The Cumming of the Space Age

....and at long last, here it is! My (non)Twart contribution. My Johnny Recon!


...with apologies to Mitch and Scott :/

another Johnny Recon on theTwart

Andy Khun took at shot at Johnny. gotta say, I like!!
My finished colour version of my johnny will be up here within the hour.

No Twart for J.K... :(

If you haven't heard, I'm Johnny Recon's #1 fan. So passionate am I for this little indie that could, that I believe the creators Mitch Gerads and Scott Dillon currently have restraining orders against me. (if you don't know what a "Johnny Recon" is, then your stupid!! go here and get unstupid!)

Well imagine my geekgasm when I found out that the subject on Twart(go here and try to stop being so stupid!) this week was Johnny Recon!!!

"OH YEAH!!! This is gonna be fun!" I thought to myself before thinking, "I'll just paint mine and bring it on over and post it on Twart and.... oh, right... restraining orders"

Fine then, I'll start my own Twart. a Twart of one! right here! Welcome to my twart!! I mean, really,who needs their Twart?!?

Now, what to paint... Well the first 2 paintings on that other Twart(hence forth refered to as "filthy Twart") were really, REALLY cool. They had that retro sci-fi movie poster feel that's just perfect for Johnny. (click here and here, because you are still stupid!) I'm not competing with that. I need something I know that no one else would do. Then it hit me. "How about a Johnny Recon without Johnny in it?" I thought to myself, clearly without thinking again. It's stupid I know, but it's too late. The idea is out there and once it's out there it has a life of its own. I have to do this. But I did tone it down a bit. rather than not have him in it at all, I just put him in the background, buried under a hot naked chick. Since there needs to be some kind of an identifier that tells the viewer "that grining shadowy figure under that hot chick is Johnny", I put some icons in the forground; his raygun and jacket. This is comparible to a batarang and the bat cowl if that were Bruce Wayne back there.

I didn't have as much time as I would have liked to finish it yesterday, but since I'm anxious to get this up before another "filthy Twart" posts a better one, here it is, ta-da! ...half finished.

I should have the rest of it today.

new sketchbook at Beyond the Bleed forum

For those ineterested, I have more sketches here. A couple of the peices you may have seen here before, but most of it is different stuff. It's a new comics talk forum called Beyond the Bleed, created by A.David Lewis. While you're at my little corner of it, go ahead and check out the rest of it.

Daddy Longlegs

Daddy Longlegs. Man was he fun to illustrate! sort of reminds me of Mos Def as seen by JJ(Jimmy Walker's character in Good Times).
Just because the size and deformation of this character is what makes him so visually dramatic, I digitally composited Tatterdemailion in with him for a sense of scale.

BTW, scroll down and take the Bowie poll.

Tatterdemailion

Here's the painted and colourised Tatterdemaillion. Yes, that's who he is. I'm including the original. As you can see this is a very different and slightly more disgusting Tatterdemailion, so it's understandable if you didn't guess who it was.

Next up, the complete painted and colourised Daddy Longlegs

reworking the old and obscure

I reworked their looks a little, but does anyone recognize these old and obscure Marvel characters?

X-Factor continued: Crushin on Monet

squeezed in another X-factor sketch today.
Monet!

Belladonna - an original graphic novella from IDW

Award-winning writer/director Ben Ross teams up with J.K. Woodward -- artist of such titles as X-Men Origins:Beast, Star Trek, and Fallen Angel --to bring you this original graphic novella that examines the true nature of humanity and the underbelly of the city that never sleeps.

Annabelle, a beautiful woman, is gunned down, smashed up, and wakes up with full amnesia after a long coma, without any clues to her real identity. But when someone tries to execute her, she learns that she was the world’s most vicious assassin. Now she must live under New York City among the homeless, and in the process she becomes the city’s most unlikely hero.

In stores Wednesday, February 24, 2010.

view 5 preview pages

Also if you haven't done so already, go friend request Belladonna on Facebook. She's got alot of interesting things to say and there are some sketches, pages and never before seen artwork.

X-Factor continued

Busy day and I only had time for one more X-Factor sketch. But since I got it done so quickly, I decided to colour it. I did a character study of Shatterstar.

honours from Comic Attack

Comic Attack was nice enough to do an interview with me for their Artist of the Month feature.
Thanks Guys!

X-Factor

I've worked with Peter David since 2005 on Fallen Angel and it occurred to me that I've never drawn any of the chgaracters he's using in X-Factor. So I've started sketching for my next painting. These are preliminaries and will probably not resemble the actual painting when I get around to doing it, but still, it was fun working with these characters. Guido, Madrox & Darwin

Batman/SpaceGhost

just reposting this since I changed my format and had to remove the old one.

BeanBag the comic: A Benefit for Boston Children's Hospital

I recently finished a page for a benifit book called Bean Bag. The proceeds from it go to Boston Children's Hospital and you can find more about it from the source. Basically the idea is for industry professionals such as myself to donate a page of art to this comic. The main character in the book, whose name is BeanBag, is a 5th dimensional character who is able to travel to many different worlds. These world's are represented by the pages the artists donate. The BeanBag character is then digitally composited into the scene.
The first image is the page as it looks when I composited the character(Drawn by Stephan Lapim) into the scene and the second image is the page as it was originally illustrated.

The Ghoul

Thank you Steve Niles and Bernie Wrightson for this inspiration. I had a lot of small tasks to get out of the way today and it made getting this done nearly impossible, but I finally completed it!
Man, I'm loving this series!!

see the earlier process work here & here

Ghoul part 2

I only had the opportunity to work on this for an hour before I got snatched away to do other things. But now I'm about to start in on it again and I thought I'd once again post my progress before I do.
Next time you see it, it'll be done.
promise.

GHOUL part1

Yesterday I announced on twitter that I was working on a sketch of Steve Nile's Ghoul(and Klimpt). Then I announced that I was too inspired top stop and that this was going to be my next fully-painted fanboy piece. Well, since this is a blog, not a portfolio and since I just can't wait to unveil, here's what was on my drafting table 5 minutes ago.

I will of course post the final hi-res, full colour scan later today when it's done.

Beyond the Coast to Coast

No matter what I post here, I keep getting questions about the "Tad & Terry", Batman/Space Ghost painting above. It's actually my favourite piece right now, so I definitely don't mind talking about it. here's a photographic documentation of my work on that one: (you'll have to login to Facebook)
Batman/Spaceghost

Not as Western as I thought.

I actually did a tryout page for the first time in 5 years for a western comic. Not really a reader of Western comics so I was crazy to try. I'm not really sure what I was going for. what readers of western stuff are looking for. I just did it as I imagined it and ...big suprise, I struck out. I got a nice vague(probably form) response, so I leave it to fans of the western thing to explain it to me. What did I do wrong, what did I do right, etc. Or could it have been simply not the look they were going for?
If I learn nothing from this it was a complete waste of time .

Star Trek-Captain Pike the comic

Cover for Star Trek-Captain's Log:Pike comic
completed with colour

Star Trek-Captain Pike the comic

The black & white watercolour original for IDW's Star Trek. Captain's Log:Pike. Colour will be added with a combination of airbrush and flat colour digital overlay.