More Gijinkas

Some spaces opened up, so I got to do 2 more. Randomly picked by Rinnychu, because I like a challenge sometimes.

Onix

and

Hippowdon

Wild Psience Chapter 1

So, it's all available here: And I'd love for you to log in, like, share rate and otherwise vote.
What have you go to lose, other than some time finding other awesome comics to read for free??

The first few pages of Wild Psience, Chapter One for your reading pleasure:

And that's just the first few pages.
Chapter 2 is already starting over on Webtoons.

Pokemon Gajinka collab pt.1

Not knowing much beyond the general pop-culture references to Pokemon, I'm glad the person who put this collaboration together made a giant list.

So, based off the Gible, here's my first one.

Not bad for concept-to-painted in about 4 hours, I think.

Try something new

I usually like trying new things, especially if it'll let me expand my skills and hone or stretch my abilities.

So for this, I wanted to kind of reverse my normal method.
A sketch layer, a shade layer, and everything else on one layer. Line-art in the colour of the item. Fill it in a slightly different shade of same colour.

Not a terrible re-imagining for Sketch_Dailies' topic of The Riddler, but if you figure he's wearing a bald-cap, and a wig on top of it... plus the eye-mask, well, maybe that ain't too bad. Most of the redesign went into the trade-mark ?-cane.  A bit more short-blade sickle, and I figured hey, green & purple, a lot of weapons nowadays have circles punched through them for weight balancing and what-not, why not do that, but fill'em with the other costume colour ? I think I spent 2 hours start to finish, with a lot of revision in the sketch phase.

While most of the picture could burn, I am really please with how Edward's shoes came out.

Skullkickers colours

Via the wonder of twitter, I saw a link from Jim Zub to some line art for his fun-to-read comic SkullKickers.

So I snagged the made-available [here] line art and spent some [very distracted] time doing this to it:

And in case you're wondering, oh yeah, I borked the booboojeebies out of this.
My light sources are wrong, my shading went off the rails.
This is not quality work. This makes me mad at myself. I need to do this again and do it right.

Here's my flats - no major issues with them, but I completely demolished the highlights, shadows, lighting, contours and depth.

A Mustachioed Menace

I blame/thank Paul Tobin for the idea:

What if: Galactus had a mustache?

After some google-image searching, I've come to the conclusion that Galactus' helmet has a few commonalities, and a lot of other decorative stuff that's up to the artists' discretion. So I kept it pretty simple for this, though I do want to spend some time just going to town on it [the helmet] in the future. 

I know the Avenger's movie franchise is taking aim at Thanos... and I [personally] would love to see a bit of "here's how bad/powerful our villain is" with an opening scene/credits bit of Thanos knocking Galactus around.  He's done it in the comics, let's see him do it on the big screen before the Avengers come to save us all.

And then, of course, because I can - I made Paul Tobin a World Devourer:

Made a few changes to help balance the photo over/under the drawn aspects.
I like the eyes & cosmic eye-...smoke? leaking power? whatever? in this more than the first. 

"Old School" mash-up

Inspiration strikes in the shower, right?
That's the cliche`, anyhow. I figure it's more that you're focused on a mundane task, and your brain is free to wander - without the usual forced-to-wander kind of creative thing going on. Like a puppy let loose in a field, as opposed to a fenced-in park.

I had a fleeting thought about that Muppets art collaboration thing [that I didn't get in on], and then soap in my eye, and then this is what hit me in the shower.

Pneumonia Pno More!

So this cough I'd been fighting since Christmas turns out to have actually been pneumonia.
Got some meds and am now kicking Pneumonia right in the silent-P.
One side effect is they make me dizzy.  Another is supposed to be hallucinations. So I'm really hoping all that talk about a new tv series about an animated Brids of Prey where I get to voice a couple of villains if true.
Which it isn't, because I just made that up.

Something else I've just made up is this piece here.
The always awesome Lar deSouza had tweeted something about wanting to see other artist's old works, to see how far they've come in their abilities and craft. I don't have any paper&pen sketches anymore of these guys, but figure it couldn't hurt to re-create them digitially.
Well, I've been drawing these two since I was 8 years old.  Sadly, I cannot recall the name of the "hero", but the "villain" has always been Hornible.
And if we're honest.. what can be more villainous than putting ice in someone's drink while they're off to the loo? Well, lots of things, really. But it's never the big things.. but a piled-on heaping helping of small things breaks people..especially heroes, right?

Done in Manga Studio 5 with Ray Frenden's brushes. You can pick up all of Ray's brush packs for something like $20 - completely worth it.

Character Design Version 2

Trying a different shading/colouring technique that, in my own opinion, I need more practice on.
I don't know the proper name for it, I've always referred to it as two-tone shading, or "Simpson's Shading".

Character design, Version One

Version One of a character design for a set of short stories that are brewing. 

There's a few other styles to try out before I settle on one. 

King's Watch - Marc Laming art

So a snap of Flash Gordon and Mandrake the Magician going off-roading through some weird alien-esque critter was flopped around Twitter.

I like it! So.. despite the low-res availability,  and after some fiddle-farting around with my browser and Instagram, I managed to get the pic[and permissions] and coloured it in.

From what little I've seen / read of King's Watch, it's pretty good entertainment!
Knowing almost nothing about any of the characters, aside from the 70s?80s? Flash Gordon movie [mostly the Queen theme song] and the ..mid/late 90s? The Phantom movie, I like seeing these guys getting together and doing awesome things.  Jeff Parker and Marc Laming have a good series here.

Part of me visualizes the art credits as being emblazoned like raised ornaments...leaving an imprint on the robo-alien-thing's chassis\chest. And that makes me laugh. ^_^

Goodbye 2013, Hello 2014

Normally I don't generally care, or celebrate things like the New Year... really, I mean, if not for certain Roman Caesars wanting to be immortal, we'd still have a 10-month calendar.  So it seems to me that the celebrating the change-over of one day into another because of the end of a numerically dated sheetbook seems kind of silly... but hey, any excuse for a booze-up, right? That's what people want, it seems.

so.. last sketch of 2013, first of 2014.. because hey, we have to mark these things down and take note, right? Right. Though a lot of days I wonder why.

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. 

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.

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.