More Work Doodles

Yanno...for not having a creative job, or a job with anything to do regarding arts or creative stuff at all..I have a nice collection of highlighters and coloured pens.

Some doodles while on break at work:

Christmas: A New Hope ???

Or, you know, whatever. All-around-great-guy Lar de Souza provided the line art and I just coloured it in.

A generic, ordinary..not that wookies are ordinary for Christmas... but average colouring.

And a little something different...

.. and a minor variant to that something different.

Inktober & Sketch Dailies [2014]

Instead of the usual digital-ink, I decided to bust out my watercolour postcards and copic markers that I've got stashed in a box with other physical art supplies [as opposed to ethereal, digital ones]. If you're wondering, I buy the majority of my stuff from Curry's Art Supplies.  They usually carry whatever I'm looking for, and at a better price than most of the other local shops.

The other local shops are okay and all, don't get me wrong - but there's some weird cool-guy / hipster / artsy-fartsy kinda vibe I get from them... like if you don't have permanent, expensive-brand grease-paint stains under your fingernails or in your horribly-high-schoolish mustache, you're not a "real artist" kinda vibe / impression. And I don't know about you, but I don't care about my `struggling artist / hipster / cool guy` street cred or whatever.. if I've got the choice of the same item at two different prices? I'm going with the cheaper price because hey, life is expensive enough!

I'd started to sketch this out in my sketchbook, and my brain kept telling me it was from some videogame I'd played when I was a kid, but I couldn't remember what game, even though Ogre Battle for the SNES kept coming to mind, but the style is all wrong and the pumpkin-head critters from that game are more scarecrow-jack-o-lanterns than this thing.

Yes, this is actual postcard that I've made, signed & dated on the back.

Gold Iron-Man helmet

Working with lighting - absorption, refraction, reflection - on metals.
Gold is... interesting. It absorbs light, but reflects more than enough to be able to have a mirror-esque finish. Soft and malleable, easily dulled and dented, but capable of a fine shine.

These may look "okay" at a casual glance, and maybe I'm my own worst critique
[no internet, that is not a challenge], but there's something about these that doesn't feel right to me, and I'm not sure what. Going to try and get one more attempt done before class tomorrow, maybe finally nail it down.

This is shading with colours, instead of lightening or darkening an already coloured section.

And this is using the lighten / shadow brush in MS5.  The shadow brush takes a really light touch to us it without 'burning' the colour.

Update:

A 3rd attempt - about 50% done, ran out of time before class [and dinner].  I like this one much better, but it's still not where I want it to be [but I think I may have found some brushes that'll get me closer to it]

]EDIT[

Here's the 3rd attempt - finished.

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.

Spider-Man Coloured

And here's the coloured version.

The clouds were giving me some grief until I remembered a few things.
I think I prefer an instruction of "please add clouds" to a colourist instead of the artist drawing them in, as this can produce a more natural kind of cloud formation. But that's my opinion.

Spider-Man flats

I was making some decent time on flatting this and the day got away from me. Phone calls, laundry, errands... and now here I am, 12 hours later, finishing *just* the flats.

And that's fine - for now. Because it's not a job, I'm not paid to do this. [yet]

Normally I'd leave colouring effects - especially text effects, until last, but I was curious if my initial idea for the 'thwak' would balance or further unbalance all that sky.

Something old, Something new

So I bought a few more brushes that Ray Frenden's created. I have a hard time understanding how artists and colourists - any creative individual, really - are still working in Photoshop.  Manga Studio is a much more natural art program to work - a better ability to replicate real-world brushes and set up pages and such for printing in an easy-to-see / understand method.

Why am I so pro-Manga Studio? is it because Adobe screwed me out of my investment into their Creative Suite 3? No. ...I am still sore about that, coming on almost 7 years now.  But it's the fact that this is a program designed for people who draw, who create... whereas Photoshop's options often seemed like they were jammed in as afterthoughts or half-hearted appeasements.

Back to the point: I got playing with Frenden's Wash Brushes.. and figured what better subject than to remake an old Fallout Super-Mutant quick sketch I did a few years back. For those not familiar, the Fallout World is post-nuclear-apocalypse.  Think the version of the future envisioned by 1950s/60s sci-fi and fantasy.

But with no running water, and most of the water being radioactive, you can imagine the layers of grime one would accumulate whilst traipsing about the new-but-broken world.

Remember now - this is a recreation, not just colouring old lines, so there'll be some differences.

Original:

Coloured using Frenden's brushes - his Wash set, various Pencils and Ink Nib 2 and the Feather Fawcett ink brush. 

Colouring the Lartist

The always-a-great-guy Lar de Souza was kind enough to send me his line art & inks for a piece he's doing for a convention or some such thing - you can check out his own colours and such HERE.

I had no idea what colour scheme he would be using for anything, an didn't want to see his finished piece before I made solid commitments to my own colour schemes.  Thankfully, I only saw his after I'd already laid out my flats.

My only complaint is the line art & inks he sent weren't signed by him. I believe in giving credit where it is due, and this wouldn't have happened at all if not for his art.

So here's my colours on his awesome art:

First the flats:

And now the finished piece:

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".

Quick sketch & colour

Whenever I doodle for myself, I almost always shortchange myself and run out of room for the feet. Makes me worry a little bit.

Anyhow, here's a gunslinger with some simple wash colour and even simpler gradient background.

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. ^_^

Batman '66

So, via Greg Pak, by way of Brian Michael Bendis with a source of Alex Chung through the magic of Tumblr, I come across a black and white image of this awesomeness.  Classic 1966 Batman and villains as drawn by Kevin Maguire.

And it's just one of those things I had to colour. From memory, despite the fact the show is/was before my time, but reruns let everything live forever, more or less.

So.. some classic campy Batman, drawn by Kevin Maguire, coloured by me:

My only real concern doing this from memory is the Egg Master [Egg Man?..bald guy by the Joker, played by Vincent Price if I remember right], and the two top-corner villains, along with the prison-striped faceless guy behind the Mad Hatter.

And just because.. I even colour-doodled in Cesar Romero's white-painted mustache on the Joker.

Trying to think of the actors behind the costumes...  Adam West, Burt Ward, Cesar Romero, Frank Gorshin, Julie Newmar \ Ertha Kitt, Vincent Price, Burgess Meredith, ... I can't remember who played King Tut, Mr. Freeze or the Mad Hatter.

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. 

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.