My Rotten Blog

This week the pick on the ComicTWART blog was Dan Dare, selected by Dan McDaid. If you don't know Dan McDaid, I highly reccommend checking out his website, danmcdaid.com. He has worked on Dr. Who magazine and the wondrfully Kirby-esque creator owned book Jersey Gods.

As far as the drawing, Dan Dare is not a character I was that familiar with. I did know he was a British Sci-Fi character created by illustrator Frank Hampson in the 1950's. Dan become a very popular character and spawned radio shows, toys, television programs and more. In 2008 Virgin Comics published a 7 issue Dan Dare mini-series written by Garth Ennis, with art by Gary Erskine.

I dod this rather quickly. I started with just the pose from random sketches. Eventually I decided on this one and it made me imagine Dan shooting through space with a pair of rocket boots. I lie it for the most part, but now I wish I would have spent a little more time on it. I tend to rush through things because I'm excited to get to the final drawing. Although I have gotten better at slowing down in the beginning of the process. Now I just need to slow down at the inking stage. Another leson.

A little something for my buddy John Siuntres.

A little something new. Just playing around with my laptop and Wacom tablet. I always hated drawing on a tablet, until I bought my Cintiq. Not being able to carry the Cintiq around, I decided to mess around with my old, tablet. I decided to just try something simple and see how things might turn out. I did a few warm up sketches and then decided to just start with a gesture and see where it took me. This is what I ended up with.

Invincible is one of my favorite ongoing comics. Robert Kirkman has such a love of the kind of superhero comics that I read as a youth and it comes out in this book. If you haven't already read it, go give it a try. It's just good, fun superheroes, robots, monsters and aliens. Good stuff.

This week's ComicTwart selection, courtesy of Mike Hawthorne, is the prototypical hooker with a heart of gold - Clara de Noche.

For those unfamiliar with Clara, she is the creation of Spanish Illustrator Jordi Bernet. She was modeled after Bettie Page and her adventures were extremely erotic but funny and humane at the same time. For more information on Clara and other work by Bernet, I highly recommend the book "BERNET" from Auad publishing. You can get it at Amazon.com.

This piece came together very quickly for me. I was surprised how it went from an idea to a finished piece in such a short time. For whatever reason the idea hit me to put Clara at the zoo, in front of a black panther pen. I waned to try and emulate Bernet's style but not ape it. I tried to really free my hand up and just draw and brush this without trying to be too precise. Overall I am very happy with this one.

One thing though, I have no idea if the Italian on the sign is correct. Anyone that knows for sure, let me know.

Okay, here is this weeks Comic Twart Bootleg. The guys over at ComicTWART were gracous to have me playing along as a Junior Memeber so I'm going to keep trying to do it every week. I know a bunch of those dudes, and if there is one thing they all have in common, besides being super-talented artists, it's that they are super nice guys too.

This week the pick was from Mitch Gerads. Mitch followed Francesco Francavilla's lead and chose his own character JOHNNY RECON! To learn more about the fantastic adventures of Johnny and his co-creater Mitch, please visit www.popgunpulp.com.

As far as my peice; not very happy with it. I was trying a few too many things here and I don't think I was able to accomplich much of what I set out to do. Obviously I was going for a Kirby feel with the giant robot, and out of the entire peice, I like it the most. Unfortunately, there are too many other things wrong with it. The figures are stiff looking, and overshadowed. The composition is bad and the whole thing feels drab to me.

Oh well, back to the drawing board. If nothing else, I think I learned a few things on this, about what not to do.

Okay this one comes with a bit of a story and a few links. Firstly, the character here is The Black Beetle, which is a webcomic by the fantastically talented Francesco Francavilla. If you don't know Faranchesco, he has worked on Zorro, Scalped, The Black Coat and more. You can check out his blog at http://pulpsunday.blogspot.com/

As far the reason I did this peice is because of a great blog called Comic Twart that Francheco is a part of. Comic Twart is a collection of amazingly talented artists that each week pick a character or theme to all draw inspiration from. Then they post their work on the blog for everyone to enjoy. These guys are amazing and I highly reccomend you check them out at http://comictwart.blogspot.com.

This week happened to be Francesco's pick, and he chose his own character The Black Beetle. I decided to challenge myself by seeing if I could keep up with the Comic Twart guys. So I decided to start with this week's choice and here you go.

Let me make one thing abundantly clear. I am not a member of Comic Twart. I am in no way, even remotely close to, the same level of talent as this group of awesome artists. These guys are all professionals and I am not in their league. I know this and can freely admit it, but I figured I would bootleg their idea and keep myself motivated.

I've always been a big fan of Dr. Fate. His costume is just so simple and cool to me. After watching the Absolute Justice episode of Smallville, I decided to try my hand at a Fate piece. Started messing with this yesterday and decided to go ahead and finish it. At least as much as I could. This started with an actual pencil and piece of paper, but eventually found it's way into Adobe Illustrator through Sketch Book Pro and Manga Studio. The end result is all vectorized and completely scalable.

It's amazing how much faster I am this way but I still don't feel completely comfortable with a pencil and brush as I do a mouse.

As usual, click on the image to the left to see a larger version. And feel free to leave a comment, even if you hate it.

Decided to get back to some illustration last week. I've always wanted to do a Bettie Page piece, but never quite felt comfortable trying it. I mean, there is some fantastic Page artwork out there and to try and compare to that is a losing battle. But, at the same time, I'm trying to push myself in new directions, so I figures what the heck.

I did this completely in Adobe illustrator and it took me about 30 hours from start to finish. The hardest part was the chopper.

Click on the image to the left for a larger view.

Been a little busy lately and I haven't been keeping up with the blog. I am working on a new project, nothing podcast or comic book related. More of a commercial design job. Below are some of the things I have been working on. I don't really want to go into much detail about them as the project is still in it's infancy, but I thought I would share a little bit of what I've been doing lately. These are all "logo" concepts/designs for the same project. Hope you like them.