promote the book and get our names out a little more. Plus the chance to meet and talk with comic book fans was incredible. I wanna make sure to say thanks to Scott for putting them together for us and getting them printed. They made our signing times alot more entertaining.