Sunday, September 28, 2008

Illustration Friday-Packed


A celebratory post-packing meal!

(I did some further editing to this image after my initial post. I decided it needed another tone, and so I added the white highlights. Definitely helps the contrast, I think.)

Superheroes (and Villains)



I'm not terribly proficient with superheroes, but with FallCon coming up, I wanted to take a more serious crack at them. I see these as pin ups or posters (or prints) rather than covers of any sort. The characters may be cartooned more than they appear in the comics, but it was really a matter of incorporating my style into the characters existing visuals. However, I re-configured Electro's costume in the Spider-Man drawing, and used a more classic visual for the Joker, rather than the more gritty Joker from this summer's Batman movie.

Friday, September 26, 2008

Fallcon!

October 4 & 5, 2008 - 10AM to 5PM Both Days!
Minnesota State Fairgrounds - In the Grandstand!
1265 Snelling Avenue - Saint Paul, MN 55108
Admission: $11, good for both days
20th ANNIVERSARY 1989-2008

I'll have a table there, along with a ton of other great cartoonists and comic artists! The new edition of 'Toby & Sara' will be up for sale, along with other mini-comics and digital prints. See you there!

Saturday, September 20, 2008

Minneapolis Buildings

One of my recent endeavors has involved doing superhero drawings for FallCon coming up here in a couple weeks. One of them involves Batman and Catwoman in Gotham City, and so skyscrapers and buildings play a prominent role. However, my initial drawings were unsatisfying, the buildings seem bland, unappealing, and just not...real enough. So I'm now having to go and work around the problems within the illustration digitally. (I'll eventually post the drawing once I work through said issues)

But as I was driving near downtown one day, it occurred to me that the best way to work around this problem is to actually draw skyscrapers, and fortunately for me, Minneapolis is blessed with a wide variety of these. So I went out with a sketchbook and came back with these:

The point of this exercise wasn't to draw a refined architectural drawing. It was to capture the form and shape of these buildings, to construct them within my own style. They aren't about details or accuracy, but about impressions.
The drawing on the right was done first, and you can tell I ran into some problems. The building has a combination of curved and sharp lines, and from my vantage, these blended together. The drawing on the left has a similar building, and draw out the combination more explicitly.
These sketches are really a form of note-taking, a reference for future work. In the drawing above, the right side had a pattern of windows that repeated itself row after row. I drew the first 3 rows, and decided that was all I needed. If this was a finished drawing, all the rows would be drawn, but it's an observational sketch, so it was a matter of capturing the essentials, and then moving on to the next drawing.
The last one I drew, and my favorite. The front of the building has this amazing cacophony of blocks upon one another, with half cylinder layers going up the center. Definitely a building that I'll give a second look at down the road.

More to come. Stay tuned.

Wednesday, September 10, 2008

New Threadless Design: Two Phoenix

I have a new t-shirt design up on the web site Threadless. If you click on the link below, it'll take you to the image. If you like what you see, please vote on it, it would be greatly appreciated!

My Threadless.com Submission