The Clash

I spent a few days during the last week painting up some quick portraits of the members of the Clash. I got the idea to do these after watching Don Letts' excellent documentary, The Clash: Westway to the World and these drawings were all referenced from the interviews he conducted with the group around 2000. I loved seeing how the guys had aged, and comparing them to the photos and footage of them as young punks.

These painted sketches were all done fairly quickly, and I was just aiming to experiment with new approaches and techniques. The first two, of Paul Simonon and Mick Jones, were painted in gouache on paper. The ones of Joe Strummer and Topper Headon were done as ink drawings, mostly in drybrush, with tones added digitally.

The Clash were my favourite group as a kid, and I still think of them fondly. I can't think of any other rock group that can evoke in me the same feeling of hope and possibility like they do. For a little while, it really felt like they could change the world. I still miss Joe Strummer and listen to their early records often.

PEN Canada: Dawit Isaak

PEN Canada recently asked me to draw a portrait of imprisoned writer Dawit Isaak, and I was happy to accept. For those unfamiliar with PEN, it's an organization which assists and publicizes the case of writers in many countries who are "persecuted for the peaceful expression of their ideas". I urge you to read more about Dawit Isaak online.

If you'd like to read a little bit more about the process, then you can continue below for a short process post.

I was grateful to art director Gary Beelik for giving me free reign with what I drew, pending approval of course. So to start with, I just researched everything I could about Dawit Issak and his case. There was a lot to read, and some of it was mis-information, which made this part very interesting.

Near the start, I asked my friend Tim Davin, one of the favourite art directors, for his help in throwing ideas back and forth. I always appreciate Tim's input, especially on the more challenging assignments. He was gracious with his time and we had a great couple of meetings at local cafes while we drew quick thumbnails on a coaster and discussed issues surrounding Dawit Issak's case.

Among the things we weened out during those meetings were initial ideas like this one:


Sometimes, you just gotta put your big first idea on paper to see that it's not gonna work. It's something I've had to do often in my career.

After some discussion, we agreed that I should just do a straight-up portrait, with little overt editorial. I also thought it should be something with a graphic approach, but still contemplative.

Next I drew up a portrait of Dawit Isaak in pencil (below left), and followed that up with a gouache painting at about 50% final size (below right). It was painted with two colours, mostly in drybrush:



From that painting, I cropped and tweaked an image in photoshop which made the final cut as the rough I submitted. It had something of the quality I was looking for:



After that rough was approved, I set about panting the final. Again, it was painted in gouache and ink on paper, using mostly dry brush. The main differences were a tighter under-drawing and a much larger size - 120% of final size:


Neither painting required much photoshop colour cleanup because they were painted in gouache. Both the rough and the final were painted in a graphic palette suited for posters. The final is a closer likeness, but the strokes are more subdued.

Toronto Streets

A couple of weeks ago, I was on a walk in the west end of downtown when I saw this street. I was struck by way it looked, so I came back a couple times to take notes and shoot pictures. Then I finished this painting back at my studio, working in gouache and ink on watercolour paper.

Editorial all day long

Just to show you that my time isn't spent doodling super-heroes all day long, here's a batch of editorial illustrations I've done recently.

The first is for Maisonneuve Magazine, illustrating an article on interesting villains in literature. I chose to go with an illo of my personal pick for most interesting villain: Satan, from Milton's epic poem Paradise Lost:



Next, and in keeping with the biblical theme, is a small spot for the New York Times Book Review, accompanying a write-up on the book "Jesus Boy":



Finally, shifting the focus from religion to money, here's a spot for Briefings Magazine, accompanying an article about Chinese market manipulation of american currency:

A Night at the Opera Pt. 2

These are the other seven illustrations I did for "Les Adventures de Madame Merveille", a comic-themed opera performed earlier this month in Montreal. There were ten illustrations in all, and you can check a previous post of mine for the other three paintings, as well as more details on the production.

The colour choices for these drawings were a bit more saturated than I would normally use, but that was because the drawings were to be projected and I knew they might lose some intensity along the way.

The Marvel Superhero Hour Pt. 2

As I was mentioning in a previous entry (see 2 posts down), I took some time recently to do some new super-hero paintings to take to TCAF, the Toronto Comic Arts Festival. Here' the rest of the batch, for your viewing pleasure. Most of them sold pretty quickly, so I think I might do the same thing for the Fan Expo show later this year, and bring some new artwork created specifically for the show. And yes, that's another Iron Man drawing -- I actually ended up drawing 3 of them for the show.

I'd like to thank all the people who came to TCAF and visited my table. It's been 2 days and I'm still not fully recovered from the show, but I was very happy to meet and chat with the people that came by. I hope you all had a great time at the show.



And here's another painting I did recently, this time of Superboy. It was my contribution to the Doug Wright Awards fundraiser auction -- if you're quick, you can still bid on the art on ebay!

Best American Comics 2010

This was a fun assignment, and a real honour. I was asked by Houghton Mifflin and series editors Matt Madden and Jessica Abel to design and illustrate the cover for the 2010 edition of their annual Best American Comics anthology. They gave me free reign to draw what I wanted, so over the course of a couple of weeks early in January, I sat down and worked out this image. Like most of my favourite cover assignments, the concept for this one came together pretty intuitively and I had an idea of what kind of response the image should provoke. This deluxe hardcover collection of excellent comic stories ships in the fall.

This year's guest editor, Neil Gaiman, also chose to include my 14 page story "Trinity" (a non-fiction comic about the creation of the atomic bomb) as part of the collection. Again, a real honour.

the Marvel Superhero Hour

Lately, during the week, I've been trying to take a couple hours at the end of the night to paint up some small super-hero sketches. Some are done as commissions while others are done for fun. Here's a few from that batch, all of which were painted in gouache and ink on board. I've been doing most of my work in gouache lately, instead of using markers, and really enjoying having a painted final product that needs little pshop cleanup.

Please note, I'm not taking any new commission requests right now. Sorry if this looks like a tease -- I'm just too busy with other projects at the moment.

Village Voice

This is a cover for the Village Voice Spring Arts Guide I drew a few weeks ago. Obviously, its a tie in to the new Kick Ass movie that's coming out soon. I also drew a small spot featuring the same character for the interior article. I don't really know much about the movie, but it was fun to draw an action scene for a magazine cover.

Cartoon City

This is a new painting I completed earlier this week for an exhibition called Cartoon City, which opens at Harbourfront Center on April 9th. The show features a great line-up of Toronto area comic artists, each contributing a piece about their neighbourhoods. In my case, I did my best to capture a section of College Street, a few blocks from my studio. If you're in the Toronto area during April to June, feel free to check out the exhibition. And if you're in on April 9th, come by and attend the opening which will be from 6pm to 10pm.

This is probably one of the biggest and most complicated paintings I've attempted in years. It's about 30" x 10" in size, and was painted in gouache and ink. Usually, I complete most works in one or two sittings, but this one took about four nights to finish. As detailed as it seems, I painted it fairly loosely because of its size and I really enjoyed the opportunity to use larger brushes. Everything on this was hit with a #5 brush and up. While working on it, I also discovered I enjoyed utilizing a few techniques I rarely use: 1) scraping out white lines with an x-acto blade and 2) using low-tack painter's tape to lift off ink and create texture.

A Night at the Opera

Here are three illustrations from a fun project I completed last month. They're for a new modern opera, "Les Adventures de Madame Merveille" which will be opening this summer in Montreal. Commissioned by ECM+, the libretto is written by award winning comic writer Cecil Castellucci, and features 4 different comic-themed sequences, each illustrated by a different artist. The other artists involved in the project are Scott Hepburn, Cameron Stewart and Pascal Girard -- excellent illustrators all.

My segment is the romance part of the story, and the drawings above are three of ten illustrations that will be projected onstage during the performance. All the illustrations were painted in ink and goauche, and were a lot of fun to work on. I've been having great luck lately in the variety of different assignments to try my hand in and I have to thank Cecil for bringing me aboard for this project.

Crossroads

This is a little painting about Robert Johnson that I completed recently. Come On In My Kitchen is one of the songs that I listen to all the time while drawing. I've probably worked on at least a couple dozen paintings while listening to his music.

Like most of my recent work, this one was also painted in gouache and ink on bristol, and is about 10" x 10" in size. And if you're interested, you can check out the pencil sketch for it below. I also did a half-size colour thumbnail for it, working out the values, which I shared with people on my twitter feed.

Pablo Picasso

This is a small painting of Pablo Picasso I did for a charity art-show and auction, to raise funds for Haiti. They asked for a head-shot of any kind and, after half an hour of wracking my brains for what to draw, I decided to ask for some suggestions via twitter. My thanks to B. Clay Moore for suggesting this. This was painted in gouache and ink on bristol and is about 7" x 9" in size.

Incidentally, Picasso's Les Damoiselles D'Avignon is one of my favourite paintings of all time. It might even be my favourite, actually.

Darkseid - Lord of Apokolips

This one was a lot of fun to work on. I was asked to draw an image of Darkseid (a great comic book villain created by Jack Kirby) for a commissioned painting, and I decided to go for a big wide-angle close-up. After I thumbnailed it, I decided to paint the final for it really big, on a 22 inch piece of board so that I could get loose and have fun with the backgrounds. It was a delight to paint larger again, after months of working on smaller pieces and the whole process was quick and highly enjoyable. The painting was so big it wouldn't even fit on my large-format scanner, so I had to scan it in pieces and patch it back together to post here.

Incidentally, drawing the background for this piece reminded me of growing up in Hamilton, Ontario in the 80's. Back then Hamilton had 2 giant steel companies working full time, so I was used to seeing raging fires light up the night sky. It was always an awesome sight.

The final art was painted in gouache and ink, so it needed no photoshop cleanup. If you're interested in seeing the prep sketches for it, you can check them out below:

Here's my quick 10 minute colour thumbnail, which gave me the idea to paint it up nice and wide:

This is the pencil sketch for the piece, drawn at about 60% of painted size. I kept the background buildings and flying figures as just simple outlines, since I wanted to stay loose and do most of the "real" drawing in ink:

Happy New Year

Now that it's 2010, I thought it was time to post some new artwork. Unfortunately, I can't share much of the work I've been doing lately due to contractual obligations so, with that in mind, here's a quick watercolour portrait of my wife, my baby girl and I, which I did over the holidays. I've never been very comfortable working in water-colour, so I prefer only using them to mess around with on quick sketches, and not on final work for clients.

Here's hoping that you all had a nice time during your holidays and are enjoying a wonderful start to 2010.

Happy Holidays, Everyone!

Here's my holiday card for all of you who've dropped by to check out my blog this year. May you all have a wonderful season, and a bright start to 2010. And if you're a freelancer like me, I sincerely wish you some extended time off with no last minute deadlines over the break.

And yes, my holiday card has a drawing of Darkseid on it. I wonder how many other holiday images he's been in?

In time for Christmas: Penguin does Posters!

A week ago, I got in the mail a nice package from Penguin Publishing with some excellent posters they'd made of my cover artwork for Don DeLillo's "White Noise". I did a blog entry a few months ago about the creation of that jacket illustration, but I didn't know at the time that they were planning to make posters from it -- a nice surprise.

Anyway, mine isn't the only artwork that Penguin decided on. They also printed up a great poster from Tony Millionaire's remarkable "Moby Dick" cover.

They're both available for purchase from the Penguin website, and would make terrific stocking stuffers for book and comic fans. Check out the links below to get your copy today:

Order the "White Noise" poster
Order the "Moby Dick" poster

The Mighty Avengers!

Sorry for the long delay in between posts, folks. To make up for it, here's a drawing of that old-school Marvel super-team, the Avengers. I think this particular lineup only existed for a couple of issues (Hulk was never much of a team player), but it remains a personal favourite. You really can't go wrong with any group that includes the "fin-head" Iron Man.

This drawing is actually a companion piece to a drawing I did years ago, of a group of DC heroes. I pencilled it months ago, but didn't have time to finish it up until recently. The final art was painted in markers and ink, and you can check out the original pencil sketch for it below:

Bill Russell - the greatest Celtic of all time

As some of you may know, I'm a basketball nut. I'm the kind of fan that follows NBA teams even during the off-season: reading about trades, personnel changes, summer league games and obsessive things like that. So, with the new season almost about to jump off, here's a recent portrait I did of Bill Russell - the anchor of some of the greatest Boston Celtic teams of all time.

I drew this one up as a commission - one I was glad to do. It was painted in markers and ink, with a few white highlights painted in gouache. The image was referenced from a photograph of a young Russ from the Sports Illustrated archives.

The Amazing Absorbing Boy - Book Cover Art

Above is the final artwork for a recent book cover assignment for Random House Canada. I was contacted by art director Jennifer Lum to illustrate the cover and 20 small interior illustrations for The Amazing Absorbing Boy, a new novel by Rabindranath Maharaj. I enjoyed this assignment very much, and working with Jennifer was a real joy. Like my last post, I thought I'd share here some of the process and roughs that led to the final art.

The book focuses on the culture shock experienced by a teenage boy as he immigrates from Trinidad to Canada, specifically to the Regent Park area of Toronto. With that idea in mind, I drew up 2 initial cover concepts, in colour like I usually do. Both the drawings below were drawn quickly and featured Regent Park, a distinctive area of Toronto, as a specific location:


While I liked the first concept, I hated the 2nd one. But I sent them both to Jennifer, to get her suggestions. After talking with her and getting the proper final dimensions for the artwork, I drew up another round of cover concepts: some were slight tweaks to previous ideas, while others took the cover concept in different directions:


After sending these to Jennifer, I was told that concept 6 was approved. She also sent back a rough mockup of the cover with all the copy in place:


That mockup formed the basis for the final cover illustration, which is at the top of this post.

I also drew 20 black and white interior illustrations, to be printed very small, as chapter openings. You can see a sampling of some of them below:


All in all, this was another highly enjoyable project to work on. Jennifer Lum gave me a lot of freedom on this, especially with the interior art, and was a great collaborator to work with.

For more information The Amazing Absorbing Boy, you can check out the the listing on Random House Canada's website.