Following up on a pair of posts (pt. 1 and pt.2) from last month, here are my 4-pages-at-a-time thumbnails for the first half of issue #2 of last year's Empowered and Sistah Spooky's High School Hell, a six-part miniseries written by me, drawn by Carla Speed McNeil, and colored by Jenn Manley Lee. More inf...
2019-06-10 18:33:41 +0000 UTC View Post
Was leaning towards a weekday-based posting schedule for this Patreon, but maybe not, as I just spent the last hour or so this morning messing around with the Procreate iOS app. In my ongoing attempt to familiarize myself with working digitally, used the marker-like “medium hard airbrush” to crank out a sketch based on an Instagram cosplayer’s fantasy outfit, as screencapped below:
2019-06-08 14:01:37 +0000 UTC
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Once again, almost forgot this week's life drawing post, plus high-res raw scan of the original pencils! This time, here's a recent sketch set, featuring a model whose, ah, prominent behind seemed entirely Emp-relevant.
Gotta say, I'm thinking of trying something different with the ol' life drawing over the next month or two. I might try to kill not two but three birds with one stone by cranking out A) character-design sketches base...
2019-06-07 22:00:30 +0000 UTC View Post
Behold, a 6-page preview from early on in the upcoming Empowered vol.11, as poor Emp tangles with civilian drivers being "puppeted" by a powerful (and also deranged) telepath. For the record, the following images are my "work-in-progress jpegs" for the pages; the final, printed version of the book will appear much bolder, crisper, and cleaner than these rather was...
2019-06-06 18:23:04 +0000 UTC View Post
So, yeah: Behold, dear Patrons, my very first completed page from Empowered vol.12, the next installment in the series after this fall's upcoming vol.11! No worries about spoilers, either, as this opening sequence (from a story I'd estimate to be roughly halfway through vol.12) is, in fact, a flashback to a brief scene in the old one-shot Empowered: Th...
2019-06-05 13:39:49 +0000 UTC View Post
From last weekend's Phoenix Fan Fusion, a sketch-cover commission. I rarely draw seriously cartoony figures like this, so I found the pic to be a fun change of pace.
Howeva, as I had time to kill, I went ahead and drew on the back of the sketch cover:
As I'm presently tinkering with digital-art tests involving a character who's a fair bit bustier than I usually draw (aka
More Empowered story notes from very early on in the series. And now, some quick annotations.
Left-hand column:
*The karaoke bit appeared quite directly in vol. 3, save that I had to swap out "Girls and Boys" for a sing that wouldn't need quoted lyrics (and, hence, legal approval).
*The "voice-mail affirmation" bit refers to the long-ago occasion that I did cover artwork for a CD, and received a very kind voicemail about ...
2019-06-03 13:12:50 +0000 UTC View Post
Whoops, almost forgot this week's life-drawing set, thanks to last weekend's convention action! Here, we're jumping back to the earliest days of my photoref-sketching kick, all the way back in December 2016. Note, at upper right, the rare attempt at rendering some clothing. As the caption attests, this was not a fun experience or my drawing hand, so I steered clear of such matters in sets to come.
Attached is the same jpeg as an upload (note the unwise date numbe...
2019-06-01 17:53:42 +0000 UTC View Post
Kinda cheating with this post, as I was gonna draw some Alita for a monthly art request (from the $5 & $10-tier big spenders), but have run outta time before the end of the month.
So, instead, here are a pair of my better Alita (or Gally) con sketches of recent years, dating back to TCAF 2015.
I've actually drawn her quite often for con sketches over the years. Down the ro...
2019-05-31 16:12:37 +0000 UTC View Post
Wellp, I'm running out of days in May to still post a mermaid piece for #MerMay (or however you wanna capitalize the hashtag), so from deep in the Dirty Pair archives, here's a not-very-good con sketch of "Leather Mermaid" Yuri. To clarify, I'm saying that the B&W line art I sketched for the illo isn't very good; the colors provided by my buddy Ryan Kinnaird, however, are quite decent.
2019-05-30 15:55:51 +0000 UTC View Post
A week or so ago, I solicited your ideas for an art-request subject, at least one of which nominated Velma from Scooby Doo. As I’ve (shockingly) never drawn her before, I decided to use her for a test of brushes in the art app Procreate.
See, the rival app MediBang Paint has an oddly misnamed “pencil” brush that I love sketching roughs with, but I hadn’t found an analogue in Procreate—until, that is, a trio of digital-savvy young artists drop...
2019-05-29 15:17:05 +0000 UTC View Post
Am flying back from Phoenix Fan Fusion today, so about all I can do for a Patreon post is pull images of my phone's camera roll. Above is a con sketch from yesterday in which I got in a li’l life drawing by using photoreference—if steeply up-angled, lens-distorted, and notably busty photoref—for an Empowered illo. (Vaguely startling to see Emp without her hair at least partially obscuring her chest, as it usually does. Yikes!)
For a bonus, below is the actual photo I was reffing f...
2019-05-28 20:20:08 +0000 UTC View Post
From the Phoenix Fan Fusion show, here's a con sketch based on an interesting suggestion, of Ninjette from EMPOWERED cosplaying as Marvel's Silk.
I did an initial rough that was quite small yet seemingly viable, but I couldn't translate the wee thumbnail's pose to the sketch's full 11" X 14" size:
And here's a work-in-progress shot of the pose I wound up using:
2019-05-24 06:05:33 +0000 UTC
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Not much time for a post today as I do con prep for Phoenix FanFusion (May 23-26), but here's a con sketch from, I think, Toronto FanExpo 2013. This genderswapped illo of Marvel's Iron Fist is one of very few such pieces based on pjotoreference—in this case, a photo I took of a cosplayer at the same show, as seen below.
Not sure if I'll be able to post much to the Patreon while I'm traveling,...
2019-05-21 17:49:18 +0000 UTC View PostAs a monthly feature, I'll be opening the floor to all you fine Patrons and soliciting your ideas for a subject or character to tackle for a Patreon-exclusive piece of artwork. (Well, at least initially Patreon-exclusive, as I might someday post the theoretical illo elsewhere, down the road.) I did a preliminary version of this "bonus art" concept for April, back when I did not yet have any Patrons.<...
2019-05-20 18:04:24 +0000 UTC View Post
Fresh off the ol' drawing board, here's today's set of life drawings from random photoreference, plus this week's high-res scan of the original piece, this time at an easier-to-upload 300dpi. Patreon's uploading format and my crappy, flaky-ass DSL don't play well together, so I've had quite a bit of trouble posting the 600dpi raw scans; hope this slightly lower-res PSD still works for y'all.
I'm sporadically working on a kinda-sorta side project featuring a female character who's, ah, r...
2019-05-20 15:43:51 +0000 UTC View Post
Will be doing an illo of Yuhkito Kishiro’s ALITA—or Gally from GUNMM, if you prefer—shortly, so I thought I’d do some tests of the various brushes available in the art app MediBang Paint (iOS version) based on faces from the manga. I really do enjoy the oddly misnamed “pencil” brush, and have been cranking out a whole bunch of comic roughs using it. As I plan to do a lot more digital experimentation in the months to come, I’ll probably post a bunch of that stuff here—well, unl...
2019-05-19 18:50:40 +0000 UTC View Post
A decent if not terribly dynamic B&W con sketch of Alita—or Gally, if you prefer—from 2014, which was just before I switched over to the two-color commission format. In fact, I've drawn her fairly often for con sketches over the last decade or two; I'll post more of 'em in the future, never fear.
2019-05-18 17:34:44 +0000 UTC View Post
So, yeah, lo these many years ago, I worked up a pitch for a Terminator project for Dark Horse Comics while I was wrapping up the last issue of Dirty Pair: Plague of Angels. As Soviet military hardware, especially submarines, had been a childhood obsession of mine, I based a story on the idea of human resistance fighters in the Kamchatka peninsula seizing a Typhoon-class ballistic-missile submarine to launch a decapitation strike on Skynet.<...
2019-05-17 13:00:03 +0000 UTC View PostHello there, all 17-ish of you kind folk who have sprung for the $5 and $10 reward tiers, despite there not yet being exclusive material for said tiers! (You're gonna see some sneak previews of higher-tier stuff before the end of the month, though.)
Next week I'm going to throw open the May "sketch request" dealie to all the Patrons, in which I put up a post taking folks' ideas for a subject or character to tackle for a Patreon-exclusive piece of artwork. (Well, at lea...
2019-05-17 01:43:12 +0000 UTC View Post
Jumping back to the December 2016 beginning of my ongoing kick of life drawing from (extremely) random photoreference, here's one of the earliest such sets, also attached below as a 600dpi Photoshop PSD of the original scan. I'm probably going to have to roll with lower-res versions of these scans (300dpi, probably), as my crappily flaky DSL and Patreon's slightly picky uploading format do not seem to work well together. (Lemme know if this is a deal-breaker for any of you.)
Si...
2019-05-16 13:01:00 +0000 UTC View Post
Behold, reposted just in time for #mermay, here's a 2017 con sketch of Mormon-ish yet underboob-y twins Mona and Morgan from Neil Lalonde's goofy yet sexy webcomic Mermaid Comics. Note that this "con sketch" was one of the very few such pieces actually drawn at home on my drawing table, which is why it looks better than most of my actual convention commissions, which ...
2019-05-15 13:00:05 +0000 UTC View Post
More Empowered story notes from very early on in the series. And now, some quick annotations.
Left-hand column:
*The CENSORED bit probably wasn't all that objectionable, but what the heck.
*Yeahp, that's the Ninjette drinking bit from the beginning of EMP3.
*An early reference to EMP5's joke that the Demonwolf speaks to Emp's mom on the telephone, which is something I really should show directly at some poi...
2019-05-14 13:00:00 +0000 UTC View Post
Behold, a fight-scene page roughly halfway through the srsly action-packed Empowered vol. 11. (More info on the book, and ordering it, here.) This is actually a patched version of the artwork, as I disliked the initial page's pose for Plutonium Blonde in the lower right corner. Below is the original version:
2019-05-13 13:01:01 +0000 UTC
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The following is a long, rambling, comics-related Twitter rant of mine from a few years ago, reformatted into easier-to-read paragraph form for your reading convenience. As an amusing postscript, I should add that I've long ago forgotten which titles Comic A and Comic B might've been. Oh, well.
So, this is “a subtweet comic critique” of an unidentified recent comic, as well as a book from earlier in the year with similar problems. The issue: Comics storytelling spoiled by d...
2019-05-12 14:00:03 +0000 UTC View Post
Behold, yet another Patreon category, and an embarrassing one at that! Not that I intend to add very many posts to this hash tag, though, as this is where I'll occasionally dump some really old and seriously crappy material from my pre-professional days.
Here's an ink-wash assignment for a Kubert School class; no idea which one, or which year, for that matter. I simply photocopied a page from the comic-fo...
2019-05-11 14:00:00 +0000 UTC View Post
And here's another element from this Patreon's header—namely, the cover illustration from Empowered vol. 7, which wound up being one of my favorite covers from my entire g-d comics career. Dig those sweet colors from the talented lads of Guru eFX, won't you?
And now, the work stages. First, the rough:
Next, the inks, as I don't appear to have scanned the finish...
2019-05-10 18:36:32 +0000 UTC View Post
Whoops, forgot that I'd intended to post my scripts here on occasion! Well, let's kick things off with the (full) script for issue #1 of the 6-part miniseries Empowered and Sistah Spooky's High School Hell, which featured line art by Carla Speed McNeil and color art by Jenn Manley Lee.
I'd also forgotten that I started doing image inserts as reference by this point, rather than my older practice of attaching ref pics separately in emai...
2019-05-10 14:00:03 +0000 UTC View Post
In a follow-up to an earlier post featuring an illo that Ryan Kinnaird and I did for an ICON motorcycle helmet, here's another image we created for the same campaign. This time I drew a vaguely Chun Li-ish "kung fu girl," complete with oh-so-classy panty shot and more than a touch of the oft-mentioned "Mysteriously Intermittent Post-Millennial Torso Glitch," a wasp-waisted bit of stylization that rampaged unc...
2019-05-09 16:00:04 +0000 UTC View Post
More Empowered story notes from very early on in the series. And now, some quick annotations.
Left-hand column:
*Ninjette did, of course, end up moving in with Emp and Thugboy after the EMP3 ninja fight, which was indeed originally set in a fast-food joint, before I came to my senses. (Vastly easier to draw a forest than a restaurant interior.)
*In my own experience with the malady, I always preferred the phrase "weathering" or "endur...
2019-05-09 13:01:00 +0000 UTC View Post