Angels on the Airwaves

This is the cover for a Christmas card I sent out to some of my college friends and artistic peers this season. (Hopefully all recipients have gotten it by now) Facebook and the internet are great communication tools and all, but I feel like I've lost touch with a number of fun and influential as a result of the growing years and miles. I figured this would be a good way to reconnect, let people know how to reach me, let them know what I've been up to and planning on doing in the next year and find out what they've been doing too, etc.

I'm hoping for a spark in establishing a stronger community and maybe even build some traffic for this very blog.

I had been cooking up the notion of doing the cards since Thanksgiving time, but it took me quite a while to come up with an idea for the cover. I was shooting for a "scene" like something out of the old Saturday Evening Post covers, but wanted to avoid Santa imagery, feeling it would come off as trite. That and I already did Santa for Sleep Care last year. In the end, I fell back onto my strengths; heavy darks and a mid century period setting.

Here are some of the works I found particularly inspiring. Consider them your online stocking stuffers!

 

Edit: And wouldn't you know it, after everything is all done, that when I discover an image that I have never seen before that looks almost identical to the end result. Go figure.

Deja Vu: Santa Surprise

NC Wyeth vs. Norman Rockwell

Talk about a gift that keeps on giving! I think its great when you can see the clear influence on another artist's sleeve like this.

While I've posted about such similarities before, there are people who have been doing it a lot longer and more throughly.

Myth Riders

Just an idea I've been cooking up since Halloween. Long time viewers will know that I love surreal juxtapositions of pop culture characters; Tommy Wiseau and The Joker, Rick Blaine and Indiana Jones, Andy Griffith and Optimus Prime, The Doctor and Zardoz, etc. On Halloween night I cooked up this idea of a crossover between The Headless Horseman and Lady Godiva, playing on their status as legendary, near-mythical, horse riders and contrasting the large black Horseman horse against the Lady's gentle white equine.

I spent about three weeks since this doodling compositional ideas to get to this point (and taking a crash course in drawing horses too) Unfortunately for all the effort I expended I'm not satisfied enough with the project to continue it just yet. I couldn't really decide if they were racing, flirting, just passing by or what. Not to mention Lady Godiva's lack of clothing and how to creatively conceal it and still be identifiable was causing problems with generating a legible composition.

So yeah, this ones going on the discard pile unless I can come up with some new solution to turn this idea into an illustration. Any thoughts?

Care Package ... OF DOOM!

Here's a little something I've been working on for the past week. We're sending a care package to my cousin and Dad thought it would be great if I could draw a dragon on the opposite side of the box. Dragons are a bit outside of my wheelhouse, so it took me a while to practice sketching one out to my satisfaction.

The practice run on seen here is a bit different from the finished product. Well, the scent that the Sharpie produced a particularly powerful wallop that I hadn't anticipated, so after the dizzying headaches subsided, I had decided that perhaps the background details weren't as important as finishing the actual dragon itself.

Next time I'm going back to either pencil or ink. Hopefully that'll be soon.

Whoops! Wrong Way 'Round

It came to my attention recently that I had misread the directions on the contest entry I had done for Superhero Cocoa. To be fair, their "X wearing Y's costume" instructions were easy to get mixed up.
So here is the new vision of Aisha Campbell, the second Mighty Morphin' Yellow Power Ranger dressed as Lyra Walters, the second She-Hulk. Seems fitting I suppose. Given the topsy turvy nature of this mix up I even mirror-reversed the original pose I had done.

This was actually something of a good experience. Once I got over the physcological hurdle of "getting this done for a deadline" with the last one, I really had a chance to play, and have some fun experimenting with some different brush textures on this one with its contrast in stiff leather and soft skin over hard muscle.

Lyra Walters as the Yellow Power Ranger

This is my entry for the Halloween Bash Contest for Superhero Cocoa featuring Lyra Walters, The Savage She-Hulk, (not to be confused with Jennifer Walters, the Sensational She-Hulk) as The Mighty Morphin' Yellow Power Ranger.

   

Here is a glimpse at my process, starting with the rough pencils to finished the inks. 

I started out with a sketch, were you can see I was emphasizing the plainer structure of the figure. The second sketch I flipped around because I thought it made for a better pose and tried to build up her muscles (she is a She-Hulk after all) However, by the time I got to start applying the inks, I de-emphasized her six-pack abdomen because I didn't want her to look like the stereotypical "spray paint spandex" of superhero comics, instead trying to go for something that actually resembled cloth. Though I did increase the size of her bicep just to remind you of her super strength.

Its kinda fun to look back on how this all came together and I'd be interested to see if any of the commenters have an opinion on what I should have kept or if I should have lost certain things or now that you can see were I'm coming from, perhaps I should have gone in a different direction. 

Give me your thoughts people!

Elephant in the Room

An editorial cartoon for Worldwide Biomedical Charitable Services about the World Health Organization's  dependency on donated equipment. The elephant was fun to draw, I just wish I'd been able to give him more space.