Costume design & choices

Character design, to me, is always interesting. Even if I don't like what I see as the final design, it's always neat to see what designs lead up to the final choice.

Once again, the debate/argument about how vastly female characters' costumes/armours differs from their male counterparts seems to be raging.

Trying my hand at solid-colour shading instead of blending, and a thought on the above topic, below:

Skottie Young fan-colours

After a brief twitter tete-a-tete with Skottie Young [and his permission], I found some art of his online that's both B&W and [naturally] pretty awesome. Very fortunate for me, as I've just started getting into Jeff Smith's Bone series.  Below is, in order, Skottie Young's art, my first coloured rendition, and my second - which is the same, just playing with a fire/fur brush on the rat-creatures.

This was fun to colour. And Jeff Smith's Bone series is a fun read, too. I'm 4 or 5 books in, and you could give these to pre-teens as a run-up to something like the Hobbit or Lord of the Rings novels, if they like fantasy.

More from class

I actually own this comic, which is a little thrill - to me. 'Cause this means I can hold up [once I find it] the published article against what I've gone with and see the differences and all the rest of everything there on the pages.

I have no idea [off the top of my head] who the female characters are..and that bothers me.
Guess I better go look them up!

Fun Colouring

So, the ever-enjoyable Lar de Souza posted this little gem in his Tumblr  -

- and I thought I'd see what I can do with colouring it.

Normally I ask an artist's permission before I'd do something like this, but I know Lar a little bit and he loves art, and people's various takes on it, so I'm fairly certain he'd be okay with this. 

I'm trying to find B&W stuff from Skottie Young, because I love his art style, but either his coloured stuff is already coloured, or his B&W stuff is pretty perfect by itself. He doesn't send out hi-res files [understandable], but at least he's okay'd me to find stuff and go nuts on it. 

Wolverine Cover

It's amazing what a simple gradient can do - with and without a background colour under it.

As seen in these Wolverine covers below. Which do you prefer?

To me, the blue background helps the blood and bullet impacts pop a bit more, yet the red - to me - helps denote the "don't give a shit" berserker rage Wolverine is infamous for having.

King's Watch - last page

Here's the last page from the test pages for King's Watch:
Flatted yesterday after work, finished tonight.

I gotta admit, I like doing gunfire ambient lighting effects. Always a nice challenge to blend it with the surrounding colours.

More King's Watch test page

Nothing like a full-time day[a.k.a. "real" job.. there's is such a huge disconnect for people not working in creative/jobs \ comics that drawing & colouring isn't actually work] and life-stresses to get in the way of doing what the work you enjoy.

Anyhoo, another King's Watch test Page.
The upside to life interfering is that it gave my brain time to figure out how to colour up the barns/wood frames, textures and such.

King's Watch Pg.3 comparison

Working a full-time day-job and then colouring pages can really mess with your social life. or is it the social life that messes with the colouring of pages - while still doing the day-job thing?..Either way, not as productive on pages as I'd like to be.

Anyhow.. the flats of King's Watch Pg3:

And the coloured piece

King's Watch test pages

Below are some test-pages [originally b&w, coloured by me] put out by Mr. Nate Cosby [ Tumblr & Twitter], who is looking for colourists.

A newspaper/media building while the sky is falling, The Phantom in the jungle, and some Flash Gordon - Flash is a work in progress, the flats are done.

I worked on the first page Monday to Friday after my "regular day-job", got The Phantom done Saturday evening after running errands all day and started on Flash's page, which is now flatted and ready for "prettying up".

I had to refer to the script a few times, and was glad to see that my gut was right on a couple of occasions, but keep kicking / reminding myself to read the script first, then jump into the colours.
Lesson learned? Always read the script!
Second lesson learned? Trust your gut - but read the script!!

Some X-men pages from class

This blog is for my art - and the stories behind some of the pieces.

If you follow my twitter account, you may have noticed I've been tweeting about Chris Sotomayor's Intro to Comic Coloring course that I've taken.

Being a mostly self-taught artist, I didn't learn much in the way of theory, but the application of said theories.. man alive, that's one thing - Chris' critiques in class, not just critiques but advice! - that's a world apart.
It looks expensive, and for 6 weeks, it looks really expensive, but let me tell you - it's worth every penny.
Learning not just from critiques of my own work, but of the other folks taking the course.

Before I took +Chris Sotomayor 's class, colouring this would take me about 8 hours:

The below are a couple of the X-men pages I coloured for class. After taking intro to Comics Coloring, already having an idea of the costume colours and effects and such, I can whip off the below pages in about 3-4 hours each.  This makes me a happier person.
If you share / reblog or otherwise pass along said image, don't edit the `for educational purposes only` bit on them. Thanks.

Like I said - that class is worth every penny.