The Silver Age Suicide Squad

Another in my series of cover illustrations for DC Comics reprint collections - this one is the Silver Age Suicide Squad, or Task Force X as I think the group was originally called.  I have to admit I'm mostly unfamiliar with this title or cast of characters, so it took a bit of research to come up with the image.  Still, anything that involves drawing dinosaurs is a fun assignment!

The art for this was drawn traditionally in ink then scanned and coloured digitally.  You can see the final art above and the pencil sketch below.

The New Yorker: Kanye West

I had fun with this one.  I was assigned to do a portrait of Kanye West for the New Yorker, to accompany a review of his album "The Life of Pablo".  As I was given a lot of freedom for this, I thought it'd be nice to paint it up traditionally on paper.   It's always nice when I get the chance to paint something with this much freedom.

The art here was drawn on paper and painted with gouache and ink with some colour manipulation and tweaking in photoshop.

The Flash: the Silver Age Vol. 1

The 3rd image in the series of DC reprint collection covers I've drawn is the Flash.  This one was drawn during an interesting time for me - shortly after the birth of my 2nd child.  Needless to say, our whole family suffering from lack of sleep, so I tried to keep things as simple as possible.

The final art was drawn entirely digitally, from a pencil sketch which you can see below.

Superman: the Golden Age

This was the second in the series of covers I've drawn recently for DC Comics' reprint line.  As you can see, this is for a collection of stories featuring the Golden Age Superman.  I always liked the Simon and Shuster Superman: he was a man of action in those early stories, going after gangsters, crooked developers and war-profiteers among others -- a far cry from the neutered Superman of the 50's and 60's who's biggest concern was trying to stop Lois from guessing his secret identity.

Above you can see the final artwork, which was painted digitally while below you can see a photo of some of my warm-ups and rough sketches as I worked out the concept for this cover.

Justice League of America: the Silver Age Vol. 1

I recently began a series of covers for DC comics, for their line of reprint collections.  I think I'll be doing around 7 or 8 of these.  This cover was for the Justice League of America trade paperback, which collects quite a few stories from the silver age.  I always liked the art from that era, with Mike Sekowsky inked by the excellent Bernard Sachs - such clean lines in that pairing!

Above is the finished cover art, drawn on board in ink and coloured digitally, while below you can see the original ink rough.

Marvel Variant Covers - Batch 3

And here's the final batch of February 2016 variant covers I drew for Marvel Comics.  As mentioned in the last 2 posts, these were drawn in 3 batches from September to November of 2015.  I drew 7 covers a month,  and Marvel graciously gave me 25 titles to choose from.  I ended up drawing 21 covers in total.

This batch contained 2 of my favourite covers I drew - the Scarlet Witch one and the one for the Unbeatable Squirrel Girl.  I thought both turned out nicely.

While working on this last series of illustrations, I was also struck by the fact that all 7 covers featured female characters/superheroes.  It's a nice trend in comics and one that brought a smile to my face.

As with the others, most of these were drawn traditionally, in coloured ink on board, with additional detail and colour added after scanning in photoshop. A couple were drawn completely digitally using a combination of photoshop and Autodesk Sketchbook Pro (my favourite digital drawing software).

Above are the final covers and below you can see some of the process thumbnails, roughs and colour sketches I did on the way to the final image.

And that concludes my 3 part post on these Marvel variant covers.  Thanks for reading and my apologies for the long delay between updates on my blog!

Marvel Variant Covers - Batch 2

Continuing on my posts of the variant covers published in February 2016 by Marvel Comics, here is the 2nd batch of illustrations.

Again, these were mostly drawn traditionally, in coloured ink on board, with additional colour work and details added in photoshop after scanning.  A couple of covers were drawn entirely digitally (the Vision and Spider-Gwen).  As before, I was aided in the type treatment by my wife, the excellent designer and illustration Claudia Davila.

Above are the final covers, and below are a few process images of the thumbnails/roughs/pencils that lead to the final art.

Marvel Variant Covers - Batch 1

Around September 2015, I started work on a series of 21 variant covers for Marvel Comics to be published in February 2016.  They were spread out across their entire line of books, and gave me an opportunity to draw some of my favourite superheroes.  Marvel was great to work for, and gave me an enormous amount of freedom to design and draw the covers as I saw fit.

I thought it'd be a little too much to post all 21 of these covers in one post, so I'll split them into batches, just as I did when drawing them.

I drew about 7 covers a month for 3 months.  Most of these were drawn traditionally, in coloured ink on board and then scanned with final details and colouring done in photoshop.  I was aided in the type treatment for these covers by my wife, Claudia Davila, an award winning designer and illustrator.  We collaborated recently on another series of Marvel covers, which I'll share later.

Above is the first batch of covers I drew, and below you can see some of the prep sketches and roughs that led to the final art.

Sports Biographies

I apologize for not posting anything on my blog for a while.  I was tied up with 3 month long project, drawing a lot of comic book covers, which I'll share in a little while.  In the meantime, here are a few sports biography book covers I did for Little Brown and Co.  They're for the "Matt Christopher" series of sports biographies.   Above is Drew Brees, below you can see Babe Ruth and Blake Griffin.

All the artwork was drawn from photo reference, in a combination of traditional and digital art.

University of Toronto Illustrations

I was asked recently by the University of Toronto to draw a few images of their campus for use in fundraising and communications.  I did 5 paintings in all, 3 of which are shown above.

These were fun to do, and allowed me the chance to paint something local.  As they were in Toronto, I also got the chance to visit the campus and shoot some of the reference photos on my own.

All images were painted in watercolour and ink, from reference photos, and were colour corrected using photoshop.  

The Weeknd

Here's a portrait of R&B singer The Weeknd, drawn for the current issue of the New Yorker.  I was given a lot of conceptual freedom with this piece, and enjoyed layering a variety of mediums in making this one.

Drawn in a combination of digital, watercolour, goauche and ink.