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.