Yo Ho.

I've completed work for an artbook called Zombies, Ninjas, Pirates from a group called Sketchrospective. Sketchrospective is a group of young, dangerous artists from the Canadian West Coast and the piece is by scale my most ambitious painting to date!

Zombies, Ninjas, Pirates should be available sometime in early June.

Laundry Day

Ooh La La! Painting sillyness.

Sakura Days

Another painting done for practice around November.

You know how in Anime's they always show characters standing around wistfully with pink cherry blossom petals blowing beautifully around them? There's a cadre of Sakura trees guarding the sidewalk outside my flat and as I walked outside today the little buggers were coming down like hail! I couldn't even see down the street because they were assaulting my face from every angle. So much for the poetic scene =) Anyways, the subject of the picture is a peach blossom tree not a cherry blossom tree so i'm digressing; but watch out for dem trees.

Two Forgotten Bronze Fellows

Concept sketches for a ancient Chinese Golem? What is this? Shang Dynasty? Tang? Wu-Tang?

There are Peaks and there are Valleys and then there are Peaks

Ah, good stuff.

So I heard the economy is down,
and so is the industry.
Almost everyone's out of work,
and the weather's a little shitty.
TV is cancelled because of disinterest.
Internet is cancelled because of fastidiousness.
...
Mwahaha! What a glorious time to draw!.

Wasteland, a breakdown

Doing my latest photoshop painting was a lot of fun. Even early on, I thought it'd be interesting to post up the various stages in paint and as promised here is a breakdown of the process -which in itself is really a work in progress-:


1. I'm still just getting the hang of doing pictures entirely in photoshop and not working from scanned pencils etc. This time I started out with an extremely loose sketch over a flat background base; In the future I think i'll probably spend more time in this 'stage' since I had some real composition issues later on with the three characters ;p.



2. With the sketch in hand, I quickly roughed in some colour with a coarse brush just to have something to go off of. I'm just trying to lay in the basic shapes as well as some color difference. The landscape was, of course, done in a seperate layer and in fact I tried to have as many seperate layers as possible while keeping stuff organized (sometimes very unsuccessfully =) ). Something basic but totally invaluable I learned was that you can just right click while in the pointer mode to bring up a selectable menu of all the layers that are under where you're pointing your mouse.



3. At this point, I started rendering all the characters. I wanted to keep everything to a tight palette and as you can see from the sketch, tried to make a lot of corrections. One thing that I really like to do, but don't do enough of, is to look at a drawing in the mirror to make sure the proportions are correct since the eye tends to skew things in a certain direction. This is made much easier in 'shop where you can just flip the damned thing so I try to split half the time just working on the entire image in reverse. If it looks good both ways then you've got it made.



4. Ah, the background. I probably had the absolute most fun with this part. To me, painting is more akin to sculpting that drawing. In drawing, i'm used to draftsmanship where you try to be as precise as possible in rendering but with paint you're really just pushing colours all over the canvas and just trying to shape stuff until it feels right. Eagle eyed viewers will also notice several anamatomical changes on the characters as they didn't feel right.


Here's a view of just the background.


5. And finally, with some more colours and effects we arrive at the posted picture.



Here it is with the original sketch. Thanks for reading!

The Existential Robot

HMR-0047D-B33 performing Hamlet at Stratford-Upon-Avon, 2096

Sketch, colour test.

Children of A Broken World

The roomate picked up a ridiculously large flatscreen TV and a 360 last week so time's been, well, scarce; but in between lobbing incendiaries at alien hordes I finally got to sit down and finish the new painting this weekend. This was hella fun though it's still definitely a learning process. I've got some alternate "versions" of this which I might post and I might also put up a breakdown of the progress if I get some time this week. I love painting!

Noirlers?

Whooooo... i'm ecstatic about Edmonton's win over Minny tonight. With all due respect to the team, it wasn't a game where I was expecting any points much less a win so it was nice to finally see the first line come together. Horcoff, Hemmer, Torres and Penner seemed like magic everytime they were on the ice. Still, It was a bit touch and go there, the Wild seemed to have an answer for every single play the boys made and what a weird shootout win, what with Belanger totally missing the net to set up Hemsky's wobbly dribble that just trickled in to win the game, but hey we'll take 'em anyway we can get 'em this year. Gagner scored probably the best SO goal of the bunch, this 18-year old is going to be a legend, book it!

Ok anyways, i've been further collating some older stuff and put together a comp of last years Film Noir comic that I did with Mandy and thought it'd be cool to share here. I'm not really feeling comics right now, especially in light of that 24 hour comic that I still haven't put up (heh, it's almost 24 weeks) but I love working with people and I always feel like I push myself alot farther with these projects. I like to collaborate with Mandy alot since she has a sort of furtive manic genius that I completely lack. Here's the pages, brush inking was super-fun:


Mandy wrote the story and I drew it.

Things have been pretty busy at work and any free time has either been sucked up by my fantasy hockey pool or feverish painting, so I haven't even touched a pencil to paper since monday. It's a concern though, and I'm starting to really yearn for die sketch so I think something will hatch in the next few days.

Zombies Broke My Heart

It's around time that I need to brush up the portfolio, whether it's taping together old artwork or pinpointing new stuff I need to work on to fill some gaps. To that end, I conscripted my suffering roomate who spent most of saturday having to pour through volumes of my sketchbooks as I stood behind him holding a nail-studded bat and encouraged him to make suggestions. The poor bugger's actually a pretty experienced industry pro and me, I like free help.

Anyways I wanted to group some work together to cut down on the number of seperate images per page and I mashed together some of the concept art that I did when I went through my Zombie infection (not to be confused with my infection of THE Zombies, I still love those guys).



Looking at the timestamp, it's hard to believe that it's been exactly one year to the date that I worked on these. I remember taking a step forward with these and the anime style colouring and lighting (I think I was referencing Josh Middleton or Sunrise animation or maybe both) is still pretty cool to me. The poses however are terrible, so uncomfortably contorted, #1 and #3 stick out as particularly bad and likely proportional unsound, #2 is really boring and basically just a self-portrait although I remember that I was looking to draw someone different... pffff! The girl furthest right is alright, but still a little stiff. Bleargh! Still it's great fun to keep progressing.

The originals are still on my website for now and deviantart. Interestingly enough I've also got some non-blood variants and of course the whole series of backgrounds that I punched up for them.

Ooh La Laa

Man, I'm totally drawing skanky stuff.

Confessions of your Offensive Neighbour

I saw this ridiculous speed-painting clip last week which finally pushed me overboard into the torrid waters of digital painting. By happy circumstance I managed to produce this nice little tart which I also posted to devart last week (see links on the right). The new devart image sizing's are a bit small for my liking so i'm reposting it here:



You'll recognize some blatant pose and composition theft from the aforementioned clip, but I was really surprised and enthused by the result an hoped to continue on this vein. But treading this new territory, it's a huge learning curve and i'm having a lot more difficulty in the making of my sophomore effort. As a non-prolific painter, i'm discovering a lot of things as I go, for instance, you should never leave anything heating on the stove whilst you work; The smoke alarm has rung on two seperate occasions tonight as i've been carried away with trying to mix cool shadows in with flats and highlights.

This is really, really fun at the moment.

Ambient Beatles

Listening to Past Masters at Café Crepe.

Hello Out There, We're On The Air, It's Hockey Night Tonight!

Tension grows the whistle blows and the puck goes down the ice.
The goalie jumps and the players bump and the fans all go insane,
Someone roars "Bobby scores!" at the good ole hockey game.

So it's chilly outside and Hockey Season is in full swing. I can't exactly articulate what the appeal really is of watching a bunch of dudes who aren't me battling each other in vicarious feats of athletecism and daring, but I sure can feel it. This year i've stepped up my sport nerdery and joined a hockey pool and an even more exciting fantasy pool.

At the moment i'm sitting in the #1 spot of the hockey pool. It's actually pretty unexpected and I feel pretty excited about it, like I should be sitting at home in a jersey and waving a big foam finger at the monitor. This'll probably end tomorrow as somebody passes me and I get relegated to the bottom of the pack =)

Anyways, here's my picks in the order that I got them:

1 Spezza, Jason
2 Staal, Eric
3 Gaborik, Marian
4 Sykora, Petr
5 Horton, Nathan
6 Lidstrom, Nicklas
7 Hemsky, Ales
8 Toews, Jonathan
9 Brown, Dustin
10 Hossa, Marcel
11 Recchi, Mark
12 Connolly, Tim
13 Fisher, Mike
14 Peltonen, Ville

So no Crosby or Thornton unfortunately but it feels good to have Spezza who already leads the league in points and hopefully Staal will rebound from a relatively weak year. Looking at the roster, I get the feeling I chose with too much heart and it feels like I did pick a lot of dark horses and long shots. I have this ugly feeling that Lidstrom is finally going to decline and of those guys, Gaborik and Connolly have had some serious injury issues in the past (i'm not positive that either of those guys have ever managed a 70+ game year), Horton, Hemsky, Brown, Hossa and rookie Toews are still really developing and haven't reached that "jackpot" stage in their careers, and Peltonen is a near unknown as he's an older vet who came in from the Finnish Elite league... so he's an "inspired" pick to say the least.

Also i'm cheering on my Oilers again after a Smyth-induced hiatus. We're definitely not the team that made the 2005-2006 Finals anymore, but it's a dynamic team with prospects equal to our current weaknesses. In short, we're not going to win many games this year but the hockey's going to be hella exciting with young guns like Super Series MVP Sam Gagner, Cogliano, Nilsson and Gilbert and Smid in the rear.

October

I called in sick today -which sucked- but it gave me the chance to sit down and do some scanning. I feel pretty bad looking at this sparse page because one of the main reasons in having a sketchblog was to produce regularly. However, spending all morning and afternoon attending a screen, mouse, tablet and keyboard; I find that i'm never really keen to spend any time on the computer in the evenings, much less the scanner. This doesn't mean that i'm drawing any less though, in fact, i'm actually putting more time aside to sketch every day which feels pretty good. It would definitely be nice to have some more of that up though.

One more argument for why should try to post more is that it's a whole different experience looking back at doodles that i've probably forgotten about by the next day. I find the progression of styles and ideas very interesting, so here's a selection of sketches from the last few weeks and i've tried to jot down some comments for each:

Teenage Dropkick

I've really clued into this scratchy, sparse style. I like the idea of trying to get my hands as loose as possible when I draw... not to mention it's a lot easier on the wrist.

The Evil Nurse

Hmm, this one is interesting because this was a failed sketch. I had a concept in my head, sort of influenced by Daryl Hannah's character in Kill Bill and Marly Shelton's character in Planet Terror (from Grindhouse) and I wanted to make something I could later finish in watercolours but it fell apart and I wasn't happy with the pose. The sunglasses are cool though, and you'll see that the weird melty though bubble finds it's way into later stuff.


Machete!

Have you seen the fake trailers for Grindhouse? I have a slew of post-it's at work chronicling the gritty exploits of Machete, sadly this is the only sketch I have handy here.

Dance, Dance!

I like this, I've been looking at solicits for black and white graphic novels and the idea of the alternating contrast really interests me. The white-black-white/black-white-black really makes things pop.

Two Old Men of Vastly Different Circumstances

I was probably just noodling around but looking at it now it's a contrast between a rich old man and a poor one. Retroactive introspection, yeah!

Miscellany.

And now, an everyman, a Kung-Fu Colonel Sanders and a Ice Cream Cone Sumo (and his posse).

Special Ed Forces

I watched "Assault on Precinct 13" yesterday, which wasn't nearly as bad as I'd been led to believe. It almost looked like a John Frankenheimer movie, what with all the sudden snuffings of key characters and -for a moment- about 3/4's in, I actually thought they might just go ahead and snuff the protagonist. Predictable denouement all the same, the fancy rifles and elegant body armor got me all flushed and pining to pencil out some tactical aggression of my own.


other movie ripoffs include blatant Defoe posing and a Solid Snakey, Ryu-ey mashup

I always feel kindoff bad for drawing this slush, but the sad truth is that I grew up in the Lee/Liefeld/Mcfarlane era and really... special ops, guns and pouches... they feel gooood.

Mmm... Chips.

munch, munch.

Last Days of Summer

Shit, I was freezing my pretty little buns off this morning waiting for the bus to get here and the sun to rise.

Summer's over, boys.

It's a damned shame because I was really enjoying it and i've still got a few items on my hitlist that I wanted to get to before the grey enshrouds the city again. Martinis and patios anyone?

btw, don't worry I am still actually working on that 24 hour thing haha

Wetwork

I think my brain is slowly collapsing. I guess that's why my mohawk is kind of sunk today.

yes. I am Angry + Hungry.

Go figure: the day I decide to stretch and do a 24-hour comic is the day that I end up having to stay half those 12 hours at work.