Mockingbird for Hawkingbird

Noticed the request from Hawkingbird13 a while ago and took some time last week to work this up. This is one of the last pieces inked with brush pens as I'm beginning a transition to traditional inking tools. I picked up a Series 7 brush today and am looking forward to seeing the difference it makes. I'm also trying to focus a bit more and markering my sketches, but I don't feel like I've got the right range of colors yet...

Anyways, hope you like the piece Hawkingbird!

Raph

Just can't get enough of the Turtles. Took some time last week to ink this, and I'm already itching to get another one started. I've gotta say, it's a ton of fun playing around with different character designs for the boys in their later years. Might be something I need to do with some other properties as well... suggestions?

The Warmage

Started this at the Edmonton con and then took my sweet time getting around to finishing it. For those who may not recognize this character, he's the Warmage from Robot Entertainment's Orcs Must Die!2. I'm tempted to spend some time coloring the image, but I doubt I'll get around to it with the original. Maybe as a digital warm up some day...

Silver Surfer

I posted a copy of this a while ago, thinking it was done, but it's been nagging at me the last few weeks and so I finally snatched a bit of time to go back into it. I'm been trying to juggle my time between developing new prints for the coming year, building a small collection of originals, and of course bettering myself in general so it took a while until I was able to fit it in. 

Red Cape Kid part 2

Another piece that I've had stashed away for many months now. If I recall correctly I jammed this out in an afternoon, and was pretty happy with the progress I made. Of course it's far from done, but this was a vital step in my growth over this last year, and it's something I'll be coming back to ASAP. I plan to submit the finished piece for the Calgary Comic & Entertainment Expo art book this year, and the due date is the end of Feb, so I expect it will pop up a couple times between now and then as I work my way through it.

Batman

I've been trying to vary things a bit lately, focusing on design/composition first and color second instead of my usual, dynamic figures and linework. I'm really enjoying putting together these quick color comps, and I feel like it's giving me a chance to stretch and grow as an artist. I'll always love dynamic figures, but they can become distracting to the point of overshadowing the rest of a piece if you're not careful to control them. With these most recent pieces I've been allowing myself to experiment a bit with different brushes, and since I'm just playing around I don't mind if things come out a bit messy. Soon I'll have to break down and start rendering things, but for now I'm going to revel in the opportunity to just churn out ideas. I'm pretty sure future me won't mind handling things later on...

WW

Really enjoying the fact that I'm allowing myself to post totally unfinished work up here, so here's some more. Came up with the composition for this piece many months ago (I'm starting to realize how many pieces I have sitting on my desktop from 2012, and I'm a little embarrassed that I didn't get more of them done) and had a terrible color rough done from about the same time. Hated the rough though, and so I went back in with some black lines and worked my way up to a state where I was happy moving back into color. Now that I've spent a bit of time with it, I'm willing to go so far as to say it looks damn cool. Wonder Woman's shoulder looks like it belongs on Arnold Schwarzenegger, but other than that I think it's coming along just fine.

Oh, and have no fear, I won't leave her looking like an Austrian body builder...

Trinity

I try to spend some time looking around the net every day for inspiration and reference. Sometimes I find some cool stuff, sometimes I find a lot of junk. Every now and then I find something that inspires me to such a degree that a new piece springs to mind and I am forced to take the time to throw down some scribbles to get it out of my head.

That's what happened down below. The image above is the result of an hour or two of testing out colors and refining line work after getting that momentary flash. I'll of course keep you posted as it develops, but I'm hoping it'll end up as a piece that travels with me to the various expo's that I attend this year.

There's a Storm coming...

My darling wife put in a request for a "proper" Storm quite a while ago, and while I did take some time to do a redesign, I haven't done a piece that makes the character recognizable. I'm endeavoring to change that now, and so far I'm pretty happy with the results.

I started with this environment study, but soon realized I didn't have an idea as to where Storm would go,  so I scrapped it and moved on to...

 A composition that puts the figure front and center. 

I'll be coming back to her a lot in the next few days/weeks as I think there's a lot of potential here. 

Back in Black

I haven't been looking at my black background pieces much lately as I was starting to worry that they were becoming a bit of a crutch. That said, I had this urge to do up a Cyclops piece (he happens to be on the Req-a-sketch list) and after some doodling in my sketchbook I brought it up on my comp and started to push the color. After a little while I sat back and realized that what I had done was pretty much a black back piece, only it didn't have the right dimensions (the tall/skinny frame was part of the challenge for the black backs).

I might go back in at some point to see if I can crop it to match the rest of the set, but for now I think I'm done with it. 

EPS #3

Hey all, did another EPS portrait up a little while ago and just got confirmation that the client has received it (I don't like to post things here until I know the client has had a chance to enjoy it first).

Also, I've got a ton of WIP sitting around and I'd like to see what I can do to share it. I'm going to experiment with scheduling posts ahead of time, to see if I can put together 3 or 4 posts at the beginning of a week and then have it drop without my having to come back to post it. I tend to horde work during these big breaks and posting it all at once seems silly as I'm worried that whatever I post first will end up off page, and thus ignored, so I'm hoping this scheduling thing will help to alleviate that issue while still allowing me to throw down a lot of content all at once.