Batgirl of Burnside

Batgirl receives a multiversal, time-travelling selfie from Dick Grayson.

(REALLY excited for the new Batgirl, you guys)

Batgirl Begins Again

Batgirl!

Above is my entry for Project: Rooftop’s recent “Batgirl Begins Again” costume redesign contest, celebrating the sites eight-year anniversary.

Today they announced their “Top 3 Entries” for the contest, and I’m happy to say I find myself as one of them. Paired with two stellar designs by the incredible Chris Samnee and Elizabeth Beals, I’m pleased as punch.

Please do click on through to their site to see all three designs as well as scoring and comments from the P:R panel of judges.

http://www.tencentticker.com/projectrooftop/2014/04/18/batgirl-begins-again-top-3-entries/

Speaking of which, I tried to address their very valid point about Barbara’s cape, doing a quick fix where I extended the fabric up over her shoulder and neck, adding a zipper, so it’d be less likely to fall off.

Brett White (of Matt and Brett Love Comics) said “this is a design that I could easily see on a dozen+ cosplayers…” and I so hope he’s right!

That’d be awesome. Let me know if you do!

Adventure Time: Fionna & Cake, #1

Announced over New York Comic Con, in January BOOM! studios will be releasing a 6-issue mini-series featuring our favorite gender-swapped Adventure Time heroines, Fionna and Cake! Their episode of the Cartoon Network show is one of my favorites from the series, so you can imagine my excitement when I was given the chance to do a cover for the book.

The above image is a variant for issue 1, with lush colors by the one, the only, Maris Wicks. Enjoy!

Shiny

Kaylee from Firefly. From New York Comic Con, 2012. Pen & ink.

Had a lot of fun with this one, as Kaylee was one of my favorite characters on the show. Hope to return back to this sometime soon and slap some color on it.

The MIGHTY MON-ARCH

The Monarch! From one of my all-time favorite shows, The Venture Bros.

Pen & ink, watercolor on 9x12" bristol board.

Henry Jones Jr.

"You call him DR. JONES!"

From Boston Comic Con, 2012. Watercolor, pen & ink on 9 by 12" watercolor board.

Wonder Wardrobe

Decided to revisit this commission from last year, and throw on some digital color.

That girl is POISON.

Above is a look at some sketches I did for a redesign of Poison Ivy for an upcoming Batman short story I worked on. All of the project was great fun, but I especially had a great time redesigning Pam's costume. Enjoy!

The Adventures of Pete and Petunia

Above is my first entry for a new online sketch group called 'Bristol Whip.' The group, started by awesome-sauce artist Joel Carroll, showcases a set of drawings every couple weeks based around a common theme. Those themes are decided on a rotation of the blog's members and are entirely up to their own discretion. This one here is for the theme 'tattoo,' as chosen by comicbook power hitter, Ming Doyle. Being a child of the 80's/90's (and being a big nerd), my first thoughts went to little Pete's dancing tattoo Petunia, from the 1990's Nickelodeon show, 'The Adventures of Pete and Pete'.

I ran with it.

Dance, señorita, dance!

Annnd here's a look at the original tonal treatment:



Copic markers and pen and ink on bristol board.

Be sure to visit Bristol Whip to check all of the awesome entries that are up on the site. Currently there are some new posts up by Jemma Salume and Paul Maybury for this week's theme, Captain America. Woo!

Photobooth Fridays, No. 2

Well it's Friday, and that means it's time for the second installment of 'Photobooth Fridays'. On the chopping block today? A couple pages from the Harley Quinn one-shot I did last summer, featuring The Joker. (It's a clown prince of crime kinda week)


The two pages I'm highlighting here bookend the issue, as The Joker introduces and closes the story. Looking at layout, I wanted to make the two pages fairly similar, though each distinct in its own way. That counts toward the posing of the character in each panel as well. There was a lot of acting I wanted to communicate through facial expression and hand gestures, and so to try and capture those subtle nuances, I turned to photo reference.


I make a pretty good Joker, right? Right?!

Here also is a look at my pencils and inks for the pages these two panels were excerpted from:


You can see more Harley excerpts here and here.

Have a good weekend, internets!

Project: Rooftop Invitational: Black Canary

The good folks over at P:R have but together a neat little project - an invitational wherein they've invited several comic artists to each draw their own reinterpretation of a member of the Justice League. They've all been awesome to look at so far, but just yesterday they released my redesign of the sonic screaming, fishnet-clad bombshell, Black Canary.

Here it is!

We came, we saw, we (Fist-A-)conquered

In its early days, one of the incentives to begin this blog was a popular drawing-game site being run at the time, called 'Fist-a-cuffs.' Created by comic artist and illustrator, Sam Hiti, 'Fist-a-cuffs' was a blog that welcomed artists to submit their own wholly original character designs to be pitted against other artist's designs. The two characters would then 'fight' via votes left in the comments section of each post. It was great fun, and a really good exercise in design.Today unfortunately the site has now long since been abandoned, though you can still browse through previous matches posted to it (I highly recommend).
This past semester, my friend Evan Larson and I taught a character design class at a local art school called Montserrat. There we thought it'd be fun to resurrect this concept as an extracurricular drawing challenge for our students. We deemed the series of matches, a 'Montserr-all-out-brawl.' Like the original, it saw some really wild and fun character designs and was great to see the concept raised from the dead. Above is an original drawing Evan and I did for the grand prize winner of the contest, Corinne. You can see her designs and many more of our students work at our class blog, here.
Another of my students, Mike appropriated the concept for his final project, where he designed every character, pitting them against each other for his fellow classmates to vote on. Again, a lot of fun.
It all came around full circle, and got me to reminiscing about the original 'Fist-a-cuffs' site. Here are some pages from my old sketchbooks, where I'm sketching out possible fighter designs. Hope you like!



Happy Holidays everybody!

Hunter's Fortune No. 4

I've been sitting on this one for a little bit, but the solicitations just came out, so now I'm freed to post at will. Above is one of two covers for the final issue of the Boom! comic miniseries Hunter's Fortune. The second cover is by the ever talented, Phil Noto.

Anywho, the series follows a young man (Hunter) who has inherited his recently deceased uncle's fortune. However his uncle has placed a stipulation on Hunter's inheritance, which is that in order to retain the many millions of dollars his uncle had, he must set out and uncover the mythic sword of Excalibur! Rough.

Because of the Excalibur theme, I decided to do a stained glass motif a la classic medieval architecture. It was not my first instinct. Here's alook at the sketches I did for the cover.

This issue involved a character named Miranda who is also in search of the sword, and serves as a bit of a foil to our protagonist. There's also some reference to the 'Lady of the Lake', so I went slightly more conceptual showcasing Miranda AS the 'Lady.' This was my first sketch.

This was my second sketch. Pretty much the same as the final cover, though originally I had Miranda oriented at the top. Hunter being the main character, I was asked to flip the composition around. Even still, I tried to make each view of the illustration equally engaging. Hopefully that's true.

Green Lantern in Wednesday Comics - Week 8

Man oh man... we're two-thirds of the way through this series already! Oh how the days go by. Whelp, issue 8 of Wednesday comics hits comic stands today. To the comic store, says I!

Here's a sample of this weeks installment:

Wednesday Comics: Issue 5

Out now!
Here's a detail of a few panels from this weeks installment-

Yes, yes. It IS worthy of a spit take.

Update: CBR just posted an interview with Mr. Kurt Busiek regarding our collaborating on Wednesday Comics. Check it out, duders!

WolveREDESIGN

Once again the folks over at Project: Rooftop have put together a sweet superhero redesign contest. This time in their scopes? None other than Canadian's own adamantium laced, cigar smoking X-Man, Wolverine. Here's my take:

Blog Post: Playing Catch Up, 2k9

Hello everyone,

I know I've been internet absent for a while, and much has happened since my last post, so here I am! Let's catch up on the good times together.

Hoorah! I've been accepted in to the next edition of Spectrum, "The best in Science Fiction and Fantasy Art." You can see the full image of the piece they accepted here.
Then this past weekend I attended the Stumptown Comics Fest in Portland, Oregon - and had a great time! It was really fun hanging out with fellow comics artists, and getting a chance to meet up with a couple people I'd otherwise only corresponded through e-mail. Great meeting Mike Allred and Gail Simone in particular, and I had a great time going out to dinner with Kurt Busiek and his family. Here's a drawing his daughter Katie did for me (of me):

So good!

Beyond that, you can check out some pictures of my exploits (including some karaoke jamming) on my flickr account, and here are some sketches I did at the con.

Batgirl

Hoth Leia

And two Teen Titans commissions:
Starfire

And Raven

All the while I've been plugging away at Green Lantern, of course. Here's another tease-


And there we have it, we're basically caught up with each other now.

Good times.

Random things...

Well I'm heading off to Maine for the weekend, but before I go, I thought I'd throw up a post on the ol' blog.

Recently I found myself doing a google search of my own name (We've all done it, don't judge me!) and I happened upon this old convention sketch I'd done -

Slimer (of 'The Real Ghostbusters')


Also, a little while ago Maris and I had decided to watch all of the Star Wars movies from end to end (including all the Clone Wars cartoons) and afterwards I found myself in quite a Star Wars drawing mood. I had meant to draw a bunch of favorite characters, but so far just managed one - Princess Leia

(I'll repost her once she's all finished and colored)

AND - before I leave you, allow me to link to this comic Maris and I had made in collaboration a little while ago. It was created as a submission for Julia Wertz's craigslist 'missed connections' anthology. I didn't get in unfortunately, but now FINALLY has arrived on the interscape for your enjoyment.

Batman Redesign!

So the good people at Project: Rooftop have once again put together an awesome superhero costume redesign contest - And once again I've waited until the night of the deadline to draw, ink, color and submit my entry.
Hey, I've been busy lately! (See 'Green Lantern')
Anyway, the contest had a unique twist to it this time around. Since Batman has apparently died(!) in the comics, people are wondering who will take on the mantle of the bat in Bruce's place. P:R thinks Nightwing (formerly Robin, A.K.A. Dick Grayson) is the man for the job. The contest was to redesign Batman with the notion that Robin would now be the man behind the mask.
(The preceding sentences are the nerdiest things I've written in some time)

Here's my entry!

Hope you enjoy! Oh and apologies for my prolonged posting absence. (see "busy") I'll try and be better.

Star Wars: A New Post

Last night I found myself watching the first Star Wars movie, and decided to do some sketching (Hey I've got to live up to the sub heading of this blog somehow, don't I?) -

The likenesses aren't exactly dead on, but hopefully they each feel like their respective characters...

UPDATE: I inked it!