Lord Something

Earlier this week I got the script for my part of Worlds of Something & Something #3 (from Devil's Due). James Lowder did an excellent job adapting his own short story.

Was chomping at the bit to get my school commitments this week met to start on this (and continue work on my contrib to the Tori Amos project, which I'm not allowed to show any of the work). Did a few a few sketches of the Big Bad of the Something setting himself: Lord Something.

I'm not colouring this, but with all the digital painting I've been doing for the other thing, it felt odd not adding a splash to the pencil sketches in my book.

~R

Been asked by the publisher to remove references to the IP as it might interfere with their license -- thus the "somethings".

More developmental stuff

So, this is why I did the Spider-Man drawing the other day.

The text I wrote on the jpegs is pretty explanatory of what's going on and touches on some of the stuff I'll be teaching and demonstrating this summer.

~Richard

Spiders

Have to do some work showing some developmental stuff for a course I'm teaching this summer on figure drawing without a model. Decided to use Spider-Man. Here's just two of the steps I go through when I'm drawing:

By the stage above I've already done a few thimbnails and had some false starts with portions of the anatomy. I draw on bond paper most of the time: it's translucent so I can trace and redraw whatever I need without a light table or flip the daring and hold it up to the light to reverse it so i can catch errors. About 60% of the work I do is on bond before being scanned into the computer or transferred to art board of some flavour.

I did another overlay drawing of the above before I drew the version below:

Normally I would have gone to Bristol to tighten the drawing up, but this isn't for publication, so I just tightened it up on a new sheet of bond paper before scanning and colouring

It was a nice break from rendering New York City brownstones.

Marvel Sketch Cards

Working on a new batch of Marvel Sketch Cards for Marvel Masterpieces II (I think it's second set -- can't recall). Might play with these further at a later date. Might use some markers to add grey tones or some colour -- not sure yet.

Instead of 50, I opted to go for 100 this time. They make great warm-ups before starting the drawing day or for winding down.

With 100 cards to do I've decided to be a bit systemic: I'm going to draw eleven Marvel characters eight times over nine cards with one last single card to get one character drawn once. No idea who that'll be.

Pretty sure the next ten will be:

1. Hulk
2. Iron Man
3. Spider-Man
4. Wolverine
5. Thor
6. Silver Surfer
7. Spider-Woman
8. Ms. Marvel
9. Scarlet Witch
10. Storm

~R

Big things

Wow -- fast month!

Lotsa things going on; six weeks left of school obligations left for this semester, the Tori Amos story needs drawing and painting, I got a 20 page story pending for an upcoming fantasy anthology series (not sure if I can talk about details on that yet) and I'm trying to line up my summer schedule as soon as possible.

I also did some virtual house cleaning; my website-I-never-did-anything-with came up for renewal and I passed on it since I really couldn't see a point where I'd have the time to set it up the way I wanted it to look and function, inspired by that I deleted my myspace account since it was a barely functioning annoyance more often than not. Facebook is doing what I wanted from Myspace, so I'll stick with that. I almost dropped Comicspace as well, but I'll see what the announced relaunch of that social network offers first.

Other than that, I've been chipping away on two projects; one a long gestating fantasy piece and a more recently started historical project. The giant above is from the former, of course. Giants are to be a big part of the fantasy "thing", so they require a great deal of of my attention as it develops. I'm starting to get comfortable with my conceptualization of my giants; longer than human proportion arms, much thicker legs and hips, cruder and different head shapes and their approach to armour.

Giants expecting to fight humans only armour their lower body, possibly wear vambraces and gauntlets and use shields if they were expecting missile fire. I imagine the crotch/belly armour I designed would be uncomfortable.

The historical thing would be a stand-alone graphic novel project, while the fantasy thing already has an intro one-shot (Zero-issue, I guess), a 6-issue mini series and several story points developed. I'm nervous about starting something that may wind up being so all-consuming, which is possibly why I'm doing so much development work on it and avoiding finishing pages!

Muscles and Teeth

Heck of a weekend: Snow storm ties up my Friday and part of Saturday morning. My first experience with an optometrist since I was 10 effectively blinded me for the rest of Saturday. Today was taken up with getting crap done for the upcoming week and watching the NY Giants become the unlikeliest of Superbowl champions.

Did find some time to draw, not as much as I would have hoped. I wanted to do more than doodle on the Tori project, but my head just wasn't going there with everything else going on.

So it was a continuation of muscled monsters with big teeth. More Hulk and a little bot o' Pitt. I have a good idea of what I'd like to do with the Hulk thing, so look for that germ of an idea to be a more finished piece soonish.

Hulk-ish

Had to draw some Hulk stuff. Trying to capture that overwhelming rage the Hulk is supposed to be in.

~R

E.M. Gist's Dead of the Day

Found this announcement through Steve Niles' forum. EM Gist is going to draw a zombie a day for three months.

Wow. Wish I thought of something like that!

The scrawl above is a doodle of mine. Follow the link to see Gist's way cooler and gorier zombies!

~Richard

LMS3 Entry

There it is. I'm okay with it.

I'm gonna get my butt handed to me because my competition is just blowing me away, but I'm cool with that.

Follow the link to Conceptart.org to see all the entries!

~Richard

(yeah -- I watched the Green Bay game . . . )

Last Man Standing 3

I entered Last Man Standing 3 which is a burgeoning tradition over at ConceptArt.org. The theme Beneath it All messed with my head some as I kept coming up with ideas and rejecting them.
I finished my entry (yay) hours ahead of the deadline (also yay), but I'mpretty sure I read somewhere on the LMS3 thread on the forums it was requested that we don't share the work until after the whole of the entries are posted.
I really wanna share, so I'll let a few preliminary pieces out:

The initial figure sketch -- this would be scanned in, the tonal value and textures played with, additional elements addes to the whole work and eventually colourized in CS2 before porting it off to Painter for digital painting.

This is a wing -- I only drew the one. The magic of modern technology allowed me to get away with just drawing the one.


I'll post the finished piece as soon as the lot of them go live over at conceptart.

Mmmmm -- Playoffs!

Last two weeks have had some amazing NFL playoff football.

Yesterday had a major upset with the roundly expected to win Cowboys losing to the Giants!

NFC championship in Green bay on the frozen tundra of Lambeau Field!

BTW -- drawing from paused TV is kinda fun!

Much Better

It's good when stress just melts away like that!

I'll post some artwork later when I'm at home!

~Richard

(sarcasm on) I'm Having a Nice Weekend (sarcasm off)

So, everything seems to be going fine . . .

. . . then I have a Friday like I just had.

Oh, one that feels more or less like this:

Not the best way to enter a weekend.

Now, I literally didn't get hit in the head with a rock, but I'm going to run with this since I already did the doodle.

Weirdly enough, I was sort of prepared to be hit in the head with a rock because someone told me "Hey, you might get a rock thrown at your head if X happens". However, I expected to have the option of ducking, or at least having someone explain to me why the only option after X happens is for me to take a rock to the noggin'.

So, of course X did happen. Nothing could really be done about X. Then, of course, I get a rock to the head. No effort was taken to meet my rock-to-the-head expectations, and it seems ducking wasn't an option.

This is me pissed-off.

I now have to wait until Monday to get this whole rock-to-my-head thing explained to my satisfaction. I really don't see how it can be.

Then I get to explain that this might end badly for everyone but me.

Northlanders

I've been obsessing over the first issue of Northlanders from Vertigo. This Viking comic has all savagery and three times the wit you'd expect of a Norse tale. It feels like some of Robert E. Howard's historical fiction, but with a more modern slant on the dialogue. You know what, I think it's essentially crime pulp set in the Viking era.

Brian Wood and Davide Gianfelice really outdid themselves here. Pick this book up!

It inspired me to to the drawing up there -- it's screaming at me to colour it. If I have the time, I will.

Spider-Man

I don't think I've ever drawn Spider-Man outside of convention sketches before -- those are so chaotic and rushed I'm usually more worried about getting the costume right and making a drawing that won't get me a sad fan face in response that I don't get to think about what I'm drawing.

Drawing this I kept thinking about how much a genius Ditko is. Just the treatment of the fingers alone is brilliant costume design, but the mask and way the red sections wrap the form make for truly interesting shapes.

I always thought of this costume as annoying before really getting a chance to sit and take a few hours on it, but I actually enjoyed it.

Smile Time

Drew the above while my students were doing the assigned work in the last class of Comic Book Layout and Composition for this semester.

You could say I like drawing The Joker.

You could also say that a Joker project would be a dream gig at DC.

Week 13

The Fall semester is over.
I thought I was ready for how hard the 5-days-a-week teaching schedule was going to be, which I was, but what caught me by surprise was how heavy the administrative and student adviser aspects were going to be upon taking the Director of Illustration for Sequential Arts role. It'll be much easier next semester as my schedule drops to 3 days a week. It'll also be easier next year when I really will be ready for the load.
I should note that Ty Templeton made my job a hell of a lot easier by how much experience he brought to the table and how he essentially overtaught his class.
Hmm, I'm thinking that Director of Narrative Illustration is a more appropriate title since I'm also overseeing book illustration and the courses overlapping into Concept Art.
Anyhow -- I was kinda expecting to be working on some sort of fill-in over the break, but that seems to have fallen into corporate scheduling cracks. I'll be able to fill the time with a number of things anyway: Last Man Standing over at ConceptArt.org, a nice 7 page story for a big top secret anthology coming out next summer, house projects and developing course materials for next semester.
Enough about me. Here's some doodles:

It's a rhino of some sort -- some students started dropping the name of some TMNT character upon seeing it.

The students were concocting some sort of Batman thing, each taking turns drawing an old, emaciated Dark Night Decrepit (heh). They asked me to do this one -- apparently mine's not old or zombified enough.
It does look like how I feel today, though. I seem to have caught a cold from another commuter on the trip home from Toronto Friday night.
*cough*
*cough*

Recent stuff

School has really been beating me up art-wise. Lots of quick gesture drawing and what amounts to doodles. Nothing as finished as I usually like to post here.
This is from the most recent Dr. Sketchy's:

The model, Priscilla Pussycat, was a blast. Dressed as Poison Ivy, we were asked to hide Batman somewhere in the picture for the prize of a mystery drink. Audience voting won me the quadruple crantini. Yay.

Other super-hero-ey drawings include a few things like these:


Lots of preliminary doodle stuff, but very little actual drawing. Grumble.
With Last Man Standing 3 underway and a few comics projects starting I think I'll have more interesting things to post soon-ish.
~Richard

Facesketchbook

A couple of people asked to see the sketch that got burried under the digital paint. . .

Dunno which one I look older and more tired in.

International self-portrait day

Saw this thread about International Self-Portrait Day at ConceptArt.org.

And, even though I'm swamped with all sorts of art-instructor stuff in addition to getting a speach ready about MtM's Concept Art program for the Northern Digital Expo this weekend, I just had to take a couple of hours and do this.

Yeah -- I actually feel as tired as I look there -- probably moreso since that was how I looked while drawing it.

Wow -- whole month since I posted anything. Sorry -- it's been that sort of month -- I do have tons of sketches, but my studio move has finally been progressing so nothing is being scanned.

Hope you all had a Happy Halloween!

~Richard