Legends Of Rock #02 - Neil Young

Process Post: Cover Art

Again, a view into the way I work for better or worse.  Process of the cover art for DJ Lani Love’s winter mixtape Snow To Stars.  Projects for Lani always get me to work in a more sleek, hip fashion.  Not much room for smiling pixelart or batmen, but I’d like to think I can do cool too. You be the judge (I’ve decided this is going to be pretty cool if I stick to it, but your confidence is highly appreciated).

Step 1 & 2.

Left: Extra rough sketch for the basic layout and concept. I went with the snow and stars.  Right: Less awful rendering of Ms. Love. Coolness tip: head slightly raised, shoulders slightly back? Coolness. Who knows why.

Step 3 & 4.

Left: Serious cleanup of the face and hair with a rough shape for the space-blouse.  Right: Her hair loaded the right side of the frame unexpectedly - so the sweet gloves and dropping the collar for a bit more asymmetrical balance.

Step 5.

Clean it all up.  Next step will involve the tough decisions of shading, color, text, etc.  

Pixel Strut

Another snippet from the Pixel Art Project, which is one of a few but the main one going.  This dudes got a pretty wicked strut.  With as few pixels as I had to work with, it turned pretty hard pretty quick but I like the product.  Check out the making of here for all the janky steps.

Season 3 Episode 2 in which long-time bad guy, the (Cigarette) Smoking Man, comes to the forefront of evilness. He has to bargain and bluff some other bad dudes and the good guys too and creates some pretty stressful situations for all. 

This is part of an ongoing project to catalogue the villains from the television series X Files. Check out the others here!

Five Deadly Venoms

Pupil #2: The Snake from Chang Cheh’s (much more) story-driven martial arts film Five Deadly Venoms. One hand represents the snake’s head, the other the tail. Trying to keep the warmup game going.

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Visit my new, pretty blog!

I whittled a collection of fruit and veg for my nephew. All hand carved from basswood with a Carvin’ Jack knife and lightly finished with a smooth sandpaper to preserve the faceted look of the knife cuts. Main body colors were applied with an airbrush using Vallejo Model Air paint. Details painted on by hand with brush. First real foray into carving and will be doing lots more.

Being from Maryland, this baseball season was the best anyone could have hoped for. Despite the Nationals having the best record in the league, my allegiances remain with the Baltimore Orioles. Tonight, they battle for the wild-card spot, so in support, I drew the new/retro logo that I'm quite fond of (glad to be over the lifeless bird silhouette). Go O's. 

Is that Scarface?

It should be known that I occasionally play video games, and with winter coming, several activities see a significant boost in activity, namely: cooking, eating, sitting, and video gaming. I’m way behind on games and decided not to try to play anything too new until I catch up. I had a copy of Red Dead Redemption at my house, so I popped that in, knowing full well that I don’t care for many Rockstar (game studio, not quality of game) games or how awfully they treat their hardworking development teams (after the completion of at least 2 games I know of, Rockstar decided to fire the entire team before bonuses and profit-sharing kicked in. Classy). Anyway, I played some of this mostly janky, un-amusing game to find that the only real plus is the horse physics. Horse riding is excellent which is good, because you will be doing it for hours and hours. Won’t last too much longer on this one, especially since the now 7-year-old Resident Evil 4 has been released on Xbox 360. So much video game jargon in this post, I apologize, but also, expect more.

During my time in the wild west, I think I met Tony Montana. Image captured offscreen from Red Dead Redemption - then cleaned up, colored, texted and all around prettied up.

Batman Moods: Heartbreak

About a year ago, I did a one-off drawing of Batman. I really liked it and only recently realized I could do more if I wanted! So, this will mark the reboot/kickstart of the Batman Moods series. First up, a broken hearted Dark Knight. Bruce Wayne seems like a tough playboy with stuff figured out, but you know that guy must have gotten his gut busted by a batlady at some point.

In the 1990 movie Marked For Death, Steven Seagal must take down a Jamaican druglord named Screwface. In it, there are a lot of Jamaicans, and when they talk about Screwface, it is awesome. At the risk of seeming insensitive to the Hollywood portrayal of Jamaicans, I’ll tell you I have a phrase that I often say whenever I hear the word face, and that is “witch ya scroo feese mon.”

Anyway, I’m working on a face / avatar generator app for the iphone and ipad. I’m pretty pumped about it. Below is the loading screen, homepage and main face-making page. I like the style and am starting to crank out the assets. Hope you like it - coming soonish!

June - Turtie Needs Work.

Continuing the 2015 calendar project, June is Turtie from Steve Wolfhard’s Turtie Needs Work. We love this minicomic beyond reason and I can only pretend to make a strip as good as the originals. Here it is. That’s 6 months, half of 2015 down and printed. More coming, obvs.