fan based art coming

I am looking to rebuild my portfolio for 2017 and was looking at re-imagining existing comic characters. I have this old 3-5 page story of Milestone comics characters, Static Shock, and ICON sidekick Rocket  that I will work to complete panel work this year-- The story is called "Rocket Love" and it was written by G Walker Teon of Generate comix... here are some sketches I worked on today while watching a Netflix Series called Abstract: the art of design

gotta get my ink game in check or find an inker

Okay, I created this cool piece while watching Hulk VS cartoon on @Netflix.  The image was flowing from the pen/tablet  using my now go to sketch program- Sketchbook Pro.  I was getting pretty proud of myself and decided to try to finish the piece... note I have been sketching up a storm offline but felt no pressure to ink over anything- so it looks like cool sketch book stuff.  I felt confident in my skills.  So I figured, if I sketch digitally; I can complete a finished piece that looks as cool as my sketch- WRONG!!!   I found out that when I try to finish over a sketch digitally , I get really, really, really lazy and sloppy on following the line-work that made the sketch look so cool. I end up muddying the work and figure I can add cell shading on a different layer to fill out  what I flattened during the finished line-work....  The lesson is to truly identify what you see before inking or digitally finishing a piece. Overworking is not working smart and may damage all the coolness you put into  your original work... The real art is the ability to see your work- not just create or finish it---

Ciao- PS see case in point

start of 2017

I wanted to start 2017  stronger than before.  I am preparing to work on 10 pages of a Shadow-Walker story for the Detroit Tradecraft's 2017 anthology.    I wanted to upgrade my digital drawing, inking, and cel shading techniques.
Here is an image I cranked out today with character design similar to how I will move forward with the project.... Cheers for the New Year....

I prepared this with Sketchbook Pro 7- my goal is the use this a my chief digital tool for the comic with photoshop and Illustrator for final print out.

near end of 2016

Just wanted to post something before end of year- I have not posted in a while. I had this artwork lying around on my desktop that I created late last month.   Because I just did not want to print a naked dude without man parts;  I thought I would "pants" him.
I created the base image in Sketchbook Pro- but have more image control in photoshop- so I dressed him there. I took some generic Creed-like boxing shorts and cut them in half and placed both halves on different layers and used warp under Edit>Transform>Warp to mold the shorts to make them appear to wrap around the mannequin.  In order to make the arm in the foreground seem to overlap- I simply erased part of the top layer shorts image- and that's it- digital pantaloons
ciao

seekers ink1

just trying to ink over older art work, here is the Seekers sample 1

comic ink-n-color test 1

I was asked to do some pages for one of the partners at generate comics- doing it digitally-but instead of doing just pencils- he wants me to ink the images too. Now drawing has its own myriad of challenges- but being messy is not one of them- inking is meant to counteract being sloppy, and coloring add dimension to make the inks mean more- so I decided to practice on drawing- inking , and coloring to get ready for similar assignments....so here is draw-ink-color test one- all done in sketchbook pro

fan art- design

wanted to improve my character design work so I decided to watch some old Battle of the Planets cartoon to identify cool character designs.  So I decided to depict an variation of one of the G-force characters.   I used Photoshop for this piece.  I am trying to keep designs cleaner from the start.  My coloring needs to be upgraded.  For this piece I use flat color on one layer and created a multiply and a screen layer for shadows and high-lights of the character’s suit.  I tried to stay as close to Cel shading as possible so I used a brush on 100%. I am partial to the build up of light around hard edges- I feel that is where I give stronger visuals rather than smooth blended values...well that’s my story and I am sticking to it. I also decided to put a background in this image. This gives it a nice touch with a star-field in the background.  The circular pattern was formed by a circular motion blur. I then copied the layer several times to punch up the stars and make then distinct. So heres the image....