Challengers ASSEMBLE ! Week 4 - Panel Re-Creation - Process

So last weeks theme on the sketch blog was panel recreation. We had to choose a panel (or panels, in my case) from a comic we read the previous week and re-create/reinterpret it. I happened to be reading NORTHLANDERS Vol 1 - Sven the Returned, by one of my favorite writers, Brian Wood, and amazing artist Davide Gianfelice. The particular page I chose was from issue #6, page 5. I decided to this blog post to show my process from beginning to end of the piece. Here goes :


PREPARATION

 I start by by getting my workspace (aka coffee table) and materials together. I have my source material, a sheet of 8.5x11 Strathmore smooth bristol, my pen/pencil case loaded with numerous weapons, a small plastic t-square, circle templates, and of course way too much caffeine.

The first thing I do on the board is take my t-square and rule out my working area with a 2mm pencil. For this particular piece I'm doing basically a comic page, so at this point I also rule out my panel borders. Since I'm doing some hand lettering as well, I also use my circle templates to place word balloons so I know where I have to work around them.


PENCILS

After everything is ruled out and set to go, I go directly into penciling. I typically use 2 pencils for this process, .7mm and .4mm Pentel Graphlet drafting pencils. I really like the grip and the sturdy feel of these pencils, and they're small enough to give me good, tight lines. For a lot of the pieces I've been doing recently, I basically do a pretty rough sketch and then add most of the detail in the inking process. For this piece however, there is quite a bit of detail involved, so I decided to do tighter pencils to help avoid mistakes when inking. Here's a few detailed shots of the penciling process :

And here's how the full page looks after the penciling is complete :

LETTERING

One thing is for sure, lettering is not my thing. My handwriting is not the worst in the world, but it's pretty dreadful. Anyway, I just used a small ruler to measure everything out, and then the .4mm pencil the write in the words. The only thing I'm unhappy with in this piece is the lettering.


INKING

The first thing I do in the inking process is ink the page & panels borders, and also the word balloons and dialog boxes. For this I used a .5mm Copic Multiliner SP. I love these pens, and I'll use them a lot for fine and technical lines in a lot of my work. I also used these to ink the lettering on the page.

After that, it's in to inking the body of the piece. In this case, I worked from panel to panel, left to right & top to bottom. My favorite tool for inking is the Pentel Pocket Brush Pen.  I love this thing. It makes great lines, the brush tip never loses shape, and best of all it's refillable ! I also use various sizes of Kuretake disposbale brush pens when i want to work in some smaller detail. All of these are filled with permanent, archival quality india ink.



I usually start each panel by outlining all the black areas that need to be filled in :

And then add some detail :

And then fill in all my black shaded areas :

When all the ink is on the page, I go over the entire page with a white rubber eraser to eliminate all traces of the penciling that I worked so freaking hard on :( Then, at last we have our :


FINAL PIECE

I'm really happy with the way this turned out. I really enjoy this series, and I wanted to make sure I did Gianfelice's art justice. In my eyes, I was able to pull that off.



Make sure you head over to Challengers ASSEMBLE! to check out all the great artwork that's been posted there so far. I've really enjoyed doing this for the first month so far. It's helping me be more creative with my art, and I've been able to draw things that I wouldn't necessarily do on my own. This weeks theme is Image Comics, and the new art will be posted on Friday. For my piece I've chosen my favorite Image series of all time, which is...... a surprise ! Well, until tomorrow anyway.

I hoped you enjoyed this look into my process. If you have any questions, comments, critiques or suggestions please feel free to leave them in the comments section below this post,

Thanks for reading !

Challengers ASSEMBLE ! - Week 3 - Spiderman & Daredevil

Hello again, everyone ! Here's yet another piece I did for the Challengers ASSEMBLE !  sketch blog. The theme for week 3 was Spiderman & Daredevil. Not one or the other, but both ! Kinda had to rush this one in at the last minute because my son & I were sick all last week, but I'm still pretty happy with the way this came out. I decided to use the "noir" versions of the characters because I thought it would fit my style better, and I figured everyone else would be doing the traditional versions anyway. Also, I threw the Punisher logo in the background because he's also involved in the current Marvel crossover event with Spdidey & DD, and it just added a little extra to what would have been a blank background.

Sooooo, the next theme for the blog is panel re-creation. We have to choose a scene from a comic we've read recently and re-create/reinterpret it. I've already finished my piece, and it was a ton of fun ! It will be posted on CA tomorrow, and next week I'm going to post it here along with a full process of how i did it ! So if you're into that kind of thing, keep an eye out for the post next week.

Thanks for reading !
Ray


"THE OMEGA EFFECT: NOIR"
8x5x11 brush pen & Copic sketch marker on Strathmore smooth bristol

THE KING III - final

Hello again,

You might have noticed I played a round with the titles of a couple posts here. The last post I did was originally THE KING III, but since it wasn't technically a finished piece (and i wasn't happy with it anyway), I decided to just call it something else.

Anyhow, here is the "THE KING III". I did a rough of this in my sketchbook the other day, and was really pleased with the look of it. So I decided to do a full piece for it. It's a little different look for my guy here. I've been toying with some story ideas for this fella for a while, and the more I draw him, the more the story seems to evolve.

I'm actually thinking about doing some art prints of some of these pieces. If that's something anyone would be interested in, please let me know in the comment section below this post so I can get a gauge on the level of interest.

As always, thanks for reading !



THE KING III
9x12, brush & ink on Strathmore smooth bristol

THE KING sketch

Hi, everyone ! Here's a quick piece I did yesterday. Not exactly thrilled with the way it came out, but I promised myself that I would post some failures as well as successes here. Anyway, I had an idea for this piece and for some reason I just couldn't execute what I wanted to do with it. So I ended up just rushing through it, and that usually doesn't end well. There's just a lot wrong with this. Maybe I'll use this as a reference and make a second attempt at this one somewhere down the line. Even though it looks bad, it felt good just to sit down and draw something after not having done it in a few weeks.

Thanks for reading !

FRANKENSTEIN FRIDAY !

Hey, did you guys know that the last Friday before Halloween every year is Frankenstein Friday ? Yeah, I didn't either until today. Anyway, just did a quick 5 minute sketch on my lunch break to celebrate the occasion. Enjoy !

ZOMBIE !

Here's a quick zombie sketch I threw together this morning. Certainly seems appropriate for the season ! This is about a 20 minute sketch done with brush pen & multiliner on 9x12 Bristol board. Hope you guys like it, and feel free to leave comments below. I'm always open to suggestions for subject matter, so if there's something you want to see, let me know !

Thanks for reading !

INKING MODOK - FINAL

Here's the final inks for Kasra Ghanbari's MODOK commission by David Finch. This was probably about 6-7 hours of work altogether, about 30 minutes to an hour at a time. The paper I had it printed on was not the best quality, so I had to go over most of it twice. I used a Pentel Pocket Brush Pen for most of the piece. I used Copic Multiliners for all of the straight technical lines, and just a regular paint brush & ink to fill in the crazy bubbles. It's by no means perfect, but I still like the way it ended up. I really enjoyed doing this piece ! Hope you all enjoy it (especially you, Kasra) !

100 BULLETS - AGENT GRAVES

 

I've been reading 100 Bullets by Brian Azzarello & Eduardo Risso lately. It's an amazing crime story from Vertigo Comics. This is Agent Graves, the main character behind the scenes of the multiple stories going on in the series. Just another quick sketch I threw together.

Also, the guys over at THE SINDIECATE are doing a 100 bullets theme this week. Go check out the amazing art of Ryan Ottley, Mike Choi, David Lafuente and other amazing comic artists !

Thanks for reading !

 

SATURDAY SKETCHING

Hello everyone ! Just sitting around relaxing and I threw a quick sketch together, so I thought I would post it.

INKING M.O.D.O.K.

And once again I've been MIA from the blog for a couple of weeks. Very sorry for that, just been very busy !

Anyway, last week Kasra Ghanbari, a fellow Chicagoan and the co-creator of the highly anticipated comic MONOCYTE, posted this M.O.D.O.K. piece by superstar artist David Finch on twitter :

Now, Kasra is apparently the worlds biggest M.O.D.O.K. fan, and he owns this piece along with several other amazing comissions of the character . In his tweet, he asked if anybody would be up to the task of inking this monster. I don't know if he was serious or not, but I figured I'd give it a shot. He e-mailed me some high quality scans, I had a couple copies printed out and I've been working on it little by little ever since.

Here's what I have so far :

This thing is a monster. This is probably a total of 2-3 hours of work and I've barely made a dent in it. But I'm enjoying it. I think you can learn a lot as an artist by doing things like this. I'm going to work on it and post some updates here (along with more original art as well ).

By the way, Monocyte #1, by Kasra and the amazing artist menton3 comes out next week ! I've been really excited for this book to come out, as it looks absolutely amazing ! If you haven't heard of it, you can check out a 12 page preview here and an free 8 page digital prequel here ! Check out the links and make sure to go buy issue #1 when it hits stores !

Thanks again for reading !

TONIGHT WE DINE IN HELL !!!!!!!

300 was on TV last night so I decided to watch it for probably the 50th time. It's one of those things where if it's on, I feel obligated to watch it and then I can't turn it off. Ironically my wife Liz and I were just talking about the movie the night before, so it felt like kind of an omen. It's one of my all-time favorite movies. 300 is probably the most visually stunning film I've ever seen ! Obviously the action and fight scenes are legendary, but it's the look and feel of the whole thing that really gets to me. The colors, backgrounds and landscapes are just so perfect. I was so glad to see that they took so much influence from the look of Frank Miller's tremendous comic book.

Anyway, I decided to do a piece featuring Gerard Butler as the great Spartan King, Leonidas. In my opinion, he's one of the most bad-ass and perfectly cast characters in movie history. I referenced a screenshot from the movie I found online. I wanted to make it look realistic and recognizable, but also stay true to my "style". Not too much detail, and using lots of big black areas to form the image. I think I accomplished that pretty well here. I might do a few more movie characters down the line, because I really enjoyed doing this !

Thanks for reading !

King Leonidas, 9x12  Pentel Brush Pen & Copic Multiliners on Bristol

THE KING II - Finished

Sooooooooo, as you can see above, this piece took an unexpected turn ! About this time last night, I was ready to tear this thing up, throw it in the garbage and start all over again. I'm glad I didn't.

I started off with a basic pencil sketch of my central figure here, The King :

I was honestly really happy with the way it looked, so I went ahead and gave him some ink :

So far, so good, right ? At this point, my intention was to make this a grayscale watercolor painting. So I got out my painting supplies, started applying some gray wash and proceeded to butcher the entire thing. I don't know what happened, it just did not look anything like it should have (sorry, no pic). I nearly ripped it up, but instead I kept it to use as a reference because I planned on starting over from scratch.


Fast forward to today. I put my son down for a nap and decided to revisit the devastation. I was just about ready to start over when I decided to do a little experiment. I just started penciling in some skulls in the background. I drew in 5 or 6 of them, then grabbed my brush pen and started adding some ink. Apparently I was on to something. 81 skulls later, we have the finished product. I added a few highlights at the end with a white gel pen. The gray wash I had originally put down actually worked perfect as a contrast between the skulls and the central figure.

I can honestly say that this is the most rewarding piece I've done in years. Not because I think it looks great, but because I was able to persevere through failure and make something out of nothing. I hope you all enjoy looking at it as much as I did making it !

Thanks for reading !!!

THE KING II - Pencils

That's right kids, 2 posts in one day. A new record !!! Anyway, here are the final pencils for a new piece that I'm working on. It's actually a sequel to The King watercolor painting I did a few posts ago. I'm going to be inking and painting this, and I have some interesting things planned for this character down the line. Thanks again for reading !

SUPERMAN

I know, it's been a while. Unfortunately I've been going through a pretty bad case of artists block. Been struggling a bit to find motivation and inspiration to get anything done. Well today I found some. I read an article today about a mentally disabled man in St Louis who recently had a large portion of his Superman collection stolen from him in a pretty heinous way. Apparently the authorities are attempting to get what they can back to him, but there are people out there who want to help him if they can't.

So I decided to do an original piece of art to send the guy so he can add it to his collection or help start a new one. Check out this blog post on Comics Should Be Good at CBR to find out more about the story and for information on how you can help if you'd like to !

I'm hoping this will get me going in the right direction creatively. While this isn't my best work by a long shot, it felt good just to get something out after a couple weeks. Hopefully have more frequent posts in the future here. Thanks for reading, and if you can, help out Mike !

THE KING

If you follow me (or the #comics hashtag) on twitter, you may have noticed i posted some work in progress shots of this piece. Well here is the finished product ! I have never been much of a painter, but as I've said before I'm trying to teach myself some new things and not keep myself confined to traditional pencil on paper illustration. This piece was done with watercolor (mixed Bombay India Inks with water) on 9x12 watercolor paper.
To be honest, I had no idea what the hell I was doing. I just decided to start painting, and I kept on painting and this is what I ended up with. The figure in the image is something that's been in my head for a while now. But as far as executing the painting process, I really just let it flow. I like the way it came out ! There are certain aspects of painting that I'll need to work on a bit, but I really enjoyed doing this piece.
Thanks again for reading !

Experimenting

 Well I've decided to take a break from drawing other peoples creations for a while. It's time for me to get creative and just come up with things on my own. The 2 pieces above are the result of experimenting with some new materials and techniques. Both were drawn with my new Pentel Pocket Brush Pen (which I love so far) on 9x12 watercolor paper. I also added a little inkwash to these for some background and shading. I'm gonna be trying some more new things here. Using different types and colors of India ink and different methods of applying them. I'm enjoying playing with these new toys right now, and I feel like it's starting to lead me in a good direction creatively. Still trying to define myself a little more stylistically, but I feel like I'm getting closer. Thanks for reading !