Hellboy the Dragonslayer

Another really fun commission. This one I decided to try a horizontal approach and I'm pretty happy with the way it turned out. I struggled a bit because Hellboy is always drawn (by Mignola) in an iconic, vertical (think totem pole) kind of way. Does that make any sense? Anyway, I'm happy with the piece and I hope you enjoy it...

...if you don't, keep it to yourself.

(as always, click to enlarge)

A Girl and Her Horse

I was pretty excited to get this commission. One of my all time favorite comics as a kid was the New Mutants/X-Men Asgardian crossover. I was already a big Thor fan (the first comic I started reading as an ongoing series) and I had just recently gotten into the X-Men. So you take my favorite mutants and put them in Asgard (realm of the Norse gods, for you unitiated), throw in some awesome Art Adams art and you got yourselves a classic. I read them back to back and at the time it (I was 9 or 10) it was the most epic comic I'd read. I've almost forgotten
what it feels like to be that immersed in a comic book world...trying to think
what in recent years would compare...

Anyway, for those who are familiar with the books you will probably recognize the young lady above. For those of you who aren't, that's Dani Moonstar leader (co-leader? I forget) of the New Mutants. In the story she rescues the steed of one of the legendary Valkyrie (these scary warrior women who pick the heroic dead for Valhalla or annoint the dead on the battlefield...or something. Guess I need to dig those back out and reread them) and is in turn chosen as it's rider (essentially becoming a Valkyrie herself).

Also, interesting to note, this is the first time I ever drew a finished piece with a horse in it. Good on me.

Sketches from KC

Went to Kansas City last weekend for Planet Comicon. Met some nice folks, ate some free food, and drew these. All in all a good trip. A nice primer to the con season--FYI: I'll be doing Heroes Con(Charlotte, NC), San Diego, Chicago, Nashville Comic and Horror Con, and Mid-Ohio(Columbus). If you have the chance please come to the show and say hi.

Thanks to everyone who sent along the scans so I could share them.

Bagged and Tagged

This is an image from a project I worked on over the weekend. Can't really go into details on it (for fear for my life) but I wanted to share this one image with you.

Love is Hell

This was a fun one. Did this drawing of Eddie and Sophie at a convention I attended last weekend. The owner of this drawing was kind enough to send me a scan so I could post it to the blog (I have to say that I'm impressed with the quality of this scan--the tones of the washes are captured pretty well considering how light it was). I really wanted to put this one up because it was the first time I've ever done a strictly ink wash drawing. For my first attempt, and considering I wasn't working in the comfort of my own studio, I think the final product turned out really well. I'll definitely have to do some more of this in the future.

The Ol' Wraparound

I had the bright idea that I wanted to redo the cover for the upcoming The Damned trade paperback. The plan was to use the cover from issue one for the trade cover but I did have some minor quibbles. The "major" minor quibble was that the original cover was too still--it didn't get across any sense of action or kineticism (did I make a word up?). My solution was to make Eddie larger and coming at the reader/viewer. So far so good. But why stop there?Why not do a wraparound cover? I've always wanted to do a wraparound but have never had the opportunity. That gave me a whole new dilemma: How do I take an image that was designed to work as a vertical cover and make it work as one half of a larger horizontal cover? How indeed? After much trial and error I came up with the image below. Drawn in pen on two pieces of 81/2" x 11" copy paper. Image size--approximately 13" x 9".

Once the fun part was done it was on to the drudgery of enlarging and lightboxing the image. I drew it lightly with a harder lead (2H I believe) so I apologize for the miserable scan. Perhaps if you click on it to enlarge it will be easier to view. Perhaps.

That done, it was on to inking. That's funner part...yes, funner (get off my back, I know the proper grammar is funnerist).
This is where the piece really comes together for me.

And finally, the colors. Oh, the colors. This was the most difficult part...but only because I had no idea what I was doing. I knew all along that I was going to keep the original color scheme from the issue one cover. Only, I was also aware that I never would have used those colors had I originally intended to make a full-blown wraparound cover. It's too difficult, in my mind, to carry that color scheme through a large "montage-y" piece. But I tried. I'm fairly happy with the final product and I'm completely jazzed about attempting another wraparound--this time working from the ground up.

The Living Vampire Meets The Spider Man

Another commish I recently completed. It was a lot of fun drawing Morbius, especially putting him in his retro-70's get-up. I have to admit that I did have a little problem with the composition. It's difficult to feature two characters if they're fighting with each other. The easy solution is to have the characters coming at each other from both sides of the page. In this case though, I was dead set on showing Morbius with his "underwings" outstretched. Even with the composition difficulties, I still like the way this piece turned out quite a bit.

I decided to color the piece as well because I wanted to test out some different approaches to the way I work in Photoshop. I have a project coming up that I'm going to be doing the color on and I was particularly interested in using ink washes with Photoshop to get a more organic feel. I really liked the way the effect worked. Now, this wasn't a perfect test because the original piece was a complete piece and the wash was not applied with the idea that I would be coloring over it. For example, I would not have done a grey wash over all of the red areas of Morbius' costume had I know I would color it. I would've just done some shadows here and there.
Overall, I consider it a successful first attempt. I really like the texture that was created on the stone walls. It almost looks like watercolor but all that was done in Photoshop was a simple gradient.