Lots o' little stuff here, wasn't using the white charcoal on this page. Started drawing with my little mechanical pentel, a holdover that I used for years, and it looked really nice of the toned paper. Next thing i knew, i had a bunch of little sketches on the page.
the title says what it means. or, perhaps, a little Egon Schiele.
yes, I'll say it again, Galactus by Sienkiewicz.
The great Michael Jantze gave me the gift of an original Norm strip yesterday, and its a beaut. I'm even featured in the last panel in the black t-shirt. My wife and kids think that he absolutely captured me and I'm enclined to agree with them. To see the strip up close, go here! If the jam section has enough room at the back of the newest Norm Graphic Novel I may have a piece in there as well. I wait with baited breath.
Getting back to it, and going to try to do the sketch a day thing... we'll see how long a slow artist like myself can keep this up.
As difficult as it may be to do so, try to return to the halycon days of 1989, when the Rob Liefields and Jim Lees of the world were starting to push superhero comics into a new artistic paradigm, and when how novel the concept of finding anyone to actually follow up Alan Moore on Saga of the Swamp Thing would be. And a sweet little goth book showed up on the stands with some very interesting covers. And it was really anything but sweet.
Got back from APE 2013 and ready to get back to work! in fact, I'm utterly psyched to be at my board again, the quality of work was so much higher at this year's show. Great, great stuff.
Finished the new cover for what will be the second Carnival story, and wanted everyone to get a peak at it without trade dress and tones... just pure black and white! A wraparound cover to make things interesting.
This post by Valerie Gallaher is one of the funniest and most dead-on things that I've read in a long time. I'm so sorry to be so late to the game to have missed linking to it when she first posted it. Valerie is smart, courageous and damn funny. And yes, I recognize myself in some of this. It was why i created my "What do comics owe you? Anything? Nothing?" post, just to have a little public therapy.
Working hard to have part 1 of my new book ready for APE 2013 in San Francisco. If you're going, please be sure to stop by table 824 and say "Hullo!" to Alex Sheikman and myself.
As I hold in my hands the Genesis West Artist's Edition of Red Nails, I find that i had misgivings about certain aspects of the packaging: The one sided pages, the glossy paper used, the unnecessary slipcase, but it did not occur to me just how much this would be discussed, with such anger, online.
There is a charm to the original art that, I thought, only came across when you were holding the originals in your hands, looking at the margin notes and the erasures and white-outs, and i certainly didn't think that many of us had that gene. IDW has proved me wrong on that account.
Just wanted to post this because, well, Dave was great. The Nightcrawler is actually pretty generic and the face is a bit long, but the Storm... well, Dave clearly has actually looked at women and captured the languid sensuality of her body language. The delicacy of her left hand in the grass is a small be delightful touch. Well done Dave. Miss ya.
None of the drinks got spilled, which is pretty damn good, when you consider the amount of alcohol that was being consumed at the Drink and Draw last night. Kirsten, our bartender, had a bevy of interesting cocktails to keep us either 1 - on our creative toes or 2 - on the floor under the tables. Take your pick.
For my part, i knocked out the piece you see here, which keeping the alcohol further but no further than an arm's length. I inked and drew, all while holding a spirited discussion with Ted Naifeh, writer and artist of Courtney Crumrin over the best Batman artist of all time.“Batman did pretty well, so I sat down with the head of DC Comics. I really wanted to do Kamandi [The Last Boy on Earth], this Jack Kirby character. I had this great pitch … and he said, ‘You think this is gonna be for kids? Stop, stop. We don’t publish comics for kids. We publish comics for 45-year-olds. If you want to do comics for kids, you can do Scooby-Doo. And I thought, ‘I guess we just broke up.’”– Paul Pope, relating his attempt to pitch an all-ages (or perhaps young-adult) title to DC Comics, during his Comic-Con International conversation with Gene Luen Yang.
Dan DiDio, the co-publisher of DC Comics, said there was “some truth” to these feelings of a shifting landscape, which he said were industrywide. For comics published by Vertigo and by DC, he said: “There’s not a challenge to be more profitable out of the gate. But there is a challenge to be more accepted out of the gate.”Mr. DiDio said it would be “myopic” to believe “that servicing a very small slice of our audience is the way to go ahead.”“That’s not what we’re in the business for,” he added. “We have to shoot for the stars with whatever we’re doing. Because what we’re trying to do is reach the biggest audience and be as successful as possible.”
Two Morrows Publishing has started a new publication with Jon Cooke at the helm, Comic Book Creator, and its got all sorts of stuff on the torrid beginnings of comic books from the writer and artists.
Finished up a great piece tonight, inks over the Dave Dorman rough for a Crimson Empire cover. Oddly enough, the interior was drawn by Paul Gulacy, who I worked with many times. I should have been inking the interior on that one!
Posted this "in process" piece, simply to blow Alex Sheikman's mind, since we approach inking completely differently.
Not sure where this piece was used, but here are inks, in process, with Copic Markers for tones.
So I sit here, in my studio, with a drawing table equipped with a state of the art LED light board affixed, over a terabyte of memory available on the tower at my feet, a tabloid scanner capable of scanning at 1200 dpi in 24 bit color and downloading into Adobe's Photoshop CS suite, shown on a HD flat screen monitor and manipulated by a Intuos 3 pressure sensitive tablet... and i'm creating a personalized Haggadah for tomorrow night's seder using a photocopier, an X-acto knife and roll of scotch tape. And i'm then going to photocopy the whole thing, en mass, for over 30 people.
A new commission piece, and an interesting one to interpret, since i have no idea if the pencils that i was working off of were going to be inked, or were the basis for a painted piece. It meant that the values of the piece could have been changed significantly by having Dave separate the planes on the art by color, as opposed to line weight. I went in and did... well, what looked right to my eye, that's what. I've never drawn the Alien, even though I've seen it a million times in my nightmares.
The cover of Iron Many #1 is a great example of using the heavy blacks to really orient the weight of the figure without having to worry about pointing out how wonky the left leg and right shoulder of the figure is! As well, if you compare this with the printed version, you can see how the editors statted the vignette scenes around Iron Man and moved this into different positions. Lets face it, it IS too crowded at the top. I would certainly believe that they told Gene to leave space at the bottom for a blurb, which he did, and they later decided that the "Premiere Issue" blurb didn't quite fit. Personally, while both covers for me, Gene's original is better.
And our next little bit of priceless paper comes in the form of producer's notes from Blade Runner. Yes, the acknowledged, albeit troubled, classic film.
The work was being done for Photon Creative in San Francisco, under the direction of Ed Carden and Brandon Butrick for Zimmer, whose artificial joints are pieces of insertable art. Seriously, the artificial knee joints that they make are like holding new Apple products. 
