More Inks over Kirby Pencils

Again, another looooong delay between blog postings. I've been working so much on new stuff lately, but most of it is comics work which I really don't want to show until its all complete, so I've been scrambling for stuff to post here on my poor neglected blog. Hopefully, you won't mind looking at these samples of my inks over Jack Kirby's pencils while waiting for newer stuff.

As many of you know, I really dig practicing my inking over Kirby's artwork. He drew such complete pencil art that its usually a breeze to ink. I inked these over a few afternoons, a bit here and there at the start of my workday as a warm-up for the day's drawing. They were scanned from copies of the Jack Kirby Collector (a great Kirby zine) and printed out in blue before inking. I also have Ramon Perez to thank for scanning the final art for me (Ramon has a large-format scanner -- I gotta get one of those!).

Anyway, hopefully I'll be back soon to show some new comic art and stories I've written!

Fist-A-Cuffs: Lucy Legless!

Some of you may be familiar with Sam Hiti's excellent Fist-a-Cuffs event -- a website where artists create characters to fight head to head (in the best thunderdome style) and voters pick who wins. I tried to enter a previous match before (see my previous blog entry here), but was a bit late getting in the deadline. However, for the recent gigantic-size Fist-a-cuffs 3, I was happy to enter a new fighter, whom my good friend Steve Manale dubbed "Lucy Legless"!

Unfortunately for Lucy, while she survived the first round, she was soundly defeated in the second. I can't complain too much though, as the fighter who defeated her went on to trounce the entire division. Still, she did get to get in some nice smack talk.

Now, in my opinion, Lucy was kinda doomed from the start as my original design and drawing for her was waaaay better but had to be changed due to rule restrictions. Originally, Lucy came with a crew of "nerdbots" whom she controlled the way a queen bee controls the hive. However, Fist-a-cuffs rules demanded that I remove her little platoon and just let her fight solo. Fortunately, I was able to redraw her to comply. Unfortunately, that meant that she lost most of her firepower. However, here on my blog, I can post my much-better original drawing for Lucy Legless below.

For those who voted for Lucy during the event, my most sincere thanks go out to you. And for those of you who are going "whaaa??" and have no idea what I'm talking about at all, I urge you to check out Fist-a-cuffs for yourself and join in the madness.

The (original) Uncanny X-Men!

Again, my apologies for not updating this blog much recently -- work and other projects seem to be taking up all my time lately, so I haven't had much personal work that I could post here. However, to make up for that, I thought I'd share this recent two-colour painting I did of everyone's favourite mutant super-team -- the Uncanny X-Men!

Now for some of you, this may not be an X-Men team that you recognize, as I've chosen to draw up the original Stan Lee/Jack Kirby created team instead of a more modern incarnation of the merry mutants. All I can say is that although I grew up reading the classic Chris Claremont/Dave Cockrum/John Byrne version of the team in the 80's (the one with Wolverine), I've always had a desire to draw the original lineup of Cyclops, Iceman, Angel, Marvel Girl and the Beast (along with the ubiquitous Professor X).


I've always liked that team a lot, especially since they were actually teenagers and often acted like it. So, for this picture, I thought I'd try to emphasize that point. Cyclops is still Slim Summers here, Bobby Drake is the youngest kid on the team, Warren Worthington is a rich fashion-plate, Jean Grey is a society deb and Hank McCoy is a jock with the heart of a nerd. I Hope you like it and don't mind the few bits of redesign I did on their appearances!

And in keeping with recent tradition, you can check out the intial concept idea and rough pencil sketch for the drawing on the right.

Orion Fights for Earth!

Whoa! Sorry about the delays in updating this blog, folks. Its been a hectic week or two with the recent Toronto Paradise ComicCon and a couple of other signing events. My thanks go out to all the nice folks who stopped by my table to say hello -- I had a great time doing sketches and selling some fancy new giclee prints I had made.

Now, when I got back into to my studio after a few days away from the drawing board, I realized my artistic chops were stiff, stiff, stiff! Luckily, I was able to work out some of the kinks by drawing and colouring this little picture of one of my favourite Jack Kirby superheroes -- Orion of the New Gods! And since I was doing it purely for fun, I couldn't resist going all "super-deformed" with it and giving him a big head. It kinda makes him a bit more cute than killer, I know, but hey, its my blog and I'll draw what I want to!

And of course, as is usual lately, you can check out my original pencil sketch for the piece below.

The Killing Girl

This is a piece I did a while ago, for the upcoming Image comic, The Killing Girl. Written by Glen Brunswick and illustrated by Frank Espinosa, its a high-action comic featuring the adventures of a mafia assassin with, shall we say, major memory issues. When Glen Brunswick asked me months ago if I wanted to contribute a piece for the back cover, of course I jumped at the opportunity. Not only is Glen a heck of a nice guy and talented writer, but Frank Espinosa is one of my favourite artists of recent years. To be associated with anything that the two of them have collaborated on was a huge honour for me!

Anyway, the book ships in august, and you should definitely check it out when it hits the shelves. The pages I've seen so far look fantastic. But don't take my word for it, check out the previews on the Killing Girl blog.

Now, in keeping with my recent habit of posting the preliminary process work for my paintings and drawings, you can see for yourself the various roughs, pencils and colour-studies I did for this pin-up below:

Max Finder Mystery: Collected Casebook 2

Hurrays! The 2nd volume of the Max Finder Mystery: Collected Casebook is out, featuring artwork by yours truely. Now, I've posted about Max Finder before (you can check out my post about volume 1 here), but for those who don't know, Max is a 7th grade detective who solves mysteries in and around his hometown with the aid of his trusty sidekick, Alison Santos. Written in a you-solve-it format, his adventures were originally featured in the excellent canadian children's magazine Owl. This 2nd volume collects another 10 mystery comic stories, mostly from the 2nd year of the series' run, along with a bonus section featuring puzzles and an artists sketchbook. Its available at fine bookstores everywhere but you can also order it online from the publisher Owlkids, or from online retailers like Amazon.com or Chapters.ca. It makes a great gift for readers aged 9 to 13.

Actually, Volume 2 has been out since late March, but I thought I'd make a post here, as I'll be appearing at a special signing at the Toronto comic shop the Beguiling on Saturday June 9th, from 2pm along with Max's writer and creator Liam O'Donnell. So if you're in the Toronto area, come on by and say hello -- I'll even draw you a sketch for attending!

And since this is a sketchblog, you can check out my sketches and the evolution of the cover of Casebook 2 below:

Sketchbook gags

These are the kind of gag cartoons I'll doodle in my sketchbook, which probably goes a long way to explaining why I could never be a gag cartoonist. Most of these are pretty old, and were printed in my old zine, Papercut.

Supergirl

I actually don't have much interest in Supergirl as a comic-book character, but after seeing all the excellent redesigns of her that other artists have posted on the drawingboard.org, I thought I'd doodle up one my own. I drew up and painted this one fairly quickly, so its a bit looser and sketchier than some of my other two-tone paintings. And thinking about it, I really don't think its so much a painting of Supergirl as it is a of a girl wearing a Supergirl outfit -- at least, that's how I saw it my head while I was working on it.

In keeping with some of my other posts lately, you can compare the final marker painting to my original pencil rough below. Personally, I think the pencil drawing was a bit more successful than the painting but, hey -- you can't win 'em all!

Free Comic Book Day...

...has come and gone! Yup, for those who missed it, it was Saturday, May 5th. For my part, I spent it at the fine Toronto comicshop The Beguiling, signing books and doing free sketches for anyone who wanted one (Spider-man and Venom seemed the most popular requests). The weather was great, the turnout was even better and I had such a good time drawing in the sun that I got a farmer's tan. Thanks to everyone who came out and looked for me (hey, Doodlers!) -- I hope you all had a good time and got some nice comics to take home.

Below is my contribution to one of the fine books being offered for FCBD, the excellent Comics Festival comic. Its a one-pager, written by Brian Mclachlan, pencilled by me and inked by Darwyn Cooke. I've posted it here in black and white, but its printed in full colour in the free comic -- maybe that will make you hunt down a copy!

Incidentally, this is the 2nd year that the three of us have collaborated on a page for the Comics Festival book. You can check out our previous effort in an older post from my blog here.

More Portraits

This one's an illustration I did for a wedding invitation. The happy couple in the drawing are friends of mine, and they asked my wife and I to design their invites. Naturally, we couldn't refuse!

Cookies!

This one's just a playful little sketch I did up earlier this week. As most of my friends know, and as I've mentioned in previous posts, I just love drawing big-headed (or "super-deformed") super-heroes.

And I know the powers-that-be at Marvel Comics have "ret-conned" Wolverine so that he's not Canadian anymore, but to me, he'll always be a short, hairy canuck.

Note: Ok, ok, looks like I was a bit premature about my scorn for wolvie not being a Canadian. Turns out several people have pointed out that he was born in Alberta, so he's still a canuck. But that still doesn't make up for him being named "James Howlett"...to me that's kinda like naming him "Fangs Wolvington" or something.

Thanks to everyone who sent in the correct info! Glad to see Canadians still love their unofficial super-hero mascot.

Kirby's OMAC

OMAC actually stands for One Man Army Corps, but to me he's just One More Awesome Character created by Jack Kirby. Really, you can't go wrong with a superhero who wears a mohawk and sideburns!

I penciled this one during an afternoon as a warmup, put it in a drawer, then pulled it out and inked it one evening when I had some spare time. As you might tell, I was doing my best to unleash my "inner Kirby" while working on it. And since I don't work much in full colour anymore, I thought it might be fun to take a crack at colouring it and adding some tones in photoshop. As with a lot of my recent posts, you can see the original pencil drawing for it below.

A Little Portrait

Here's a portrait I painted recently of me and my lovely wife Claudia. Its been cold and rainy here in Toronto, so I drew this one up in anticipation of the coming spring weather. We often go walking through the alley ways in Toronto together while I look for reference for my paintings and I thought it'd make a nice scene for a portrait of the two of us. As with most of the other two-tone pieces I've posted here, I painted this one up with coloured ink markers on watercolour paper.

For this drawing, in answer to the occasional emails I get asking about my process, I thought I'd scan the painting during various stages to give an idea of how I go about working in two-tone with markers. So for those interested, I've compiled the various scans and made a few notes to explain how I work, which you can see on the right. You can also see the pencil drawing I did the painting from at the bottom.

And of course, I have to thank Claudia for scanning and colour correcting this one for me. Being a designer and art-director herself, she's a photoshop whiz and often scans and cleans up my work for me...and she did a great job on this one!

Beware of Bee-bot!

What is this drawing, you ask? Well, it was to be my entry to Sam Hiti's fist-a-cuffs event where drawings square off against each other (check it out for yourself, if you aren't familiar with it). Since the current round of matches were to be tag-team, my good buddy Nick Derington contacted me (at the very very last minute) and suggested we link up for it. We quickly decided on a robot/cyborg theme for our entries. After some furious scribbling, this was my result! I called her Bee-Bot 2000 and she was designed to eliminate the opposition from a distance, since Nick's robot was designed for close-quarters combat. I'll leave it to others to try and guess all the various armaments she may or many not have.

Unfortunately, we totally missed the deadline for entries, so our super-awesome team will, sadly, not be wiping the drawingboards with the other contestants. Bummer! Though, to be honest, some of those other entries looked way awesomely indestructable with atomic-laser eyes and claws and stuff like that...

Still, I liked this drawing enough to post it here. Hope you like it.

Toronto Back Alleys pt. 14

Winter seems to be finally over, and we haven't had any snow on the ground in Toronto for a few weeks now, but I thought I'd post one more back-alley painting that I did over the winter-time. I went for a walk in the early evening today, just to get out of the studio a bit, and I definitely got that "spring is coming" feeling in the air.

That's Amare!

Here's another basketball related pen and ink portrait, this one of Amare Stoudemire of the Phoenix Suns -- one of my favourite NBA players. I was a bit more warmed up and confident in my pen technique by the time I got to this one, so I was fairly satisfied with the results. Again, as with the last one, this one was also photo-referenced from a cover of Slam Magazine.

For those who emailed and asked, I usually use a hunt 102 nib when I draw with pens, but these last two were drawn with the slightly thicker hunt 108 with a few of the darker areas done with the more flexible 103 nib. I used the 108 because I couldn't find any 102s around my studio at all -- I usually have a box of them lying around, but didn't realize I'd run out months ago. I turned my whole studio over looking for one but, sadly, there wasn't even a rusty one lying around. I think it worked out for the best though, as the thinner nib sometimes creates lines that are so fine that they don't even show up on my scanner. Anyway, enough pen-geekery!


If you're interested, you can also check out my rough pencil sketch/underdrawing on the right. I usually make a rough tonal study in pencil before I do any penwork just to map out the various values. I often think that pen and ink work is very close to painting -- the pen strokes are used to model and build up tones, with line spacing determining value and the direction of the strokes used to model the form.

Geez...I geeked out again...

Pen and Ink (and Basketball)

Those who know me, know I am a totally obsessive NBA basketball nut (see? Its not comics and Kirby all the time!) so here's a pen and ink portrait of Toronto Raptors forward, Chris Bosh. After a few losing seasons, the Raptors finally made the playoffs recently and I think I had that in mind when I was doodling tonight after work.

As you might be able to tell, this one was drawn in pen and ink -- a medium I enjoy but don't work in often. I usually prefer to do most of my work with a brush, but every once in a while I break out the pens and try to work out the kinks just for variety's sake. Since I don't use them enough, I've never been very confident about my pen technique and it was about two-thirds of the way through this drawing before I felt I was getting into a rhythm with it, but I thought I'd post it here anyway. Of course, I referened a photo for this one, specifically from a cover of Slam Magazine.

If you're interested in seeing more of my very rare attempts with pen and ink, I've posted some other portraits of basketball players in an older blog entry here.

Kids Stuff

I really enjoy doing illustrations for children's magazines. The assignments are usually very fun and creative, and allow me to draw some crazy things. Whenever I work on stuff for kids, I'm always reminded of how different my day-job is from, say, working in an office somewhere. Its strange sometimes when I talk to people and they talk about what they did at work that day, and then they ask me what I did -- and I tell them something like "I drew monkeys riding tricycles today" or "today, I designed three different kinds of monsters doing aerobics" or something like that.

Here are some spot illustrations drawn over the last few months for children's publications:


These were drawn for the excellent Nickelodeon Magazine -- always a fun magazine to work for. They were fake games designs for a feature on Christmas-related board games -- as in "what if famous games were customized for the holidays?"


This mummy was also drawn for Nickelodeon, but for their Halloween issue. I think it was even turned into a sticker - cool!


These two were character designs for a children's book project that I was originally supposed to work on, but had to back out of due to some scheduling conflicts. They were also fun to draw, so I thought I'd share them here.

Miss Mary Marvel!

I had an unexpected evening off work recently, so I found a couple of hours to do this quick painting of everyone's favourite superheroine-next-door, Mary Marvel. I've always dug the Marvel Family of heroes ever since I was 6 years old and saw the old "Shazam!" cartoon on TV. Since I had a little extra time, this one was painted old-school style with gouache on water-colour paper. The benefit of working in gouache (as opposed to my regular marker method) is that the colours go on so flat and clean that it requires very little photoshop cleanup after it's painted. You can compare the final to the rough pencil sketch on the right.

My Favourite Cartoonists Part 2: Noel Sickles

Noel Sickles is the Man. Although he's primarly remembered as an illustrator and worked as a cartoonist for only a handful of years in the 1930's, Sickles revolutionized comic art. While Milt Caniff is justly celebrated for his deep chiascuro art-style, it was Sickles who taught his friend the basics of that approach. During the few years that he worked on the comic strip Scorchy Smith, Sickles really laid the groundwork for much of the cartooning that came after. In my opinion, few people did black and white artwork as well as he did, and none did it better.

As a writer, Sickles is nothing special, but as an artist and draftsman, he was second to none. His style was characterized by boldness, spontaneity and a sense of restless experimentation. I always got the feeling that Sickles was so good that he got bored very easily and was constantly inventing new ways of drawing just to keep himself interested in working at a high level. He was masterful in pen and ink, he did wonderful duo-tone artwork and most of all, he had an absolutely beautiful and lush black brush-work style. At a time when most people were doing line-art based cartooning, Sickles was more interested in shadows and lighting, using rich black areas to make his drawings leap off the page. He understood light and atmosphere like few others of his era and he used that knowledge to great effect in his art.

For me personally, I learned about line drop-outs, proper back-spotting and letting art just breathe from studying his work. The man could render snow in black and white better than anyone I'd ever seen. He drew jungle scenes that took my breath away. And nobody gave me the feeling of just being there in a scene, in a few quick brush strokes, better than Sickles. On my best days, when I feel I've really nailed in ink an impression of a place or a certain kind of light, I sometimes feel like I'm just doing my best, but very weak, impression of Noel Sickles.

Toronto Back Alleys pt. 13

For those who asked, here's another back alley painting. And, like the last one, its a winter scene. This one took a little longer than usual to draw, mainly because I was trying to be very careful with it. I drew this after I had screwed up a drawing just previous to this one (not posted here). There's few things that bum me out more than blowing a drawing in the last few moments after spending hours on it. It really deflates me. An old art teacher of mine once told me that you don't make one mistake, you always make at least two -- you make a mistake and then you quickly make another trying to fix it. And then, sometimes, you make another and another....which of course, is exactly what happened! Anyway, the problem with working with coloured inks like I do is that there's very few ways to fix mistakes once you've made them. I also try to be fairly spontaneous and loose with these sketches as well, so it can be a bit of a balancing act trying to experiment without making mistakes.

Regardless, I thought this one worked out well enough to share here. I hope you like it!

My Favourite Cartoonists Part 1: Roy Crane

Whenever people ask me about my influences as a cartoonist, Roy Crane is always near the top of the list. I first encounted his work almost a decade ago, and its been a source of great inspiration ever since. I know there's been a resurgence of interest in the work of early comic strip artists lately, and great cartoonists like Noel Sickles, Frank Robbins and Alex Raymond are being re-discovered by a whole new generation, but sometimes it seems to me that Roy Crane is still being neglected and not being afforded the respect he's due.

As a pioneer of the adventure strip form during the 1930's, Crane was very popular and influential with the first generation of comic book creators and well known in his day. Even the late great Alex Toth often mentioned how much he respected Crane's elegant and refined cartooning. However, many people today seem unaware of his art and writing and just how beautiful and humane it was.


Personally, I learned a lot from studying Roy Crane's comic strips. His strip Wash Tubbs/Captain Easy is a wonderful blend of humour and light hearted, all-ages adventure -- the kind that doesn't seem to exist any more. But his follow-up strip, Buz Sawyer, is even better, in my opinion. Like Peanuts or Calvin and Hobbes, when I read Buz Sawyer, I get a real sense of the warmth and humanity of the artist's personality. And Crane was an absolute master of adventure continuity writing. If you read a handful of strips, you'll be hooked on the story line and characters for good.

As for his artwork, its a joy to behold. The Wash Tubbs/Captain Easy artwork is a big-foot cartooning treat, but man, that Buz Sawyer stuff is absolute heaven! If you want to know where I get my two-tone sensibility from, the secret is that a good part of it comes from Crane and Buz Sawyer. He drew that strip on duo-tone board, so it was illustrated in black, white and a couple of grey tones -- all of which he handled masterfully. There's some panels I saw early in my career that just completely floored me, and they convinced me to stop working in just black and white and start adding a half-tone or second colour. The illusion of light and atmosphere he created with his duo-tone artwork was incomparable and when it was coupled with his cartooning, which stressed clarity and stripped compositions down to their essential elements, the result was magic.

I can see the influence of Roy Crane in many other cartoonists that I admire like John Severin, Joe Shuster, C.C. Beck and Jaime Hernandez, and I hope that more and more people will discover his art, and the wonderful body of work he left behind.

Illustration Work: Karnhuset (part 5)

Ok, here's one last image from my recent series of illustrations done for swedish agency, Karnhuset. This one's pretty simple, just a cake and piechart combo -- nothing to it, right? Except for the fact that after I drew it, the nice people at the agency actually got a baker to fabricate a cake based on my design for their promotion! How crazy cool is that?! Now I've designed stuff that went on t-shirts, CD-covers, even toys, but I've never had a cake made based on something I drew! Too bad that they're in europe, and weren't be able to send one to me -- I'd love to know what my favourite green colour tastes like. Yum!

Special note: My thanks to my fabulously talented wife, Claudia, for turning my drawings here into a vector file. She's a wonderful artist in her own right, and an expert at drawing food. I drew the original image in marker, and she converted it all in Illustrator to an eps file -- and even I couldn't tell the difference!

Illustration Work: Karnhuset (part 4)

Here's two more illustrations, drawn for the swedish agency Karnhuset for their website redesign. Like the other drawings done for them (which I posted here in December), these are portraits of their staff members. As with most of my work, I drew this in marker and ink and then colour corrected it a bit in photoshop. The final artwork on their website has a different colour scheme, but I thought I'd change 'em up before posting them here for variety's sake.

Also, just for fun, I thought I'd post the various concept sketches and pencil roughs that were done for the client on the way to drawing the final artwork and having it approved. You can see it all for yourself below:

Toronto Back Alleys pt. 12

There was a big snowstorm that hit Toronto a week ago, which was great since, up until January, we had a relatively snow-free winter. Personally, I like the snow, especially the way the sunlight bounces off of it at midday when it's really bright. Then its dazzling to me. In my spare time, I've been drawing up some more alley way pictures again, all with a winter theme, so I thought I'd post one here.

Kirby Always Rules

Sorry about the long delays between posts, folks. I've been very busy this year with a lot of freelance work, much of which I can't share or post, which has led to my blog looking a bit neglected lately. However, to make up for it, I thought I'd post this page I inked up for fun one afternoon.

As many of you can obviously tell, the original pencils were from a Thor comic book page, drawn by the legendary creator of Thor, Jack 'King' Kirby. Most people who know me know that I am one truely ga-ga Kirby fan (like thousands of other cartoonists!) and I, like many others, love to occasionally practice my inking over reproductions of his pencils. It's a comic-geeky thing, I know, but I'm not alone in doing so.

Previously, I've posted several other Kirby pages that I've inked on this blog. However, I thought I'd post this one, which was done a bit differently. Namely, I took some small liberties with the art and inked and toned it much like most of my own 2-colour work. It was done fairly quickly and for fun, without any attempt at real finesse, so it might look a bit rushed, but I was pretty happy with the results -- happy enough to share it here, anyway. I hope you'll like it too. The overall effect reminds me a bit of those old british marvel-comic reprints, which were sometimes printed in black and white with one spot colour -- usually red or blue. For comparison's sake, below is the original Kirby pencil art -- which I scanned in from a reproduction found in the excellent The Jack Kirby Collector magazine.

And as always, my thanks to Jack Kirby, who left behind such a wonderful body of work for artists like me to study and learn from. He was the best super-hero artist ever, folks. There will never be another like him.