Gestures

S'more gestures done this morning for warm-up...

Brush Tomfoolery

Quick update since there's a bit of work I need to jump on today...

Here's a little morning warmup I did to loosen up my arm. I was testing out a new brush I made from a standard round, as well as some new keys I mapped to wacom pen (I feel kinda dumb for not realizing I can map keystrokes to the pen's buttons!) So now instead of having to reach waaay across the keyboard to adjust the size, I just click the little buttons instead. I lose my right-click, but only for PS.

Anyway, yeah, not the greatest of paintings, but hey, at least I tested out some new stuff!

Back to the drawing board...

Well, after two weeks of being more or less out of town (a few days spent in town inbetween trips,) I'm back and the gears are cranking again! Some quick news, followed by sketches done this morning and on the plane trips...

If you've been following this blog for a bit, you know I've been working on a comic called Border Crossings. Well, we currently have a website up and running, which you can find over at www.thelastisland.com. Currently, we have the pitch up there, but as we get closer to June, the site will be transformed to support the webcomic, and we'll be updating it with new pages from the first issue.

Why June? Because we'll be at Heroes con and we want everything to be up in time so we can show off the goods and point as many people as we can to our product, that's why! We'll be having a table there, and as time goes on, I'll give out the details for that.

So for now, here's some sketches. One of them had my precious speedball pen vomit all over it, so just don't mind that. I think it was going through the same pressure stuff I had on the plane, cause my eyes felt like they were going to pop outta the head from sinus congestion...fun times, this allergy season.

Sketches

Some stuff from the sketchbook while I was out of town...on a related note, I'll be out of town again this week! I'll be sick of planes by the end of it all.

Aquarium and Critter

Well, it's my 60th post, so here's a mix of observed and imagined drawings. I went to the Atlanta Aquarium last weekend on a particularly rainy day, and got a slew of photographs, and when the crowds weren't thick, a few drawings in here and there. Here's a couple of them.




I also did up this little drawing of a critter the other day, then decided to bring him into photoshop to try and do some more painting study. I think it might be another step in the right direction, but still a long ways off to what I eventually want to be able to do.

S'more gestures!

Some more from today's warm-up. Same as before!

Gestures

Some gestures done today, 30-sec each, courtesy of posemaniacs.com

Morning doodle

Here's a little watercolor sketch I did in Painter X. The lines were made with the scratchboard pen tool, and it's quite possibly my favorite tool in the world.

...Of course, it also proves how terrible I am at actual painting, but I'm trying, honest! I just see things very linearly instead of color and light.

Environment Building

What do you do if you have a specific set of scenery that's going to show up frequently in your pages?

That's something I ran into this past weekend as I was prepping thumbnails for more pages of Border Crossings. Throughout the (eventual) 5-issue arc, the main characters travel on a Nautilus-like submarine called The Rhizome. Before I could start penciling any pages involving the interior of the Rhizome, I had to lay out a floorplan.

If you're faced with a scene you know you're going to visit frequently, or if it's a very specific place, you need to make sure you have the floorplan of the set planned accordingly. Otherwise, you'll run into the misfortune of drawing randomly placed things in the background, which throws off the disbelief of the artwork, and eventually you'll be called out for your laziness or ineptness (Not really, but considering how some readers are, you never know.)

This isn't a new idea by a long shot. Illustrator Frank Hampson used to construct scale exterior and interior models of the spaceships seen in his strip Dan Dare, ensuring that everything was properly in its place. It also provided him with a means to see how the ship would be affected by lighting schemes, so it provided a double-use.

Modern-day comic book artists like Paolo Rivera and Lenil Yu use similar techniques, using a program called Google Sketchup. It's all the frustration of making a scale model, without the cost of materials or storage! And it makes it incredibly easy to set up your shot, save it as a jpeg, then use it for reference or lightbox drawing, depending on your workflow.

TV and movies have been doing stuff like this for YEARS. Look at the floorplans for the Millennium Falcon, or the Serenity from Firefly. These were all designed so you wouldn't have reality inconsistencies. Looking at the blueprint above of the Serenity, how weird would it be if the characters left the cargo room and immediately showed up in the bridge?

I haven't reached this stage yet with the Rhizome, but here's what I have so far. The exterior needed to be tweaked a bit in its design from its days in the promo comic (which means when it comes time to ink that splash page, I'll need to ensure that I adjust the drawing,) but you can see what I have planned out for the interior. For me, this isn't enough. I still need to make more detailed floorplans of key areas (Engine room, Bridge, Holding Bay, etc), and I also need to design the interior aesthetics. But once all that hard work is out of the way, I'll have a very concrete set I can stage all my action on, which helps the believability of the story.

Digital Pencilling

So, I recently started up work on Border Crossings. This was originally a comic that was pitched to Red5, but they decided (after a few drawn out weeks,) to not carry it. I suspect it was partly because at the time we pitched it, Diamond dropped their new (and stupid) shipping policy, and they decided to not bring on another new title. It's unfortunate, but to make up for it me and the writer Christian have started it up as a webcomic. Currently, the site only has the promo, but as time progresses (and before Heroes Con) we'll have a full site up and running with new content. You can view the current url with the promo here.

I bring this up because I'm taking a different approach to these pages than I have to comic work in the past. To help speed up stuff, I'm digitally penciling the pages first, then printing them out to ink them traditionally. So far, I've been having a blast, even though the surface of the cintiq screen is a little slippery for my tastes. That's why I hadn't bothered doing it entirely digitally, simply because I don't have nearly the same amount of control.

So here's the digital pencils from panel 1 of the first page...

And here's the inked version!

So far, I can't complain.

Painting Madness

Whoo...bit of a while since my last post. It's not that I haven't been busy, just haven't had anything worthwhile to throw up.

So here's a WIP I have of a little painting I'm doing in Painter X. I've tried out Painter in the past, but never really took for it, and this time I decided to really sit down and do a piece from start to finish.


Here's a bit of the underpainting for you all to check out, sans the refining bits on top. I feel like this thing is nowhere near the end of it, but it's done at least for the day. Approaching something like this is difficult, for me at least, since for some reason I just can't wrap my head around color forms. When I see line, I feel confident in it, but the more that disappears, the more unsure I get... I guess what I really should be doing is finding my own style of painting. In the meantime, I'll keep flailing as I try to get a footing.

Random Fun

Best fun is always with abstract perspective boxes...'cause who knows where it'll lead.

Some more BC sketches

Hey all, So, come next week I'll be hitting the pages to start penciling Border Crossings. This week I've been spending drawing and tweaking designs and getting the feel for the world itself. I still have to do some environment studies as well as thumbnails for the pages, but no worries. Anyway, here's some stuff from that, of the local fare that inhabit the Last Island of the world. The weird gnarly fella that's been colored? He's a glass being of sorts, so I'll probably need to find myself some nice lighted references of glass sculptures by Chihuly or something.

Sketches

Hey all! Monday's are always a slow start, so here's some sketches from earlier today. They're some ideas for a comic book project I'm working on. Even though it's really unfeasible, I like the idea of a large beast of burden being a taxi cab of sorts.

Also, giant cephalopods shopping is a funny idea.

Expect some more stuff from this later in the week...

Alien Life, Part Trois

Hey! I'm back from NY Comic Con! It was a blast to be there, and I met a lot of great people. Hopefully it'll generate some work for me, but if not, then the experience alone was worth going for it.

Anyway, back to the grind. Here's an alien mockup I did to test out a process method of using a grayscale drawing and then colorizing it. I think it'd work great to quickly get something out of the way (at least for me, since I am lacking in the painting department) but it'd be terrible for doing a final piece.

I've been reading up on evolution theory and all that, and I find it fascinating how most life on land came from fish...It certainly brings up ideas of what could happen if another creature was the mother archetype for everything, and considering how varied our own history has been with species, the possibilities are endless...

Which is sad then that this is pretty tame considering what sort of genetic playground a creature artist could play in. But that just means I gotta up the ante for the next critter drawing.

More Alien Life

Here's another page before I head off to NY tomorrow. I like the idea of a myriad of species coming from one base that has a distinct trait. Towards the end of this page, I decided that trait would be rutting horns that form from condensed hair, kinda like a rhino's horn.

Aliens, Comics, and NY!

Hey hey! Rarely do I show a whole page of one of my sketchbooks, but here ya go, in all its twisted, savage glory. For some reason, I think my alien/creature drawings look more like life studies than my actual studies of real animals...guess my brain just operates in a whole different spectrum.



Also, this has been something that's been a long time coming, but here's five pages from a recent pitch I did. We're still in talks over getting someone to pick it up, but I thought a five page taste would let the world see what I was busy on for a while a couple of months ago.






And finally, I'm gonna be off to NY for the Comic Con up there this Thursday to Sunday! So if there's anyone out there that's gonna be heading out that way, lemme know! I'd love to hang out with some new art buddies and all that.

color mixin' noodlin'

You may recognize these sketches from the previous post, only they now have a splash of color! I was mainly fooling around with some brush variants and testing out the limited palette I made in photoshop just to see how well color mixing can work. I can definitely get lighter colors and a nice array of mixed colors, the only troublesome spot right now is trying to get dark, saturated colors.

New sketches!

Hope everyone had a good holiday these past couple of weeks, I sure did. Here's some sketches I did recently to test out some coloring techniques in PS. I'll be posting the colored versions sometime later. In other news, I just finished block modeling a human in maya! It's not detailed by any stretch of the word, but it's a good simple mesh for me to start from for Zbrush. Up next, my continued quest to figure out how to model armor on these blasted sculpts...

More Zbrush Hilarity

Man, with the way updates are going, it seems like all I do is sit on Zbrush...

Actually, I am gonna be uploading a sneak peek soon of what has kept me busy, but that probably won't happen till tomorrow. In the meantime, here's a fun glimpse at another go at Zbrush...

I decided to try and do a mock-up of Ahab. The face itself was pretty quick to rough in, since most of the stuff like his head, neck and such wouldn't be seen. I started to do a rough of the armor, then quit. I might pick this one back up to flesh out the armor again...

Then again, with how quickly it is to set up something in this, I might just start over and do an ever better representation. Anyone out there do armor before in Zbrush? I got a good base by masking the part I wanted in armor and extracting it to a new subtool, but I wonder how well it would work for segmented stuff...hmmm...