First off we got a master copy Ink Study. I am super unhappy with it. Lots of little things are all messed up, should have laid out the initial shapes more thoroughly. It was super late for class and I had to pound it out so here it is. Second we got a real quick speed paint study I just finished. I am all right with it. The inspiration was a barrel flash from an up coming game of which I saw and advertisement. Not only did the character have the little gun with the tiny barrel flash on it it had the three poorly placed shell casings popping haphazardly out of the top. No action was apparent on this gun at all. I am a TOTAL stickler for making guns even slightly functional and a total hard-ass about barrel flashes. If you are going to make a barrel flash then make a barrel flash. Casings flying out of a gun project away from the action in haste, they don’t lazily flop out in compositionally conducive arcs. I need a life…

Sketch page just messing around.

Some highlights from figure at the POD.

Just rocking a 2 hour quick concept. A Brady Coke, some awesome electronic and a trip down memory lane are all caliber of inspiring. This one may be worth summing up. So much to do!

My best poster design for TAD. I hope I can convince the other students to vote on the cool thing and not the logical thing. We shall see. I think I at least have a shot which is satisfying. On a more school driven note, everything is solid. Just hammering through hours and hours of homework and classes. I can tell I am starting to get used to the 16 hour days and grinding assignments. I know I am making some huge steps forward. Exciting.

Oh jeez. So here is one of the near final pitch pages for Tyrants. I handled concept, pencils, and inks for this page. The badass himself Sammy Hall handled letters and colors and will be taking care of covers. Only the team has seen this so far so its arguably a world exclusive release of the page. Any who, we are shopping it so if you need some awesome comic book goodness to publish or Sammy’s contact info gimme a holler.

Life drawing dump. This was all done at the Austin POD.

Work in progress. Had a momentary vision and have pursued it all day in various stages. I used another painting for the color scheme. I messed the old painting up and splotched it to a point of where I could no longer see any of the previous forms and then I began painting over the top of a multiplied pencil layer with the old painting behind it. Super useful technique for getting into the middle stages of a painting fast. This is a process I witnessed tonight watching a few videos of Craig Mullins do his godlike thing.

A composition sketch from my sketchbook class at school. Learning a ton and having a great time. This editorial stuff is way more fun than I thought it was going to be.

Another Arbitrator study. Channeling a bit too much of the mech from District 9. Yellow/Purple is fun and I feel like this was a good first try using it. On an awesome note, the POD is beginning its first unofficial class tomorrow in life drawing and opens Monday officially. Excitement is off the charts. Its a ‘go time’ unlike any other in my life. More to come shortly.

Craig Mullins just updated his portfolio. If I lived a thousand years I may be able to get to where he is someday. Anyways, got all inspired and did some studying and then pumped this bad girl out in short order. Using textures to lay in shapes and pulling fun stuff out of the chaos. Super happy with it. Using a red green color scheme that felt more successful than usual. Right at the end I dropped the super highs out using levels and then reestablished them and put an edge glow. I love atmosphere, any sort of light/color bleed is tasty as all get out.

Its a heavy arbitrator study. For some reason these guys fascinate me even though they are not critical characters in Isthmus. I think their design will be very indicative of the culture and the fashions nd architecture in the universe. This one is too generic in my style. I am still not sure what historical reference I am going to be pulling for the two nations; that’s a step I need to take before being able to corner a style and build a visual library for it.

Finally some nudity. That should drive some traffic…

Got lucky with color here. I laid in a general tone for the a specific area, no under drawing at all really. So dark blue for the chair, green for the drapery in the back and straight gray on the brick wall. A dark flesh tone for the shadow area on the model and a warm yellowish for the lighted areas. I stuck closer to the darks initially and worked lighter. About half way through the model I was seeing a mess of wonderful reds and dropped in a heavy handed bright red on high transparency and used layering to get it where I wanted.

Scientifically speaking I have no idea what its called bu the light is piercing her skin and she is filled with red blood, thank goodness. That light then comes spewing out her body with the redness and hits the surfaces around the skin as well as my eye giving it a wonderfully alive look. I believe the term is subsurface specularity. Feel free to correct me in the comments section (and be a dick). This phenomenon only holds true on flesh in bright direct light. Her arm and leg are not exuding the same redness as the light was not directly pointing there. The skin looks more solid and less alive. Also if the skin is angled enough you will get a glossy reflection on more stretched out skin on the legs and arms. All in all a wonderfully successful piece, looking forward to doing more.

Here’s a page for a character called an arbitrator for an independent project I am working on called Isthmus. This is a rough and disgusting sketchbook page. The most important thing to remember in your sketchbook is that this will never see the light of day so go out on limbs and test new ideas constantly. I have an ugly sketchbook filled with terrible ideas, but 1 in 10 is good and 1 in 100 is awesome. ‘Sketchbook’ also means anything unrefined, not necessarily in pencil in a book on my night stand. Sketchbooks encourage experimenting with new tools, copying other artists work to learn, and stretching my creative out so I can get my flow going before working on refined pieces. In this work I am using a 6D art pen on my cintiq, its a great tool I have yet to master enough for refined work. I don’t use color because it slows my process down. I copy a previous figure and rework the shapes and scribble a lot to generate happy mistakes I can use or dismiss from stroke to stroke. Using uncomfortable tools helps this randomness a lot and gets you used to the tool. Starting with a new figure is great as well, flipping one horizontally also is good. This is more about exploring what the character could even remotely look like than ‘finding’ the exact design. I will most likely scale it back to a more refined and realistic design if any feel good enough to take to the next level.

Process! I got all inspired from the Royksopp song ‘What else is there?’. The color and northern European facial structure of the lead female singer Karin Dreijer just really got pencil to paper. The sketch was mediocre but I had a feeling I could fill it out without too much issue in paint. I scanned it in and it sat on my desktop for several weeks until I had saved up enough drive to attack it. Color was important so I roughed that in early. I laid in an blue orange color theme initially and it slowly evolved into more of a blue purple, yellow orange. I use color balance (ctrl-b) a lot in my works. Jason Manley was super pissed at me for not using it in digital painting. Rightly so, its a great tool for making those colors sing. I generally play the slider back and forth and find a spot that feels better or makes more sense for the color scheme I desire.
I still have lots to learn about how lighting moods work so I can inject specific color schemes into a painting and elicit a response from my viewers. Anyways, once the color was satisfactor I began solidifying the work. I took a screen shot of the music video for the Royksopp video and gave it its own layer and worked from it next to my painting. Not tracing, just making sure it was close to my subject so I didn’t have a neck spasm going back and forth. When I had her face figured out I developed the arms and then began post production. I lessened the lower edge a bit with a fuzzy brush and messed with colors a bit. When I was happy I began work on the shirt design.
I dropped out all color and then made several attempts at finding the best selection fomr the grey scale. After four attmepts I had the best definition of the best parts. I repeated this process again for the middle tone. I did a color overlay layer via the blending options on each layer and messed with the colors until I was happy. I have found analogous color schemes work well for shirts. The color overlay layer prevents you from losing pixels if you were to select the color with the magic wand and paint bucket it. The paint bucket is an evil tool and if I am forced to use it click twice in your selection so the color is uniform and to the very edge of your selection. Or just use color overlay, which I believe takes into account the alpha of each pixel. I could be wrong on that though. Regardless I am happy with the work for the most part.
I think I could have fit some sort fo diagonal movement. I wanted a very square and centered work (to piss off all the artists that hate hyper balanced compositions) because I simply like them. If dynamic works have a place I feel static should as well. But I think I missed out on a great opportunity to get some movement into the work and better prove a point. Perhaps skulls or a cloak or even the woman carrying a sword or pistol at a diagonal. All in all a fun piece produced quickly and efficiently.

One of my many side projects I will be documenting from time to time here includes Tyrants, the in development graphic novel whose story will own your face. We have a great team of talented writers, George Royer and James Griffin and I share the artistic responsibilities with Sammy Hall who is also a bad ass. I was brought on as a concept artist for the project as well as its pencil artist, inker, and colorist. Due to the immensity of those jobs Sammy has stepped up to colorize and letter the project. We have the first ten pages (which we will use in our pitch) almost done and Sammy is going to rock a cover and then we shop it around and attempt to get picked up. Anyways, if you want more info on how that process works for an artist shoot me an email or ask in the comments section. The image below is a small section of a great big .psd that has 16 squares on it. I am roughing in each page making sure the page flow works and that the page to page flow works. Paying heavy attention to eye movement around the page and pages. The benefits of these thumbnails is that you can fix the movement without having to explain it in the structure and lighting. At this point I can paint a building in three strokes so if I need it to tilt or move to help the reader make it to the next panel its really easy. Sometimes I just make arrow-like marks, when I take the completed rough to the drawing table for the next step I can figure out how that arrow is going to work on the persons face, or in the building or as a dent in the hood of a car or whatever. Its very liberating and wonderfully easy and fast. This can set you up for failure or success so really grinding on it makes for a happy or sad team down the road. I also did many of these thumbs initially and forgot to put the speech bubbles in or worry about how much speech was on page. This is wrong and your panels will suffer for it. Drop in a white blob and some text estimating the size of the text on page and you can make sure your finished product rocks. A lot of graphic novel artists will work even smaller and even rougher than I do, this just seems to work for me at this point.