Daredevil

Hour and a half long digital sketch w Wacom tablet in Photoshop.

All thumbs

I never seem to scan any of my art and when I do I'm not even sure I pick the right stuff. But here's what I'm working on lately...

This is some rough art for a new comic I'm working on. I've been doing pencils on some layout paper from where I work. It's a small print shop which still does some paste-up (actually, to my embarrassment/horror they still do a lot of it)! They have these awesome 11x17 pages with blue line boxes for every inch and pica. I draw on the back and can just see hints of the blue lines through the paper so I can better eyeball my straight lines and try to eliminate using a straight edge. One of the pages has the main lines already inked.

On this project my goal is to just let my art be ugly and gritty- it fits the ugly nature of the story which really tries to get at the core of the decay of morality in our society (and I don't mean that in the conservative God and gays sense but in the liberals- look how the rich are fucking us all- sense). Our model is Poe's "The Masque of the Red Death." One of my problems as an artist is that I try to polish the turd and draw too "clean." I get tight and attempt to draw too much like Charles Burns or Dan Clowes instead of Paul Pope or Eddie Campbell- guys who embrace their stray marks and construction lines. I need to try to draw like Gilbert Hernandez instead of Jaime Hernandez.

#FemmeFriday

Today at work I was doodling a picture of a girl and had an idea to have a fake Twitter theme day on this blog called Femme Friday. Basically, every Friday I'll try to post a drawing of a girl. Here's the first (and probably last) effort...


This drawing was sketched lightly in blue pencil and then I went over it with a regular #2 pencil to darken it up and hide the stray lines. Then I added some contrast and cleaned up some remaining stray lines in Photoshop.

Astro

One reason why I was excited to see the British small press comic Decadence, which I linked to in my last post, is that recently I've been toying with some SF-themed stories myself. These are the first couple of images I've bothered to scan.

3 heads

An old doodle from a pile of stuff I've done at work while waiting for my scanner to warm up or email to download, etc.

Old truck

Drawn while looking at a calendar at work.

How I waste time at work

I work at a printing company. We often end up with scrap paper which I hoard at my desk to doodle on while the hamster wheels powering the outdated computer and servers catch up or while waiting for large emails to come through (if I try to do other activities often my computer crashes so it's better to find other ways to occupy my time). The following are just a random assortment of those doodles. OK, not totally random since I tried to pick ones where I used color...

Shame on you, North American comics industry!

Never having read any Jonah Hex comics, I'd always assumed him to be a magic character due to his name (a "hex" being a form of magical spell), and I always associated it with the non-superhero branch of DC which produced lots of mystical/horror books in the 1970s like House of Secrets, Swamp Thing, etc.

Despite my initial confusion, I began picking up the series for a couple of reasons. First, it follows the "one and done" formula which means I don't need to know 15-20 years of back story to appreciate the book unlike most mainstream comics. More importantly, the book features art by Jordi Bernet! The fact that the book doesn't sell more is yet another sad indictment of the North American comics industry. Bernet is a God whose work should guarantee top 10 sales. Another factor in buying the comics is that, probably due to the aforementioned poor sales, I can usually grab old issues in the dollar bin at a local comics shop. What could be better than buying comics by a Euro master for a dollar? Shame on you, North American comic book industry for allowing a book with art by one of comics' best artists to be on the edge where many people gossip about its chances for survival! People should quit fawning over the photo tracers and imitators and start buying this book and realizing those Wizard top 10 artists aren't fit to wash Bernet's brushes! And then go back and buy those old Torpedo volumes

I think she's dead

Tried firing up the scanner earlier this week to post another drawing but it wouldn't respond. Dead. So, I had to take a pic of my sketchpad with my digital camera. It took a few tries and I still couldn't do without the flash which created a reflection on some of the ink lines which actually made them sort of hollow. So, I had to work a bit more to clean up the initial drawing.

I used a Photoshop watercolor-style brush to help keep the drawing loose and keep me from being tempted to try to fully render it. Also, I've been wanting to play around with a coloring style that's a lot looser than the more rendered stuff I've posted recently.

I just got a card at my local small town library. Looking around, I saw a nice fat tome of fashion history. I'd always wanted to research fashion periods and learn a but more about different styles so I could incorporate them into my work when needed.

The style depicted here is from the Directoire period which came after the French Revolution. A group of leading taste-makers were called the Incroyables and took to wearing more daring fashions after a period of subdued styles.

Look at my Man Thing!

My business partner, Jim, suggested a while back I post more sketches and art. Since most of my news and opinion blogging is taking place at the official Red Flag Publishing web site, I figure this makes even more sense.

The Marvel comics character Man-Thing has a special place in my heart. Not only do I like the innuendo inherent in the name (in fact it sounds like something you'd read in one of those spam emails) but also the only comic that has ever made me terrified was an early issue of the Man-Thing series from the 1970s. A girl in my 5th grade class gave me an old beat up issue of Man-Thing where the spirit of an old woman takes the shape of a red cloud and chases after her husband and his hunting dog. For some reason it scared me shitless and I've always wished more comics were able to have that effect on me. So, here it is: Whosoever Knows Fear, Burns at the Touch of the Man-Thing!