Post 208

Sorry for the lack of updates, but I've had a ton of things going against me this week. Be it meetings, obligations, a commission, I've been going through a lot this week! But here's another one I did yesterday. It's 11X17, so there's a chance I'll be able to haul it to Baltimore. I was talking with some of my friends that are going and I'm just not sure what all I want to haul. For local cons, it's easy to just haul everything I've got. But for out of state ones, it's been a year since I did one, and I hardly want to carry useless stock. I don't plan on checking items because it's sure that they'll get smashed up. So that leaves me with my bag, which I can fit the small paintings in, some copies of my sketchbook, some bristol, and a skeleton collection of art supplies, and one change of clothes...I know what you're thinking, but I'm showing up the morning of Saturday, so all's I need is one change. The other thing I'm bringing is my new 11X17 portfolio with some of the pieces and pages I've done on bristol board, and as many of my 3 types of prints as I can fit in. I'm serious, I'll have far more stuff than normal, but not nearly all that I'd like to bring.

I know this sounds a little odd, but I'd appreciate knowing in advance if you're going to Baltimore and if there's something you want me to hold for you, be it painting, print, or sketchbook. The reason I ask is that supply room is limited, and I want to make sure I take enough of the right kinds of change, and enough books/prints to compensate for what is held vs. what is open to walking con-goers.

Post 207

Post 206

Some new paintings here, I did the batman today, and the monkey the other day. I also have in the batman pictures my new business card. I'm really happy with the print job, it's sleek and makes me feel all warm and happy inside.

Post 205

I'm going to do another post with another monkey pic later, but I wanted to talk about this. I have to say I love the Dallas art scene. You could classify it as "comic art" but that would really take away from just how special it is. We're out there, letting the general public view us in a vulnerable state...during the act of creation. If you look at my stuff during the pre-production phases (see Hulk above) you'll notice that I don't have clean guide lines or mapped out thumbnails, I love jumping in and if I screw up finding a way to fix it. That's the beauty of live art, and I've taken it into my standard working procedures since I first tried it at STAPLE! last year.

Last night the Space Gun Kru went to Titan Comics in Dallas for the Hero Foundry's live art auction POW! I have to thank the guys again for such a great time. Good music, great patrons, and fantastic hosts. Jeremy and the Titan Comics crew were really gracious and helpful letting all us wild and crazy artists stomp around in their huge and immaculate store. Seriously, if you live in the area and you've never gone, you're missing out!

The night started off kind of slow, mainly because a lot of the artists went out to eat before the show started (I stayed and talked with folks). But when things got started they really blasted off.

I never really went to these sorts of get togethers until last year because of Jake and Luan, who have been clawing their way into the Dallas art scene for a while more than I have. They're outgoing and have forced me out of my shell, and I can't thank them enough for it, just from the exposure to how thriving our community is becoming.

I started off with a wolverine picture, then snuck in a monkey pic for myself (I'll show it later), then with not much time remaining (I think under 45 minutes left 0f the show) I did a hulk which was the last piece of the night. To let you know how this goes, you work on your piece, hand it in when you're done, then at certain points they auction off the work. I feel that my pieces did really well, and both went to one of my more recent additions to my group of friends Paul Milligan , who also organized this event. There were a few bidding wars, one over a Tara McPherson print, between the owner of Titan and some other folks...I don't think they understood that when he entered the auction they should just bow out...IT'S HIS STORE!!! But it was funny none the less.

On my first two pics I used some cheap Folk Art outdoor acrylics, but I had found some huge tubes of Windsor&Newton acrylics...I've never used high class acrylics before and now I see the difference. It's like painting with liquid platinum. I hardly had to use water because the binder is so high quality. It's really renewed my interest in painting. So even though I was rushing to finish the hulk, I felt as though it was my best work of the night.

But more than anything, it was great getting to talk with people, my friends Gambit and Dan showed up, and I mainly see them at art events and shows, so it was awesome to see them last night unexpectedly! I talked with a lot of people (though it was tough sometimes because the music got loud for the space, the speakers were behind me).

I really can't wait until the next event. I think it's the weekend after I go to Baltimore, but I'll update you on that.

I'm supposed to get my business cards tomorrow...I'M EXCITED!!!

Lastly, if you want to see more pictures, check here, you'll enjoy them.

Post 204

I had come to the realization that the person who inspired these was my watercolor professor in college. She had this midterm assignment when she knew you were going home for Spring Break and forced a reproduction of an artwork she thought your style would naturally go towards. She found artists that you would never think of finding and that way would give you a natural nudge. Some people got what we thought at the time were "easy" ones, but I think she understood that they wouldn't grow even with a kick in the rear. She gave me this extremely abstract one with a skeleton, and I had a "wtf" look on my face I guess, and she said to me, "just make it and we'll talk in a week." I did it, and it forced me WAAAAAAAAAY out of my comfort zone. But just now I'm realizing she was right, and it's really a comfortable style for me.

I'm not doing any layouts or line work for construction, the whole process is a fluid movement. Working on multiples at a time I'm really drawn to this.

Post 203

As you can see, I've done 6 more boards. I prepped a bunch more, but they'll be in a different format. I want to have a decent number to take with me to Baltimore. Pricing to be determined. But I'm having a ton of fun with these, I guess it's the simple things that I really enjoy. I really really love working by painting on matt board, I could do it all day.

Speaking of pricing, I noticed that nobody bought my sketchbook yet, and since that was thankfully the case I was able to edit the price online. You see, it takes a while to change things because you submit the price early on, so it was a while ago that I came up with that price, but I lowered it by 5 dollars to account for shipping and such. I feel more comfortable with that price-point. So $15 now!

Post 202

So, I decided to REALLY diversify my convention portfolio of sales material. I'm utilizing the idea my friend Kristian has done in the past with selling small paintings at conventions. The ones above are a little over 6X13 inches on matt board. I think I'll be doing 10 paintings to bring with me just because of space concerns in flying. If you know you're attending Baltimore and want to buy one e-mail me with what you'd like. It's pretty much going to be a bust painting, and we can talk pricing. BG is an application of printmaking ink to get a nice clean flat color treatment. They're fun for me to do, and a different way to get my voice heard and maybe even make a few extra duckets.

The last two images are my new business card. I still love the old ones, but I love making new business cards. They'll have nice rounded corners though, and the slickness that is the coating from overnightprints.com . I should be getting the cards by the end of the week.

Post 201

I went for some simple color application. The reds are going to make the computer go insane, I know this, but I just felt that this would be a striking image. I might turn it into a poster or something, maybe a new business card.

I was thinking about artist/colorist combos. It's weird how some artists and colorists become a team, and other artists do all the work themselves, and some artists never color a day in their lives, some never even ink their own work. In this day and age though, it's important as an independent creator to be able to do everything. That's not to say that I don't want people to color my work. I just can't have anybody INK my work (I don't do tight pencils so I don't lose fluidity in the figures). I'd LOVE to see what other people can do with my line-work in terms of coloring. I just haven't seen it. The last time somebody colored my work was my friend Ian Bailon in college. He works for Funimation, and he's an awesome designer/illustrator. But that was like 3 years ago. I'm just interested in seeing how someone else would approach my work. I stick to flatter, more graphic application and focus on the color aspect for emotional content more than anything. I've never seen it with really rendered coloring styles, or someone else's take on the color choices. I'm just never in a position where I can see what a colorist would do with my work. As an indy artist I'm usually in situations where the project can't afford anybody but me doing everything. I mean, don't get me wrong, I love coloring, but I've been coloring my work forever. I'd like to see what someone else would bring to the table and learn from the experience.

Post 200!!!

The finished picture from the steps of the last one. I really wish I had one of those screen/video capture programs so I could show you all of the decision making that goes into creating a piece...alas, something for another time.

Post 199

Post 198

I was drawing in a new sketchbook, I keep ones all over the place, but I was taking it for a test drive. I'm used to strathmore 300 70# at this point, but this pad is different, it doesn't take to ink in a normal way. The ink resides on top of the page for extended periods of time. I then tried some gray tones on it...nothing went through the page....I don't know if it's been treated differently, but in some ways it's good, in others not so much. Maybe I just need to carry it around with me and beat it up a while longer. Don't get me wrong, I love the results of the page. The blacks are SUPER black, none of the natural fade that occurs with ink seeping into the paper.

Just odd...when you think you know everything about a paper, the manufacturer throws you a curveball.

Post 197

To answer Matt's question, I don't have a lot of time right now to do the whole print screen and show step by step, but I will show the black and white version to show the difference before the colored version. I inked this with a combination of my kuretake pens and the Pentel brush pen: the Fudegokochi pen for cleaner lines, getting smoother edges on the face, the No. 13 for the majority of the scrappy line work such as at the nozzle of the freeze gun, and the pentel for large fill-ins.

I use col-erase blue for pencils and ink right on top, you may call that lazy if you're one of the folks that light boxes or transfers, but it's not like I'm selling this stuff, and even then, collectors can deal with the extra lines. Personally, I like to see the remains of the prelims sticking out. So anyway, I take the full pic, freshly scanned and change it to CMYK, this way, I can go to the channels in photoshop cs2 and manually delete everything from magenta on until I'm just left with the black channel. I'm sure there's a more scientific, sexy way to do it, but I knows what I knows because nobody ever taught me. Photoshop is all about teaching yourself or learning through viewing people over their shoulder to steal techniques, then getting home and realizing you forgot the majority of it and spending a week trying to get it right, only to get it right doing it a COMPLETELY different way. Again, I digress, at this point I change the file back to grayscale, and perform threshold to about 225. This way I don't have pesky grays that will mess with my magic wand tool. I then select out the white and delete it, leaving a top layer of just the line art. Then, it's just a matter of adding background colors, and selecting the portions of line art with the lasso tool you want to be a different color and using the fill option.

Now that I've said this, you'll all think to yourselves, "It's amazing this caveman can use photoshop, why hasn't he learned how to do things the right way?!?!" Shoot, I don't know, but it gets the job done!

Anyway, maybe sometime I'll do a step by step with pictures tutorial, but as I said, I'm just too lazy tonight. Maybe if you ask me at a con and bring a laptop with photoshop I can show you my methods.

P.S. What do you think of the BG color change? I personally like it, the black was too emo for me, I felt the warmth of the new color scheme represents me a little better. Though that's not to say I won't get tired of it and change it to something else...(my better judgment stopped me from making it blaring pink, but I like you guys, so I didn't do it...not to say I won't someday...).

Post 196

BEHOLD!!! I finally got my sketchbooks from the printer! It's not set up on the online shop yet, but wow am I impressed with it. The quality came out great! 54 pages, perfect bound tpb-style with a glossy cardstock cover. Looks really professional. I'll tell you guys when they go up online, but I'll definitely have copies at Baltimore Comic Con if you're going!

Also, thanks for all the comments you guys posted on yesterday's post, I just did that Mr. Freeze pic and didn't expect any sort of response...so I'm kind of floored by all the encouragement. Thank you Luan, Jake, Craig, Skottie, and Aris!!! You guys are the reason I keep working to get better!

Post 195

Sorry it's been a week! Time flies when you're...well, when you're bored out of your skull time DOESN'T fly! Yeah, I went back to the day job last week, and I was in meetings for a week. In most jobs meetings mean tons of free time to doodle. In mine, they know when to catch you doodling and yell at you. So now that I'm past all the meetings, I'm back to drawing!

Oh, on the sketch page, there are a couple doodles by Mike Lagocki, founder of ArtLoveMagic a very cool live art group. I was letting him try some of my brushes and talking with him at the signing a couple weeks ago for Synesthetic. Mike is somebody I've run into at a bunch of cons, but after talking to him for a couple hours, I found someone who I already can call a friend.

Anyway, I'm supposedly getting my sketchbooks tomorrow, don't know when the online sales page goes up. But I'll keep you updated!

Post 194

Trying something a little different, some more spotted blacks...and I'm enjoying it. It's funny, a year ago, I hated inking, because I couldn't do it. But I committed to getting better, and I've gotten to the point where I can work on it for prolonged periods of time without ripping my hair out. It was all about getting used to the different tools, seeing which ones worked better for different styles. It's really helped with my drawing skills and depictions of volume.

Post 193

Some more sketches and stuff. The guy with the sign is this guy I keep seeing near the mall. There are these laws here where during the week people and companies can't put up signs on the side of the road, so businesses hire people to walk around with them, and if code enforcement comes by they can just walk off to the side. Normally these folks are lackluster in their presentation, but this guy is just fantastic. I don't have the courage to ask him what he's listening to, but he is just ROCKING OUT!!! He does crazy behind the back tricks, treats it like a guitar, he does tosses. He's covered in sweat because it's like nearly 100 or over every day, but he doesn't care, he's all about the presentation. He's probably late 20's, early 30's, but all about the rocking, which makes me think 80's hair metal. Either way, he's my new favorite performer. He needs to be on a show of some sort!

Post 192

Luan sent me a better poster for the signing on Saturday. Also, here are some sketches I did. Threw on a little marker and some water-brush gray tones for some flavor. Plus, I just noticed I'm getting close to post 200. Seems like not long ago I was just getting to 100. Weird how time flies.

Post 191

Okay, so, this seems a long time in the making, but we finally printed up copies (by 'we' I mean not me, but Jake and Luan). The anthology that My friends Jake and Luan put together...I need to be clear about this, they organized it, edited it, designed it, wrote, colored, drew, inked, pimped, printed, lost sleep, put in tons of money, and did anything and everything that they could do to make the best product possible. I talked with Jake about doing an anthology, and when people dropped out on me, Jake and Luan took things over and put together an amazing anthology featuring some of the great storytellers of my home base, the northern part of Texas.

First off, Synesthetic (the anthology) has a new website with some slick design.

Luan best describes the process in an interesting and concise format, and I really suggest you read it. It was stressful, but ultimately rewarding. Between the three of us, we've had a hand in nearly every page of the book. I personally have two stories in it, you can see samples of all the stories on the Synesthetic site (the link here takes you to the previews).

The great thing is that we'll be selling copies, signing, arting (as Cully says), and generally having fun (hopefully) this weekend at Titan comics in Dallas on Saturday August 16th from 12-6 pm. Then I think we're going to the Inwood to check out the late night showing of Big Lebowski.

Either way, if you're in the area, please stop by, we'd enjoy the support. It's been a long time in the works. If you can't, I'll be at Baltimore with Jake and Luan and we'll gladly sell you a copy (or two, or whatever you'd like to buy ;) .

Post 190

Yet another reference to the theatrical Orion release of Fist of the North Star...but it's influenced my art, so why not pay an homage to this material?

Yes, Rick still doesn't have his head, but he's trying to track it down. Leave you guys and gals guessing what will happen next in the follow up.

Rick started off as a random idea, and now he's getting a little too big for this format. I've always had the idea in my mind that I'd like to try different formats with him, so I'm going to pursue one and see if it works out. So don't think that this is the last you're seeing of Rick, if anything, he's got more reason to continue than anyone...I mean, he's got no head!!!

Post 189

I'll post the last one tomorrow, but I want this one to settle in!

Quick explanation, the guy flying in is Super Sam, the first comic character I did, and he is doing the same thing as the last panel. I'll find the original sometime soon, but I'm at my brother's place right now.