Weekly Inspiration 4: Nature

 Taking a side step from art, this weekend I went on a scouting/camping trip. Not scouting like boy scouts, but scouting for game for the upcoming archery hunt. It's so nice to get away from the cities and go back to our roots. When I go camping, I go as high and far away from other people as possible. I take only what I need, and leave no sign I was there.

Filling up my water bottle from a natural spring

  Nature and the wilderness inspire me more than anything else. If you climb high enough, you can find pure beauty that has yet to be ruined by mankind. It's kind of sad to be ashamed of ones' own species... but that's how I feel. When I find an old beer can or a candy wrapper while stalking along a game trail I think I could maim the litterbug without any remorse. How could someone defile such beauty when it's so easy to put your trash in your pocket and take it home with you?
  I'm an outdoorsman. A naturalist. I don't understand why we as a species have separated ourselves from nature. Why do so many people feel it's our destiny to build cities and towns on every square foot of earth? Why do we feel we need to dominate and control other animals instead of live life beside them? We are, after all, just another species.
  It is not man's role to overcome nature, but to live in harmony with it, just as every other species does.

Obligatory Update

Not much has happened since my last post. Lots of work and lots of drawing. Today I hung out with my beautiful girlfriend, Emmalee and her friends as she worked on cutting the script for Hamlet. She'll be directing a high school performance of  it this fall. Gonna be sweet! Anywho, I dragged my sketch book along and got some gesture drawing done while she wasn't paying attention.

Each drawing was about 30 seconds.

  Also, I finally got page 1 of Avalir penciled, inked, and colored yesterday. I still need to letter it, but I feel I made some definite progress. I'm planning on having at least 10 pages finished before I start uploading them weekly to the site I set up. 

  So... yea.

Comic Cover Recreation

When I woke up this morning, I had an idea that I didn't think would take all day, but it most certainly did. I picked out a cool cover from my Daredevil collection to redraw myself. I wanted to practice composition, posing, shading & inking, and color, so I figured a good way to do that would be to copy a pro, and hopefully absorb some knowledge from it. I chose issue 155:

I started out drawing in blue pencil, so the scanner wouldn't pick up the construction lines when scanned in black and white. This took about 2 hours.

Then about 2 hours of inking...

I immediately noticed that, despite scanning at 600 dpi, the scanned image looks much choppier than my drawing on the paper. Damned computers. Next, 3 or 4 hours of coloring in photoshop. Then about 1 hour to cut and paste the title bar and other word effects. TaDa!!!

Not too bad... if you don't look at Beast or Hercules' faces. I wasn't aiming for it to look identical to the original, so long as I got some practice with the inking, coloring, etc.

There ya go, an effective way to spend a day... my butt's a bit sore, though...

Hulk...

I slowly started to hate this one as I was drawing it. Feels kinda flat, and shading kicks my butt sometimes. Oh well, here it is.

Here Comes.... Daredevil! Man Without Fear!

Good hell, I love Daredevil.
drawn and colored with india ink pens, colored pencil, and a big, fat sharpie.

Poor R2...

  I watched A New Hope and my personal favorite, Empire Strikes Back, this weekend. No time to watch Return of the Jedi, but I'm not missing much. I'm happier without watching Ewoks and mediocre acting. Here's a doodle inspired by one of Luke's oh-so-cheesy lines from A New Hope. 

Spidey

Hopefully the movie kicks as much ass as the trailers. Though it was made by Sony, I still have hope.

Weekly Inspiration 3: Northlanders

  Violent. Gritty. Gory. Yet somehow soft and personal. I love Northlanders. It's a series that chronicles adventures of Vikings, and their unfortunate victims, throughout Europe circa 1000A.D. 

  How does it inspire me, besides just being a beautiful series of comics? The use of blacks. Not making a racial statement here, I'm talking about the inks. I've heard my hero, Ralph Bakshi, say that black is the most important color for a cartoonist, and I took note. But Northlanders really made me see it.  Huge blots of black ink make up a lot of the pages in these books, and it's funny that your mind doesn't find it odd. Black just works. It tells your eye, "This is a dark area," and your mind just fills in the blanks. Definitely gonna look back on these while doing Avalir.

Colors!

  Thinking about all of the work I have yet to do on Avalir, I realized I only had a slight idea of how I was going to color it. I scanned in a recent drawing to play around with it in photoshop. 

I isolated the linework onto a single layer, and filled in flat colors underneath it.

I'm really happy with this look. Early on I planned on coloring Avalir like this, with the inks handling the shading and simple, flat colors to give it the look of old comics. But I kept fiddling and added slight shading with color.

I do think this looks better. More rendered and finished. I guess we'll just see when the time comes to color Avalir. The flat color/inks method still looks great, and is MUCH faster, but I might throw a bit of colored shading into it if another hour shows up in the day.

  Overall I've grown to like this little doodle. It was nice to break out of my comfort zone and play with colors. Thanks for reading.