The Adventures of Dr. Pyewacket and Vladdy!

TA-DAA!!! Finally I'm showing some images of the "SECRET" project I've been doing on the side, while working on NPW. Introducing the adventures of DR. PYEWACKET AND VLADDY! The story will be about Dr. Pyewacket (the cat) and his little vampire protege, Vladdy who are Supernatural adventures/hunters that will be thrown into fun situations with familiar looking monsters. The design and atmosphere of the comic is inspired by the old Disney and Looney tunes cartoons, especially the spooky ones.

I also went with a very limited color palette. Recycling the same five colors where needed. Why? Well, one reason is that it'll save time, which is preferable due to this being a side project, but also to have fun and explore what I can do with a limited color palette.

Each story will be around twelve pages long and be posted, two pages at a time, weekly, on the Strange Kids Club website. At least that's the plan for now anyway. The first pages will be going up around mid-march, so stay tuned for updates.

I'll be posting up some of the Monster designs next week!

Cheers!

Strange Kids Club Anthology Mini Comic

Here's a sneak peek of the 6 page mini comic I did for my buddy Ron Scott for the Strange Kids Club Anthology. Yes, it involves Wrestling...and monsters. It was really fun exploring a new style and way of building the pages. The style is influenced by old Disney and Looney Tunes cartoons, which I began exploring for my "SECRET" project, which I will debut later this week! Keep an eye out for that...maybe both eyes. 

Any-who, The Strange Kids Club anthology should be out around mid-March and will be chock-full of great art by great artists. Check out some more AWESOME sneak peeks over at the Strange Kids Club, and tell them Jon sent ya. 

Cheers!    

New Character Designs

Things have been really busy lately, not just with work but with preparing Nightmare Pro Wrestling for the year 2011. We have a lot of things planned, a new NPW website, doing some merchandise and getting ready to jump into doing comic book conventions and similar shows.

Outside of the realm of NPW, Nicole is still working on her book, refining it and coming up with new and fun ideas for stories. You can take a look at her stuff over at her blog The Minted Mouse.

I've been working on a couple of comic book side projects that are going to be mini comics, I'll be posting things up once I have more to share.

After going through some of the older work for NPW, I want to share a comparison of the old character designs with the new ones. In a lot of ways the 1st and 2nd Issues of NPW were experiments with figuring out how to do inks, lighting, backgrounds, paneling, etc. So with the start of Issue 3, I wanted to update all the character designs to reflect more of a sense of each characters personality. I also tried to make them look more fun and interesting with design and color.

Yeesh...it's almost a little painful to look at the old designs but at least I can say I've learned a lot since starting. I'm excited to see how much more the characters will change as I continue to working on NPW and growing as an artist.

Portraits of Gomez Addams and Julie Newmar

So my wife and I recently moved in to a new apartment and we decided to spruce the place up with a few cool vintage pictures to give it more of an artsy kinda feel. Then I thought, why not do my own pictures and paint them in ArtRage? :D  I quickly collected some reference photos and began. Here are the first two I have done so far.

Gomez Addams: I love the Addams Family. The TV series and the movies. When it came to decide which one I would paint, I had to go with the John Astin Gomez. I do like the Raul Julia version but I feel the original is more iconic and fun. I mean come on, look at the crazy face.

I couldn't find any one picture I was really happy with, so I based the painting on two pictures.

I love the crazy face he makes in the first episode and in the opening credits of the TV series, so I went with that face and the body of a pic I found online of him holding a cigar.

I had a lot of fun painting him in my own style while trying to stay true to the images. One problem I did have was the greys I was working with tended to sometimes mix into a light blue. This problem was easily remedied by just importing the painting in to Photoshop and bringing the saturation to 0.

Speaking of Photoshop, I did cheat a little at times, importing the painting into Photoshop and adjusting things I couldn't seem to correct in ArtRage. For example his nose was really a pain to get right.  I took the painting into PS and messed with it using the "smudge" tool. Then I took it back into ArtRage and touched it up. If things didn't look right, I just switched back and forth from Photoshop to ArtRage until I liked the way it looked.

However this might have caused some problems because after a while, ArtRage claimed that the file was "corrupted or didn't exist." Luckily all I had to do was "save as" one of the Photoshop files, and then ArtRage was able to recognize it. WHEW! Freaked out a couple of times when that happened.

And for the 2nd painting...

Julie Newmar as Catwoman: I ran across a few vintage pics of Julie Newmar as Catwoman and I had to paint one.

I love the picture I decided to use but I wanted to make a little bit more vintage looking, so I added a red tone in Photoshop and ended up with the pic below.

Then I just picked up the colors with the "eyedropper" tool and started in ArtRage.

This painting was a lot harder than the first. Julie Newmar has very sharp, distinct features and when I couldn't get them even close, she ended up looking very very strange.

Her forehead was another problem I had. Each time I painted and tried to fix it, her forehead always seemed way too large. So I just took into Photoshop and re-sized it.

Her hair is something else that came out way too large. I had intentionally exaggerated it to capture the hairstyle as a focal point. But I had made it way too big. So I, again, imported it into Photoshop, selected it with the "lasso" tool, copied and pasted, and shrunk it down a bit.

I did try to create the sparkles on her suit by actually creating tiny dots...yeah, that didn't work. I just went  over them with the "Palette knife" tool in ArtRage" and smoothed them out.

The one thing I would change in my process is doing the backgrounds on separate layers. The texture transferred over to the main images and kind of hid the cool paint textures I made on those.

It was a lot of fun doing these paintings and I even used them as a warm up before starting the day on other projects. I'm really looking forward to doing more, so be on the look out for some updates.

Cheers!

Nightmare Pro Wrestling Issue 2 Page 32 Pencils & Inks!!

Finally a new blog post. A lot of things have been going on and I've been keeping myself really busy with working on new character designs for all the Nightmare Pro Wrestling characters. My style has changed a lot since I first started drawing NPW about a year and a half ago so I want the characters to reflect those changes.

I've also been working on some new images for the new NPW website my wonderful wife Nicole is putting together. Speaking of my Wonder wife, she too is working on a project of here own. Check it out on her blog: The Minted Mouse.

So here are the Pencils and Inks for Issue 2 Page 32. Lately I've been trying to be a little more creative with the panels of my pages. After reading a blog about advanced panel layouts, I thought I'd give it a try. I don't think I'm there yet but I do like that my thought process for paneling has incorporated some of the concepts I'd read.

I also recently noticed that I've started to be able to draw my characters more expressively. Not that I'm saying 'My drawing ability is amazing, PRAISE ME, PRAISE ME!' I'm just saying that it's nice to be able to look back on my older pages and see that there's a big change. I hope I can keep growing as an artist and cartoonist/storyteller.

Issue 2 Page 25 Pencils and Inks

Page 25 of Issue 2!!! WOW! I never thought I'd be saying that. Finally on the last pages of NPW Issue 2. The big showdown between Nightmare Pro Wrestling Champion, Grim and Mr. Hyde. At this point, I'm still at Grim's intro. I wanted it to be so epic so you know how important he is in this world and to the NPW fans.


I pictured Grim with a bit of a Triple H kinda entrance, as this intimidating force with a cool ring entrance. I've actually had this page in my head for a while -- fire breath and all. It's nice to finally see it on paper/computer. 


I'm really happy with the way the inks came out on this page. I was a little worried about how the pyro on the last panel was gonna come out but I think it looks good. I think all of that will look a lot better once its colored though. 


I changed the fire coming out of Grim's mouth so it looked more like a controlled burst. The original sketch in pencils was a lot smaller and less intense. I want there to be the idea that if Grim wants to breath fire on you he can control its severity.


I also took off a lot of the motion lines from his arms. I think it was too much. It almost made the original drawing look like he was going to clap his fists together (or in Nicole's opinion, made him look hairy) which I didn't want. I'm also not sure if I need the "BOOM" sound effect. I think the images creates the sound all in itself, but I'll test it out and see how it looks.


Alright, hope the pencils and inks got you excited to see the colored page. Check it out on Monday at NightmareProWrestling.com


Later.

Issue 2 Page 24 Pencils and Inks

Here are the Inks for page 24 of Nightmare Pro Wrestling. Something that I've started doing on the pages is creating the backgrounds and characters differently. For the characters I sketch them out on paper then scan them in but for the backgrounds I've usually been drawing them directly on the computer. It's been saving some time and allowing me to still get the perspective I want.

Page 24 is pretty much the beginning of Grim's entrance into the arena. I really wanted to get the mood right on this page. What I wanted the reader to feel was the the excitement of and anticipation of Grim's entrance, along with the knowledge of how popular he is with the fans. When a big star comes into the ring his entrance music gets the fans cheering and then the star pumps up the crowd and the fans get louder. Then the star's music stops and then suddenly the bigger star's music plays. And the crowd goes WILD.

I hope I can get this moment across to wrestling and non-wrestling fans alike.

I plan on putting in some cheering for Mr. Hyde in panel 1 in a big font. Panel 3 is the moment I imagine Grim's music starting. I'm going to use a bigger font for his cheers to establish that the crowd really loves this guy.

In this page I'm also playing around with a special insert panel for the announcers. I like the idea of a smaller panel with the announcers in it to remind you where the commentary in the caption boxes are coming from. I'll test out throwing these panels in every other page during a match.

The last panel is the one that took me the longest but it's also the one that I had the most fun with. The biggest obstacle was drawing each monster in a way that has  them doing something without covering up the other monsters too much.

What I ended up doing was separately drawing all the main monsters first, scan them in, cobble them together in Photoshop. Then just filled the spaces with other random monsters. I had a lot of fun designing the monsters and it was great to finally have the Nightmare Night Creatures in a crowd shot. If you look closely you can also see a few celebrity monsters in there, including the Strange Kids Club puppet.  I'm not really sure what to put on there signs yet. I'll think of something.

  

Now to do paints....ugh...that last panel is going to take a while.

Later.