Where Wolf?

"There wolf!" 

Did a quick werewolf concept illustration today that still needs just a bit of fine-tuning before I consider it final.  Below are some progress images as I created the werewolf concept, from initial pencil sketch to almost final color in Photoshop.

Creating Cameos

Last summer I volunteered for what turned out to be artist Renae De Liz's most excellent Womanthology comic book project. By contributing, I hoped to gain some practical experience as a comic book artist (a long-time dream of mine), while at the same time create art for a great cause. It turned out to be so much more than that!

Cameos
One of my creative tasks for the Womanthology: Heroic project was doing cameos of a few of the Kickstarter contributors. My writing partner, Kimberly Komatsu, wrote the script to a wonderful short story called "The Aviator and the Elephant". It had multiple characters which meant I could do more than one cameo.

I ended up doing six.

In order to capture the individual look of each of the contributors, I did a variety of sketches for each subject using the photo(s) they submitted, and then did some more sketches of them in character and in costume in the same poses (or close to) for the story panels. Some of the cameos were in two panels, but most were in only one. Here are some of the preliminary panel thumbnails and sketches I did for the cameos:






After all of that, I did final pencils of each of the cameo panels along with the other panels for each page. Here those are, in no particular order and without text (FYI, there were 4 pages for the story with a total of 35 panels):






And then I scanned the final pencils, patched them together and inked/colored/painted the pages digitally in Photoshop. Here are the final color panels of the cameos (again, without text):






More about my interesting, always fun and challenging experiences, and what I learned about creating comics while working on Womanthology in a later post. :)

Eowyn and Nazgûl sketchings

Over on the ArtOrder blog, a new art challenge:
review the scene (of Eowyn fighting the Nazgul) in the book, and create your own interpretation of that scene.

I managed to pick up a copy of the LoTR trilogy at the nearby used bookstore and did a bit of re-reading of various scenes to tweak my memory last week. And during this week's storms, tornadoes and power outages, I came up with a bunch of possibilities with my little thumbnail sketches, some of which I posted below. I started with various abstract shapes to explore layouts, and then added a bit of gestural figures in the next stage of my thumbnail sketches. I've posted one of the three scenes I'm developing further at the top; I still haven't firmly decided which of my favorites to go final and color.

You can see many more entries, sketches and color versions in progress from other artists from digital to traditional over on the ArtOrder forums, here.

My intention is to do a watercolour version of the final scene I select, with some minor digital enhancements as necessary. The project is due on May 15th...

First Day

This one started out as a Friday Faces random sketch, but I really like the narrative that's going on here so I'll be taking this one further over the next few days. Exploring, painting, adding in a background maybe, adding in some extra arms... :)

The Hunter

I seem to be posting everywhere but my sketchblog lately; I'll have to remedy that.

Juggling projects as usual, but I also started up a new weekly sketch practice for myself to work on lighting, speed-painting, and other areas in my illustration artwork that I feel still "needs improvement". I'm calling it "Friday Faces" and plan on posting a new one of those images every week as I have been doing on my Facebook page.

The above image is a concept I did in Photoshop 7 last Friday. A speed-painting practice sketch (for me any detailed illustration under 20 hours is really fast as opposed to product design concepts where I might do 3-10 a day or per week depending on complexity, etc.); took about 6 hours to do including research, sketching and coloring in PS.

Lovecraft Creatures: Penguins of Leng

The above is the final concept art that I did for the latest Art Order challenge.The initial rough sketches and lineart are below. A nice break and something quite different from other projects I'm working on at the moment. :) Here's the quote from H.P. Lovecraft's "At the Mountains of Madness" that I referenced while I developed these particular penguins:

“Suddenly a bulky white shape loomed up ahead of us, and we flashed on the second torch…This white, waddling thing was fully six feet high, yet we seemed to realize at once that it was not one of those others…We were indeed clutched for an instant by primitive dread almost sharper than the worst of our reasoned fears regarding those others. Then came a flash of anticlimax as the white shape sidled into a lateral archway to our left to join two others of its kind which had summoned it in raucous tones. For it was only a penguin—albeit of a huge, unknown species larger than the greatest of the known king penguins, and monstrous in its combined albinism and virtual eyelessness.”





You can view other artists' interpretations, from student to professional, of various creatures from the stories of Lovecraft on the Art Order forums, here.