Fantastic Four page - coloured

Aaand here's the flats all coloured up.

Initially saved as a 17meg+ jpg, I resized it down to about 130kb. Gotta love Irfanview.

So the costumes are different from the norm, or any of the redesigns I'm aware of [all-white with some black, and red & black].  I think it works okay - not great or amazing, but it works okay.

The Thing is often orange-y/brown..supposed to be all rock-like. So I spatter-flecked him out with some lighter & darker shades ...pondered trying some marble-style vein/slash designs but it just didn't look good.

Johnny's almost always on fire.. so that's half the team being red[ish] / hot coloured.... and they also tend to be the hot-heads. [moreso Johnny than Ben].

Sue and Reed are the scientists of the team.. so I kept their costumes similar to help balance against the reds/oranges.  Sue's a biologist if I remember right, and would know the value of letting your skin breathe. Yeah, Reed designed the costumes out of ...unstable molecules?... so I'm sure it breathes better than cotton, but nothing breathes as easy as no impediments at all.

Anyhow.. team balance, brains & brawn.. blues and reds.

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. 

Abominable Charles Christopher / Karl Kerschel contest

Karl Kerschel, creator of the entertaining The Abominable Charles Christopher webcomic has a colouring contest going on.

So I tried my hand at it.
I'm never a fan of contests that don't have easily identifiable rules for what would make a winning entry, but then again, this is art, which is always subjective. So there I go.

Here's my colouring over his lineart :

It's been submitted to the facebook page.  I'm not looking so much to win the contest [which hey, would be nice, don't get me wrong], so much as I'm pushing myself to submit things that aren't perfect in my own eyes, because none of my work will ever be perfect to me. I can almost always see something, look back at works, that could be improved. 

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.

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. 

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.