Out on the town

Went out to eat the other night for a b-day party and saw some interesting peeps.  At the restaurant we ate at there was this Mom and daughter right across from us.  The girl was just staring at her phone and the Mom was just staring at the daughter.  Made me laugh.  And then after that we went to a bar that bills itself as "30 and over" kind of place.  There was this older guy there who was out on the prowl and kept asking all of the women to dance.  The guy was quite the character and just begging to be drawn.

And yes, the line in quotes was the actual line I overheard him use.  Funny.

Watching Movies

Here's some film studies from "Presto" and "The Avengers."

From Pixar's short film, "Presto"

From "The Avengers"

Next Five Exercise

Over in the twitter world Emma Coats aka @lawnrocket posted the challenge of taking a random picture and drawing the next 5 panels.  An awesome storytelling exercise I tell ya.  So here's my take.  I pictured the girl waking up abruptly and then a tendril/vine thing shoots out of the ground.  As she gets up a bunch more tendrils shoot up and she decided to climb one of them.  If I'd gone any further I had the idea for a dragon flying by that she would hop on.  Why not?

Here's the original picture

#nextfive

Saga inks

Here's the inks for the pin-up I put up the other day.  Digital inking is a tricky beast.

Saga Pin-up

Did this on my new Cintiq 22HD that I got over Christmas break.  I freaking love the thing and can't believe it took me so long to upgrade from my 12WX.  Anyways this is a pin-up done as an homage to my favorite comic book being published today, Saga.  Written by Brian K Vaughn and Illustrated by Fiona Staples, it's pretty much the best thing out there nowadays.  Check it out if you get a chance.  Anyways, this took about 3 days to do which is pretty good with my schedule.  So, yeah.  Hope you guys dig.

Marko, Alana, and Hazel

Here's a sketch from pretty early on in the process

Comic Bookin'

I've been itching to draw some more comic book pages and took a break between commissions to do a few.  Just a little story showing Wolverine of the X-Men running away from the X-Mansion, gets tripped up, gets mad etc.  Figured I'd throw in a little action for good measure.  These were inked with the intention of doing the backgrounds digitally, so I'll add to those eventually.  Now back to some more painting...

I Can't Smell My Eyes!

I'm excited to show this next image off.  It's an idea for a children's book that I've had for a while now and I've just finished putting together some dummy images together for it.  My hope is to show it off to some publishers and editors and see if it has any traction.  Let's just say that the story centers around a little boy, Miles, who gets a crazy idea in his head and sees how far he can take it.

This image also represents my first real jump into digital painting which is both scary and rewarding at the same time.  It sure is nice painting and not having a mess to clean up afterwards.  I have 2 other ideas that I really want to make into dummy-books so I'll start work on those soon.

There's a reason the last image doesn't have any text, but hopefully you'll figure that out when you read the book someday (fingers crossed)

Olivier Coipel

The stuff you see below was done by Olivier Coipel and he's pretty much the best comic book artist out there right now.  Hailing from France with a background in animation.  Olivier's line work will make your jaw drop.  He has a great sensibility for drawing the figure which I admire and he's so great at making everything look dynamic and full of energy.  I've never met him but I've met his frequent collaborator and inker, Mark Morales, a couple of times.  Each time I see Mark I hit him up for whatever pages I can afford at the time.  So far I own 5 Coipel originals and I'm hoping to add some more soon.  Look this guy up, people.

Here's some examples of Olivier's mind-blowing work:

Here's 4 of the pages I own.  If there was a fire, I'd probably grab these first.  

Luna

I am currently in possession of the world's cutest dog, Luna.  Sorry everyone, you're dog just isn't that cute.  Ahem, now that we have that out of the way here's 2 paintings of her that I gave away as Christmas presents.  Both were done in oil on paper and are about 4 x 6.  The one on the left is a little more stylized...well, they're both stylized but I'm still happy with how they came out.  Neither took all that long to do, probably about 2 hours for each.