Available for your viewing pleaseure.

It’s been hard waiting for this day, but it’s nice to finally see my comic available for purchase.  Thanks to Kristopher White, the folks at Comixology, 215 Ink, and especially our supportive fans for making this possible.

Please check out the available download here.

Maybe when robots fly…

Yeah, I know that background is fairly lacking, but I set out on this one just to play around with some new markers, mostly.  FR doesn’t usually sport no jetpack, but what the hell, this pose was a lot of fun.

Years ago I remember reading one of Mignola’s Hellboy stories where all the investigating agents dropped to the scenes of paranormal activity on jetpacks.  Mignola’s fantastic and graphic way of visualizing things has stuck with me, and I always strive to try and bring a little of the magic that I see in his work to my own.  While my success at that is debatable, I felt inspired by the jet wash he drew in that story.  I swear it streamed out from below and behind those characters’ jetpacks, even when they were landing. However, a fellow artist-friend of mine pointed out that the jet wash/exhaust would actually be hitting the ground while landing and blowing up all kinds of dust.  I may go look up Mignola’s pages and try and duplicate more of what I remember from them later, but for now here’s a quick work-up of our hero in (uncommon, for him) action.

The robot was done by hand, vectorized, and then colored by hand with Copic markers.  The jet wash and dust (and shitty backdrop) were done digitally in good ol’ Photoshop.

 

Playing with skeletons.

With all the robot-themed work going on these days, I’ve felt very starved for the spacesuit stuff that I was working on earlier in the year.  So, here’s a fun one I did to just let my creativity wander around for a bit.  Whether it was Ghost Rider, He-Man, BPRD, or an old Scooby-Doo episode, there’s always been something both terrifying and amazingly cool about the floating skull character.  I love any design with that particular mystery-feature.  I also love the idea of putting it in a spacesuit.  Maybe it’s a ghost and the suit keeps the whole thing together, maybe the suit is containing something, keeping it from getting out, or maybe it’s just some awesome piece of technology putting on a show or hiding the real wearer.

 

Surf’s Up.

Just messing around with Adobe Illustrator.

I was trying to come up with a new logo for the “bad guys” in Father Robot, and someone pointed out to me how near I was to making up a new surfboard company.

So, here you go…

Where am I?

Time passes.

Sometimes weeks go by and I haven’t returned phone calls or messages.  I feel like all I do is go to work and draw.  On good days I also sleep, but there’s not much more than those few things.

All in the name of comics.

The good news is that I’m really happy with the results I’m getting from my work on issue #3.  I’ll try and put some previews up soon, but I’ve found that posting is one of those things that slip away in the temporal blackhole that is comic page-production.  For those of you who follow my work, I’m sorry not to post more.  I look forward to putting up more, regular updates soon.

In the meantime, here’s a quick, digital, color sketch from work on Father Robot.

 

This soldier from the future is supposed to be one of the “bad guys”.  I thought it interesting that when designing villains, I right away went to harsh angles and cool colors (in an earlier version).  I then started over, thinking about all those poor schmucks who just needed a job and ended up being on the wrong side of inevitability in stories like Cobra in GI Joe and Imperial Stormtroopers.  My uniform for those unknowing evil-doers is hopefully a little ambiguous as far as archetypes go, I hope.  He could be fixing his spaceship on his way to trade foodstuffs or burning villages of Care Bears, but you would never guess by looking…

There’s something on your shoulder…

Convention-season is upon me, and I’m eagerly awaiting the finished proof of issue #2, ready to go to print as soon as the final version is in my hands.  In the meantime, there’s lots to do on issue #3, as well as an overload of promotional material I’d like to have ready for my first table of the year.  It’s going to be back in my favorite city, Seattle, for the Emerald City Comicon.  I’m looking forward to seeing some old friends, showing my girlfriend my favorite haunts (and rainy tourist spots), and introducing the denizens of that wonderful area to Father Robot.

The above image is from the cover of issue #2.  The book has a cropped version, and I plan to make high-res prints of the full shot available at the convention table next month.  I really like it, and I wish I could spend as much time and attention to every panel of the book as I did this one image.  It was hand-drawn, then cleaned up and colored in Photoshop.

Traveling in color.

Just working on some more concepts of vehicles for the ol’ comic book series.  In addition to the mobile lab, the story calls for a whole mess of vehicles in a para-militaristic convoy of sorts.  So, I thought some jeep-like ATVs might go well with that big truck.  What I was going for was a simple concept that would serve to have components that could be switched out/added on to and such.  Here’s there’s a roll-bar, but there just as easily have an anti-bullet bubble, like the one the pope can create, an armored metal-plate hardtop, or maybe a wench on the front.  Mounted-machine guns, anyone?

There’s a few characters sketched-in for scale.  I did the line work by hand, but the colors were added in Photoshop.

Next, I need to come up some mobile barracks for when the convoy stops at the local equivalent of a KOA.  I should probably finish working on the comic book pages first.

Happy Happy…

To everyone who has been wonderful enough to show interest in my artwork, thank you and I hope you have fantastically enjoyable holiday season.

Do the Father Robot

If FR was one of those fools that feels compelled to make a “V” hand gesture in every picture, I absolutely would refuse to draw him.  However, since he just likes “flexin'” with big guns when the camera’s pointed at him, I’m game to help him realize his 2D-life aspirations.

 

I colored this one with Photoshop and the simple, old-school mouse at my work computer.  Have you tried coloring with a mouse?!  It’s hell.

The Lost Edition

Here’s the end-result of my custom remake of an old Nancy Drew cover.  I didn’t try to replicate the illustration skills of those talented cover artists before me, but tried to put a new spin on an old concept and do it in my style.  I’m pretty happy with the result.  Although, I do wish the composition was a little bit closer to the initial sketch/study.

As you can probably tell that, after finishing it, I traveled back in time and left it in a public library, just so it would get that worn-in, well-loved, dog-earred look to it. Sweet.