Even more Venom?

I hope you fine folks out there aren't getting bored of all the Venom pics, cuz it's time for another one!

Haven't had much chance to get to anything else this week (vacation coming up, and spent an unfortunate time working my other job) so it's more Venom for you today. I'm really loving the changes that have occurred in the last couple weeks, and I feel like the piece is starting to take on a life of its own. I've been trying to avoid cutting corners, and I've done a bit of reading on the ConceptArt.Org forums regarding digital painting, and the way colors work together. I'm far from mastering it, but I think I've come a long way.

Highlights this week are the carapace on his back, and the changes made to the arms. Hope you guys dig it!

Next up I'm going to be tackling the tail, and maybe tweaking the teeth a bit. After that I might actually call it finished!


Along with the Venom piece, I've been roughing out ideas for a Black Cat print. I'm thinking it would be prudent to have at least one print with a female character, and since I'm already working with the Spider-man mythos, I opted to continue in that vein.

Here're some quickies...

Time Traveling Tuesdays!

I posted my very old design attempt at Orcs last week, so I thought I'd follow it up with a series of comic pages in which said orcs appear.

There's six pages (of a planned 8) but I'll break them down into 2 page chunks so that I don't blow through all my work in the next few weeks. Apologies for the quality of the scans, I don't have an 11x17 scanner (yet) and these pages are over a decade old...

Quick tip for those who don't know: pencillers will often use mark a series of x's into a space they intend to be filled with black.

Gotta say, it's kinda painful to look at these now so I'll try to do a quick summary of the story, but I don't want to spend too much time on 'em.

I was looking to create an adventure story, and these first pages were supposed to kick off the grand quest. It starts off with a young man exploring an underground cavern, in the hopes of finding some treasure. He drops down into a room full of gold and trinkets, and picks up a gauntlet with a huge gem on it.

The drawings themselves are kind of fun from time to time, but man oh man is the storytelling bad. I think I'll go through and do a crit of these and some of my other pages at a later date, maybe make that an every Thursday thing.

Ugh, Mondays

In the midst of a stretch of shifts, and I haven't had a lot of time to get drawing. On top of that, my main email address seems to be under fire, and I just spent an hour trying to get it back from whoever hacked it this time.

That said, I've got a couple rough sketches for today. First up is another attempt at the design of Valor. I've got the basics figured out, but the details of waistline and upper legs are giving me a headache. I don't want it to be all one piece, but I don't want it to look like he's wearing a diaper either...

Next up is Vengeance. He's a major player in the story I'm looking to tell, so I won't dive into details. You'll probably be seeing a lot more of him in the coming months though, as I really want to have his and Valors designs as finished as I can get them.

Weekly Warm-ups

Trying to get a few different weekly "events" organized for the site, so that I have a bit of routine to rely on when looking through my art to see what I should share with everyone.

I'm thinking Fridays will be the day that I recap the week's progress, as well as post a few of my favorite warm-up sketches.

First off the warm-ups.

I don't have a lot to say about these beyond the fact that Art Adams is effing awesome. Well, that, and I was having some fun with the pencil tool in photoshop, and working on some serious contour lines.

And now the recap.

I've stripped Thor back down to just inks, and am trying to get them finished up ASAP. So far I'm liking where it's going, though I'm noticing that without the hair blowing the whole piece loses a ton of its energy. Guess I'll have to make a point of getting that back in there soon.

The working title for this one is Fighting Time, which I really don't like. Unfortunately if you fill your directories with Untitled#1, Untitled#2, Untitled#3, etc etc, you spend a large chunk of your day trying to find the piece you want to work on, instead of actually working on it. So it got a name, and if you fine folks out there have suggestions, please shout 'em out. My goal here is to match it up with the banner logo at the top of the site here, but it's kind of a pain. Not only did I do the banner at 72 dpi, which is totally unprintable (it'll come out a jaggy pixelated mess) but I also did it in dimensions that no printer is going to want to work with. So I'm stuck trying to rebuild the composition while at the same time hoping to keep the vibe that the banner has. Wish me luck... Oh, and I'm thinking I'd like to put a quote on the right hand side, something that involves mans constant battle with time, but I haven't been able to find one yet. Suggestions are welcomed.

Finally we've got Venom. I think it's coming along quite nicely. It's a got a crap ton of work to go, sure, but it's looking pretty bad ass as it is, and if I can carry the style throughout the piece I'll be very happy with it. This one's just going through the detail work, so it might be tough to spot the changes from last time. One thing I'm a little uncertain of is the anatomy of the front most forearm. Once I get wrapped up here I'll take it to CA for a review before calling it officially done, but if anyone can explain/redline the issue and the proper way to deal with it I'd greatly appreciate it.


And that's it for this week folks. G'night.

It was Wednesday today? Oops...

Was about to head to bed when I realized what day it was. Sorry about that folks, guess I should pay more attention if I'm going to claim to have any kind of regular schedule here.

I spent most of today working on Venom, and I think it's coming along quite nicely. Not a lot to say about it though... If you see any glaring errors, or have some brilliant suggestions, feel free to send 'em my way. Feedback is always appreciated.

Did some sketching last night, trying to work out a villain for Valor. I wanted something with a power/threat level similar to the Hulk, but wasn't interested in yet another really big, strong, tough guy. So I started working on a telekinetic. Think Tetsuo from Akira as a super villain instead of a misunderstood kid. Dunno if it'll stick around, I think I'd rather more of a costume and less "normal" clothing, but I might keep the cape as a bit of an homage.

Time Travel!

Turns out I have a time travel device in my studio! I call it, "the drawer" and kept safe within it is a good chunk of my creative past.

I was rooting around in there today, trying to find some notes I had scribbled down back in high school, and I thought it might be fun to share some of the old work.

First up is Orcs! Way back when I was trying to develop a fantasy world and it seemed like orcs were a necessity. I had been reading Scion at the time, and was loving Jim Cheung's artwork, so that influenced the style quite a bit. Concept wise I was looking for a race of Incredible Hulk type creatures. Massive warriors who had perfected the art of war over centuries of infighting. They pop up here and there in other pieces I found in the drawer, so I guess I liked the idea.

More Venom

Posted my Venom and Green Goblin pics on the Conceptart.org boards, and some decent feedback. So now it's back to the drawing board!

Sadly I haven't made much in the way of "progress", so I'll toss in a color rough of my Thor piece too.

Thor

First off, apologies for missing the wednesday update. I was planning on posting last night, but unfortunately blogger had other plans for me. All seems to be well now though, so I'll put this up ASAP.

Checked out the new Thor movie last night, and I've gotta say I didn't love it. I think the story was weak, the art direction was headed somewhere I really didn't want to go, and the casting was just... off. All in all not my favorite marvel outing by far. That said, I've been looking forward to it for a while now, and was kind of hoping it'd be a killer movie. And with Thor on the brain comes Thor in the sketch book.

Started inking this sucker after I went through and did a first pass of colors. I'm really not feeling comfortable with the whole digital painting experience yet, so I scrapped the colors and started inking.

Here's a WIP (work in progress) shot to tide you over. The plan is to have this on my table at the con, so if you've got some suggestions please don't hesitate to mention them.

Valor

Spent a large chunk of the last couple weeks looking at an old character of mine. The basic jist is a magical version of Tony Stark. In the coming weeks I'll try to post a redesign of Valor, or maybe some of his villains, over the next couple of weeks, but I'm pretty distracted these days with Expo stuff.

Anyways, here's a quick sketch I inked up of Valor.

The Green Goblin is back!

Scouring my past works to find images I'm comfortable using as prints and I came across this. Spent a surprising number of hours cleaning it up, but I'm pretty happy with the results. After a couple days of pouring over it I'm taking a break, but I'll likely stop back in just before the con to look at it with fresh eyes and decide if I need to tweak further.

Any suggestions/feedback would be greatly appreciated, as I want to make sure the con pieces are the best they can be.

Calgary Entertainment Expo Here I Come!!

Received an email a few days ago, and it turns out I've managed to wrangle myself a table at the Calgary Comic & Entertainment Expo.

I'm pretty excited (obviously), but rather nervous at the same time. I've got just over a month to pull together a full tables worth of merchandise, not to mention signage and business cards and the like. On top of that, I don't want to be handing out stuff with a link to an old ratty blog, so I've been trying to spiff things up here as well. Most notably, I'm dedicating myself to a 3 day a week update schedule.

What this translates into is a crap ton of work for me, and hopefully, some great new (and recently reworked) art appearing on the site. I've got some exciting plans for future content, but for now I'll start with what I've been working on this week...


First up is Venom. I didn't want to make any changes to the figure, but I felt that the pastel blue background wasn't serving the image very well. I'm not one hundred percent convinced that this is the way it'll look when I go to print, but for now I'm pleased with it.

Check it out and tell me what you think.