Adventures at STAPLE!

So my wife (Nicole), my brother, my two sisters, and myself went to Staple, the independent media expo, this past weekend.  It was exciting to see what other artists are doing and chat with them about their work.

The first artist who really caught my eye was a fellow named David DeGrand. He had a lot of great looking prints and a cool comic called "Heeby Jeeby Comix." The comic was an anthology of comics done by David and fellow artists Chris Houghton, Bob Flynn, and Dan Moynihan. The stories included great character designs, monsters, and fun situations. I picked up the comic and thinking about it now, I'm wishing I had picked up one of his prints. David was a cool guy and he even did a quick sketch for me on the end page of the comic. You can check out more of his work over at his site: http://degrandland.com

 We also ran into a friend of Nicole's named Ximena who had a table with a couple of friends. They had some great stuff and my eyes quickly moved to a mini comic they had called "Cobra Commander Comics" and I was sold on the cover alone. Even just flipping through it I knew it was Awesomely hilarious! It was about Bill a beaver, Eric a superhero(?)looking guy, and their new roommate Cobra Commander. GREAT STUFF! Best $1 ever spent and we also had to get a cute pin that Ximena had designed. You can check out their website at: http://mascotwedding.com

Moving down the aisle, we came across Chet Phillips's table and wow! Nicole and I were in awe. He had a bunch of fun stuff. We picked up a trading card set called "World War Monkey" a Portrait of Military Monkeys.  Which was just that, Portraits of Monkeys in military uniforms. We also came across a handbound book, bound by his wife, called "Wrestle Pets." Of course I HAD to get that one. Inside the book had fun drawings of cats and dogs in Lucha Libre outfits along with fun wrestling stats. Chet was really cool and you can check out more of his Amazing work at his site: http://chetart.com

We all left feeling inspired and extremely happy with our experience at Staple. Hopefully me and Nicole will be putting in an appearance of our own at a table there next year.

Later.

Vampires! No Glitter!

Dr. Pyewacket and Vladdy will eventually run into some vampires and here are their designs.

When they're not being evil, they'll look very bored. The boredom of living for centuries will play a role into how the Doctor and Vladdy run into them, should be fun. These guys won't show up till a little later though. I'm still working on the werewolf story. 

Next week I'll be posting my designs for the Frankenstein Monster!

Cheers!

The Werewolf!

Here's my first post for the monster designs of the Dr. Pyewacket and Vladdy comic. I posted on Twitter a while back that I was drawing a fat werewolf, well here he is.

The Werewolf is going to be the first monster Dr. Pyewacket and Vladdy have to deal with in a classic cartoon sorta way. Think of the early Chuck Jones Daffy Duck and Porky Pig cartoons.

His human form, down in the bottom left corner, was based on Lon Chaney jr. Unfortunately, the more of Chaney's features I tried to incorporate the more the character didn't look like he belonged in the same world as the other characters. So I tried to keep the design as simple as possible. I'm still not one-hundred percent sure about it. Nicole suggested I just design my own guy...I might end up going in that direction.

Well hope you enjoy the Werewolf, I'll be posting up some more designs up soon.

Cheers!

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!