5/26/2014 Mademoiselle Tireuse

Just finished another one!

4/7/2014 Painting some eyes

 Just painting some eyeballs today!

3/17/2014 Tactical Archer

The modern mobile assault team is said to be built around the Archer.  What separates the Archer from other combat operatives is the Archer's ability to reach high value targets from far distances. Modern tactics have been sculpted around this aspect, and typically teams are assembled with the objective of providing the Archer with a clear shot.

 Because an Archer's shot is imbued with such importance in missions, there has been continuous efforts towards maximizing the impact of the Archer's payload. The bow string of a mil spec long range bow platform is said to have enough tensile strength to cut through soft wood.  At a full draw, this high tension spider silk bow string allows the arrow to reach its target at super sonic speeds, while arrow shafts are milled from aircraft aluminum to ensure minimum mid flight flexing. But it's most often the arrowhead that is crafted with the most exotic materials, ranging from high carbon steels to depleted uranium.

Though the main objective of the Archer is to send accurate shots to eliminate essential targets, the harsh demands of combat and ever increasing tensile strength of the bow string necessitated the development of a new hands free/ bow hand support system.  Cutting edge gyro scope technology now allows the Archer to take both hands away from his primary weapon to adjust arrowheads, switch to his secondary weapon, or make quick adjustments to his bow without having to break his sight picture.  This new anchor point assisting levers system, or APAL system allows the Archer not only to load his arrow to his rig and go hands free, but allows him to concentrate on observation and surveillance without having to sacrifice the time it takes to get that crucial arrow down range.

3/1/2014 Sketches and Stuff I've Been Up To

 

 

 Been quite busy these days.  Work's been crazy, and I've been trying to get together my personal work. I haven't forgotten to do sketches whenever I have the chance though.

1/5/2014 Winter Riders FINISHED

 

HAPPY NEW YEARS!  Here's a pretty painting for everyone!

12/22/2013 Winter Riders WIP

Oh boy, hair and fur sure is a lot of work.  Hopefully it'll all have been worth it in the end!

9/24/2013 30 Day Challenge: Day 10 & 11

 

Experimenting with integrating cross hatching into this new more geometric style.

9/14/2013 30 Day Inking Challenge!

I've decided to tackle a 30 day challenge!

My good friend and co-worker Vince has convinced me to do a 30 day challenge (He'll be posting a 30 day challenge of his own here). Our goals are a bit different, I'll be trying to draw and ink characters and include backgrounds or at the least characters interacting with their environments.  I'm a bit rusty on having characters blend into the space they occupy, so this should be a good exercise!  I'm going to try to make sure to practice onomatopoeias and effects.  If you're a fan of 30 day challenges, stay tuned!

(This is actually last night's entry, so I shall be posting again later tonight!)

9/9/2013 a little something

Had a chance to do a little bit of painting tonight!

It's been another long hiatus, but I promise it was worth the wait!  I've finished my comic, and I'm just trying to think of a way for me to show this thing to the world!  Just wait a little bit more, you guys!

Summer Girls 3.0

Here's my third installment of my annual Summer Girls themed paintings!

This painting took forever, but it was a BLAST painting this one.  A did a lot of experimenting with color on this one, and it was totally worth it.  A lot of the colors came out better than I had expected!

1/21/2013 BACK FROM THE DEAD

Hopefully my delusions of grandeur have come true, and millions of people read this blog.  And those millions of people must have been wondering where I had gone.  I'm certain many people have come up with theories on how I must have died in an adventure with vikings.  These theories are surprisingly far from reality.

This is what is commonly referred to as a mess

This is pretty much where I've been spending all my spare time.  Since moving to Seattle, many things have happened, but one of those things is that I've had to re-write the story I've been working on.  Thankfully I have a good buddy to bounce ideas off of, and the prologue that I have finished inking doesn't have to go to waste.

Storyboards are really not pretty, and for the most part embarrassing to show to people.  That's why I've been neglecting posting this whole time.  Storyboarding is a slow process for me, and I've had to sketch out a lot of pages.  But now that that's done, and I'm doing work on actual boards, I have stuff to show that I'm not terribly embarrassed to show!

ATTACK OF THE LETTERS

More after the break!

9/1/2012 Update

 Holding slow and steady on the comic front.  Progress is by no means fast, but I'm at a comfortable pace.  I thought I'd update a bit of my work progress, so enjoy!

8/13/2012 Stuff and Happenings

Hello friends!  Sorry I've been absent for so long once again, but I promise it was for good reason!  The whole finding-a-job situation has been distracting me a lot.  Though I have more time, I seem to spend most of that time looking for leads, or stressing out about not already having a job.  I've had some good news trickle in recently, so hopefully that's a sign of things lookin' up in the future.

But!  That's not all I've been spending my time on.  Take a look see, my friends, here's a little preview of what I'll be working on.

It only took me 4 tries, but I've finally completed the first page of my comic (pictured left) !!! 

Summer Girl 2.0

Done!  It was fun revisiting the Summer Girl theme!

Inks and Screen Tone

Slowly getting the hang of this.  Basically the problem with the last batch of screen tones was that the resolution was too low.  When I photographed this ink painting, I split it up into 9 sections and then auto-aligned them in photoshop.  With more pixels to play with, I was able to keep the dot matrices small enough to not compete with the line work. 

Some More Findings

First, photoshop is proving itself not be to be the best for screen toning.  The Images I brought into Photoshop were already high resolution, but the dot matrices were too large even at the smallest settings.  and I'm not really sure how to create new patterns.  Also, the process is quite slow.

On the more Analog side, I need to draw with thicker lines.  Must not forget that all these will be shrunk down, and lines that are too thin are hard to read.

Even though manga style drawings are far more lighter with the inking, the darker colors still need more blacks.

More Inking

 The inking continues!

I'm getting a bit more familiar with what I can get away free hand and what i need to use a ruler for.  Basically any line that's shorter than my index finger, I can get done with just free handing, but any line longer than that, I need a ruler to keep my hand steady.  The problem is if I have to reposition my elbow mid stroke, the line becomes wobbly, and the line weight becomes inconsistent.

I'm thinking it's time I try screen-toning.

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Been watching a lot of car shows as inspiration.  Top Gear, and Fifth Gear being the major TV shows I've been watching, with a healthy dose of Initial D and Wangan Midnight.  They're super fun shows, especially if you're into cars. 

At first I was looking for good car chase movies on netflix, but there's not a lot there to choose from...  Ronin definitely has my favorite car chase scenes, but other than that, I can't think of anything good.  Any suggestions?

Findings from the Inking Laboratory

Today's challenge was cars and motorcycles.  I'm getting a little better at creating "mechanical noise", and there's really no easy way around it.  You just have to build up a vocabulary of mechanical looking jargon and figure out where you have to place it.  You can build this vocabulary much easier when inking and painting than graphite, and im not really sure why yet.  Possibly because the mechanical noise you create just becomes a grey mess.

Another thing I need to practice is not to get too zealous.  The inks on these should be a bit more blank, and I have to stop myself from trying to shade with cross hatching.  Shading on mechanical things should be done with screen toning (especially if it's surface color, shadows could be done through cross hatching though).

A few more useful tips to consider:

-Be patient.
-Cannot stress enough, do not use a dip pen when using a ruler.  The ink bead gets under the ruler and ruins the drawing.
-When drawing long lines, spin the paper around so the line is consistent with the arch of your arm.  It's nearly impossible to draw a clean line if your drawing a long curve that bows towards your own elbow.  Spin it around so it bows away from your arm, and use anatomy to your advantage!
-You should know how to draw wheels without stencils (with graphite), but just use stencils when inking
-Microns seems to bleed much less than Sharpie felt tip pens
-Be patient

I still have to work on getting better at drawing wheels.  I have a few stencils, but they're never the right size/pinch to draw the wheel angles I want.

Next episode, we shall have people ON vehicles!

Memorial Day Speed Painting

Had a surge of productive energy this morning.  Thought I'd try out some speed painting. 

A bit of an update on my life:  Sadly I've been laid off from my job at 38 studios.  This got me thinking about my career.  I've been trying to be as versatile as i possibly could as an artist.  Leading me to work in many many different styles.  I'm going to try to use this opportunity to try to work on my own style a bit more.  I'm going to try to find a place to work where i don't have to bend my style opposite to how I want to progress as an artist. 

Also, I'm going to do a comic.

So stay tuned!!!

5/23/2012 WIP

   Working on some more sketches!  Been quite stressed lately, but the upside is that whenever I'm doing poorly mentally, I seem to do much better artistically (lol, sigh...).