The Grinch & Max

Easily my favorite Christmas story. Dr Suess is god.

The Blue Bloodz

Well the Fist-A-Cuffs tournament is over and whew, what a fight. My team "The Blue Bloodz" got all the way to the championship match(!) where we were defeated by the Daughters of General Melee. The whole tournament was a lot of fun and there were so many great teams. I had some great teammates and I look forward to the next tournament. "The Blue Bloodz" are from left to right: the sleazy but lovable "Don Sting" played by yours truly, the gunslinging tattoo-ed giant "Six Gun O'Shea" was Jeremy Mohler, and the feisty, sexy savage "Bezerkette" was Melita "Miss Monster" Curphy.

Cue the bad guy music...

Another page from Imperial Lance, my favorite so far.

Sorceress design

Some more character design for Dragonblood Miniatures. This sorceress is part of a diorama where she'll be casting a spell while fighting a dragon warrior. Unfortunately I didn't get to design the dragon guy but it is cool to draw women for awhile. Now back to drawing nazis for Imperial Lance.

Frankenstein's Monster

I worked on this a little last night. I'm pleased with the way he's turning out and plan on taking him to full color when I find some time.

Late night sketch

Mosasaurus Fight

Originally this was supposed to be a fight between a badass amazon girl versus a dragon/prehistoric crocodile but after the initial roughs it turned into a mosasaurus. During my research I found out that there's a big mosasaurus skeleton, the Onion Creek Mososaur, right here in Austin. Can you say field trip?
These are the final miniature diarama designs for Dragonblood Miniatures. I think this will look great on my grandmother's coffee table. She'll love it.

Satyr Girl

A break from work stuff. I've still got a satyr girl in my head that I can't get out...

Bug Guy final

I can't wait to see this guy as a miniature. He'll definitely be my new playing piece for Monopoly, no more stupid thimble or battleship for me.

Looks like I'm getting a 360 after all...

I LOVE everything about this. It was like they were channeling my soul when they designed this game. A chucks-wearing, axe-wielding, hotrod-driving heavy metal roadie with demon wings fighting zombies?? Hot chicks with KISS facepaint? A friggin King Conan pose?? Ronnie James Dio led Sabbath soundtrack?? AND Jack Black is involved?? Holy shit!
I mean seriously how the fuck does it get any cooler than that?!

Bug guy concept round 2.

Here's another go at the bug guy(working title) based on the art director's suggestions.

Stick a fork in it...

Well besides the cover image, a few tweaks, and maybe a few random cards to be added later Fishing For Terrorists is done! Whoo hoo! These are the last of the action cards. I don't know for sure but I would guess the game is slated for a Spring/Summer 2008 release. Probably just in time for Gen Con. I'm really pleased with the way the images came out. It really feels good to complete such a big project and be, overall, proud of the work you did. I think I'll treat myself to a pumpkin spice latte today instead of my normal coffee fare.
Now, back to the drawing board...

Fishing... card art breakdown.

I always love it when artists show a little of their step-by-step process so I thought I'd try to show some of mine. For this particular job (Fishing For Terrorists) my goal was to improve and generally overhaul an existing game with existing art. The layouts and characters were basically done but a lot of the stuff I had to completely redraw and redesign in addition to add coloring to the entire game. I picked this particular card, "Prisoner Transfer", because it shows a few changes from the original rough and the final based on suggestions from the art director, it was one of the cards I basically had to completely redo and it turned out to be one of my favorites.

This is the rough. Basically it's showing a real badass terrorist being moved from the paddy wagon to a prison or some other secure building. I was instructed that there should be lots of guys with guns covering this guy and we needed to know he was really scary.

After my rough, my art director had some changes:
1) I pumped up the terrorist to make him look really scary but the AD wanted him to look like the rest of the generic terrorists from the game.
2) "Lose the gun hand on the right and add an arm coming from inside the building dragging/leading the prisoner inside."
3) "Add gritting teeth to the prisoner."

I didn't need to show the AD another rough so after making the changes I went straight into the inks. I inked these cards directly in Photoshop. I bring my rough into my image file on it's on layer and drop the opacity to about 40%. I then make another layer, title it INKS and start tracing my rough. These image files were 600 dpi, 1.5" x 2". I inked with a hard round, size 9 brush.

Once the image is inked I start coloring. Each color gets it's own layers and I organize all my layers into groups, ie: SPY, POLICE, BRICK WALL, etc... Organizing the colors this way makes it very easy to make corrections and change colors. Here's the image with all the flat colors.

After the flats are complete I go back and make layers for all the secondary colors. Each dark and light color gets it's own layer. For these cards I'd do at least one darker color and one lighter color for each basic color. I'm not a big fan of gradients so I use them sparingly. They work well for skies and subtle shading. This image got two. I finished up the secondary colors, added the chain-link fence and clouds (which I re-used from other cards) and it's done.

Wizard World part 3

My buddy Wes sent this picture of me working on the mermaid at Wizard World to me this morning. It definitely shows how big she is. Thanks Wes!
*The hat and lanyard have now been placed in a gasoline soaked pile with the rest of my Titans gear awaiting the match I'm going to throw on it if they can't manage to pull up from the horrendous nose dive they're currently in...
NOTE TO THE TITANS: MIX IN A TACKLE OR A CATCH EVERY ONCE IN AWHILE.

Wizard World part 2

Here's some pictures from Wizard World. I did this sketch on Friday during downtime.

Here's me doing a sketch of The Thing.

Some notable sketches I did for other people this past weekend:
The Thing (see above)
Cthulhu
A fish (I found that I'm a sucker for little girls wanting free sketches)
Venom
An octopus singing karaoke to "my favorite song"
A troll

Here's a picture of my pal and table mate, Sarah Frary, getting her Cthulhu on.

Here are some concept sketches I did between chit-chatting and sketching on Saturday. It's a start of some work I'm doing for Dragonblood Miniatures so this stuff will actually be made into miniatures. Being an old miniature collector/fan myself, I'm pretty excited about that.


I also did a few other sketches but didn't think they were worth posting, notably a rough of a gothic cowboy guy and a Frankenstein that I was really stoked with that I'll definitely bring to a complete piece. I've been wanting to do a Creature of the Black Lagoon (easily one of the coolest monster designs ever) so maybe I'll do a series of old-school monsters. We'll see.
Sunday was relatively slow at the con so another artist suggested we do some big artwork. He gave me a piece of cheap poster board and I did this mermaid. I've never worked this big before (she's 24"x36") and it was a lot of fun. I plan on getting more poster board and doing more big stuff. I had a few offers to buy her but I wasn't ready to part with just yet so I declined and brought her home.
Again, all and all, it was a great show and I have some plans for next year. I'll definitely have a few books complete by then. I'm looking forward to it already.
I also sold a few pieces of artwork this week already which is always cool. The Fish Show, which is still hanging at Z Tejas here in downtown Austin sold a few fish and I sold the original artwork for the "Enough With the Smarties Already!!" piece.
Well that's pretty much it for con season. It will be much needed work time for the next couple of months. My next show will be Staple! here in Austin.

Wizard World weekend part 1

What an awesome weekend! It was a great show. I'll post again when I gather some photos from a few people. As usual, I took my camera and I took exactly zero pictures. Thanks goes out to my buddy Scott and his wife Melissa who let Sarah and I crash at their place. Thanks guys, you rock!

Some notable quotes from the weekend, in no particular order:

Nathan (my brother): "I dig the beard bro. Very viking warrior."
Dylan (my other brother): "That's like saying you don't know who Earl Campbell is."
Scott (an old roommate of mine): "Naw... I'm not going to the convention. I don't trust myself in a room with that many expensive Thor comics."
Jessica (Dylan's girlfriend/ native Texan... supposedly): "Who's Nolan Ryan?" *insert Dylan's above response here* "Who's Earl Campbell?"
Melissa (Scott's wife): "The sugar is in the small container." (I actually heard this, promptly ignored it, then took "sugar" from the big container that makes for some shitty coffee when it turns out that it is, in fact, salt.)
Me: "How is that possible?! This little 4-year-old girl knows who Nolan Ryan is!" *points to a little 4-year-old girl*
Dylan (Lord of the Feeps) Edwards: "Have you been bothered yet by the weird guy who is going around trying to get artists to draw him having sex with different super-heroes?"
Sarah (my table mate): "THEY HAVE SONIC HERE?? AWWW SHIIIIIIT!!"
Beer dude at the Stars game: "Don't know who Nolan Ryan is?? Aw man, that's fucked up."

Chisai Pinup

I'm going to a comic convention this weekend so I figured I'd post some comic work. This is a pin-up I started for the guys over at Approbation Comics over two(!) years ago. It was right around the time my step-father got really sick and unfortunately this piece was shuffled to the back and consequently lost. I have since rediscovered it and plan on finishing her up. I'm sure the guys at AC will be like "Dude that was two years ago, get bent" but I want to finish it up regardless.
It should be an awesome weekend. I'm hoping to get some non-work-related sketching done. Besides the show where I'll be sharing a table with my "homeslice-in-crime" Sarah Frary, my brother Dylan got us some tickets to the Stars game on Friday. Yeah baby. Violence+sports+beer= good times.
See you guys Monday.

Did someone say scale?

My week's contribution to Illustration Friday, topic: Scale. I've drawn my share of scales for sure so this one was a no-brainer. I wasn't feeling especially creative this week, so here's another fish. For some reason I've always found scales very aesthetic and pleasing; whether it be armor, dragons, fish, or mermaids... consequently I draw them as often as I can.

Action cards part 2

Another batch of "action" cards for "Fishing..."

Dragon sketch

I remember doing this sketch on a post-it about ten years ago while I was on the phone at my grandmother's house. Around 2002 I scanned the rough, blew it up, worked over it and tightened it up. The big version was done on Letraset marker paper with a brown col-erase (my favorite pencil of all time) and a lead holder with 3H lead. I like harder leads because they don't smear nearly as much and I like the fact that the light lead gives a lot of freedom with your pressure versus light/dark lines. I press pretty hard anyway and harder lead doesn't break nearly as often and keeps a sharper point.
So this sketch has sat in my portfolio since 2002. He has gotten so much positive feedback that I have toyed with the idea on finishing him up, full color. I'm usually hesitant on going back and working on older stuff but I think he deserves some more love.