Happy birthday, Shawna!

April?!  I can’t believe it’s been since April since I’ve last posted something on here.  Ugh…

Well, there’s good news-reasons for that.  I’ve had non-stop commissions through the spring and summer.  The bad news is that these pieces belong to the people that paid for them, and I don’t think it’s appropriate to share the work without their permission.  I’ll see if they’d like some exposure. So, check back for some of that soon.

In the meantime, it’s my love’s birthday!  Happy birthday, Reverend Deacon Shawna.  Thank you for making my life so wonderful.

Just for fun.

I’ve been working on a superhero commission all weekend.  While the design we went with was ultimately different, I thought this unused design was pretty damn fun:

Super-bum!

I showed it to my buddy/fellow artist Cody, and he liked it too.  Enough so, that he took his mad digital coloring skills to it.  If you’d like to see the color version, by the talented Mr. Hagman, check it out here.

Breathe deep…

Up to a few months ago, I was working on a project about the experience certain children (young adults?) have when they have to go in the hospital for fairly serious procedures.  It was a difficult project because of the subject matter, and very personally challenging for me because it was a drastic change-of-subject for me.  No robots or spacesuits in this story…

Anyway, I posted a few panels from the pages while they were in-progress, but I wanted to share one of my favorite pages as well.  The finished page was colored and has some dialogue where the poor kid is being warned that he’s about to be put under (breathe deep!), but I kind of like just the cleaned-up line work.  I feel like the “fading” visual works better in black & white.

One funny thing, when drawing this POV, I used my own legs as reference.  I guess it’s not enough that the poor teen had to be in the hospital, but I had to go and give him 40-year-old-man-legs.

To the rescue.

Just when you thought I was down for the count, here I am again, stronger than ever.  These words are brought to you by the following superhero, who I worked-up from a rejected commission sketch recently:

It’s been a busy month, relocating myself and business to Oklahoma City.  I haven’t lived in this part of the country for 20 years, and it’s been a little readjustment.  I don’t mean that sarcastically, it’s only taken a small amount of effort to be comfortable here.  It helps when there’s family nearby (I was born and raised not too from from here) and when the culture is a familiar and welcoming one.  This area seems to be exploding right now, but it’s still incredibly affordable and roomy compared to the cities I’ve lived in on the West Coast.

All that aside, the freelance work has really picked up and I’ve had to hurry to keep pace.  When combined with a new day job, I’m all-of-a-sudden out of the free time I’ve been enjoying for the past 8 or 9 months.  So, enjoy this little piece I did last night, while a bout of insomnia had hold of me.  I’ll post more as they sneak their way out.

Shades of gray.

Throughout the 80’s, Hayao Miyazaki created a comic called Nausicaä.  I didn’t discover the series until about 10 years ago, but I was blown away by the style it was done in.  There was a lot of hashing instead of solid blacks (for shading) and everything was done in a kind of loose, organic line work.  It created such a unique feel for everything, and really even created a mood for the whole world.  I feel like these 3-value drawings of Father Robot I’ve done in the past couple of days remind me of how Nausicaä made me feel back when I first read it.  Not that it’s in the same style or anywhere near as well-rendered, but I do like how this has come out.

Again, this was done with Copic technical pens and sketch markers.  I got a little more variation in value by blending the markers together when I could.

How I learned to love a robot.

Someone asked me at the last comic convention my process for creating drawings.  At the time I was working on commissions I had received at that event, which could be anything from superheroes to caricatures of the attendee, but normally they were good ol’ robots.  This is what happened when both your table banners feature giant robots.  At the table, I work a lot faster than I do in my studio and erase all my pencil lines, but I thought I’d share my ideal process, when I have more time and all my gear, here for you all.  So, let’s start at the end.  Then, scroll down and I’ll lay out the process a little but more. Here’s the end-product, a hand-drawn bust of Father Robot with value (shading):

To get to this, I first lay down a bunch of wild sketches with light blue (non-photo) pencils.  Because I am an extremely messy sketcher, I prefer a very light pencil that erases completely.  Some brands are very greasy and, even if used lightly, don’t erase very easily.  This is important if you plan to “color” directly on the original drawing later.  This pencil lines need to be able to be removed, or maybe I just want to be able to correct the shape with an eraser.  I prefer Prismacolor Col-Erase pencils.  It ends up being very vague and light:

Then I come back with either a soft, dark lead either in normal gray/black graphite or a drake color of blue.  I like art pencils, but any ol’ pencil will do, preferably (for me) 2B or harder.  While traveling, I carry mechanical pencils with me, with a variety of leads preloaded.  With the right tool in-hand, I render a clearer drawing that’s going to be pretty close to the product I want to end up with:

After that, I can draw right over the top on the pencil lines with ink.  Sometimes the paper won’t take the ink if the pencil was to greasy or too much drawing was done.  So, I can just lay a piece of tracing paper, vellum, or, in this case, marker paper over the sketch and draw clean, inked, line work.  This process is also good if I want to make multiple drawings from one sketch or I know there’s something I want to fix in the composition.  Here’s the result with Copic technical pens on some Bienfang Graphics 360 marker paper:

As you can see, I wanted to turn the eyes a bit and feel free to sketch some more details of the neck and the body around the head, but for the most part it retains the point of the original sketch.  Then I get out my Copic markers and just have fun.  When I’m at conventions, I try to bring at least a dozen different values with me to do commissions, but on this, non-con, trip I’m on currently, I only carried three values, or shades, with me.  I can compensate for this lack of variety by working fast and laying down, then blending, two values together with the pigment is still wet.  I think I got a pretty good result!  Here it is again:

That’s about it.  If I work fast, I can get a piece like this done in a little over half an hour.  I spent more time on that for this one because no one was waiting for it.  Hope you enjoy a little peak into my work process!

Twice as nice.

Back to ol’ Thunderbird again.  I rarely draw superheroes, but I’ve got a need for a good understanding of this discarded mutant.  So, I end trying out different versions of him time and again.  The problem is, it’s hard to find good reference for this guy.  Even within one book, there’s a rather large variation of what his details are.  This problem is only increased by his ability to morph into a radically different version when angered.  Anyway, I did my best, but I know I forgot the little gauntlets he’s supposed to have popping off his meaty forearms.

 

I had lots of fun drawing Thunderbird.  Because of his powers and variable appearance, I felt it was a good excuse to exaggerate proportions and just enjoy myself.  Then, I went after him with Copic markers, and there’s nothing more fun than coloring a solid drawing with those!   The only thing I’m not completely satisfied with is the red tones.  It looks like my scanner couldn’t pick up the variation of that color, as I had actually used a darker value in many places.  Oh well, maybe I’ll go over the piece again with some warm gray in those areas…

One of my favorite things about Copics is the flexibility they have to be blended.  here’s a revision of the first post after I went back and added some darker value to spots.  I just took some warm and neutral grays to the areas where there was already flat (or at least lacking enough variation of) color, and now I think it looks much better.

Used drawing with ancient theme.

I have a small surplus of pieces that came from commissions and projects that the client(s) failed to make payment for.  I try to hang on to them for as long as possible in case the delinquent account does pay up, but this one has been waiting a couple of years.  So, I assume they’re never coming back for it.

Here, then, is a wise Chinese-like sage, armed against those who would sass him.  I thought he came out great, but I guess the person who contracted for him did not, leaving him a sad, awesome orphan…

The right tool for the right job.

Remember this one?  A dedicated fan (hi, Milutin!) asked if I had a version of this spacesuit with suped-up arms, and I felt inspired to comply.

I always loved how out-of-poportion Mignola’s Hellboy is.  That giant arm just makes him great.  So, I definitely was influenced by that character when updating this design.  I seriously thought about adding a gun on that right arm, but since I was going over-the-top on this one anyway, I thought I should just add the one thing no one concerned with the integrity of an environmental suit would have near them: Chainsaw!

You need those is space a lot, right?

Happy Father(Robot)’s Day!

The writer and co-creator of Father Robot, Kristopher White, came up with a great idea to promote our book for Father’s Day.  Basically, Father Robot should participate in an old-fashioned photo op for the holiday.  I couldn’t help but taunt Reggie (the real father of Clarabelle, the heroine of the story) in the piece, as seen below.  Both Kristopher and the publisher like a friendlier version, but I still like this tongue-in-cheek version.