“I am become Cockroach…Destroyer of worlds”

A colony of cockroaches has taken up residence in our home. I drew an ink sketch of one of the little free-loaders and then transformed it into a super-villain.

Menace From the Deep

Here are some process shots for the second gouache robot/guardian-inspired painting. This time I started with a blue ground. Unlike the first one, I skipped a step. Rather than brush ink the figure after transferring him to the prepared page (a la graphite transfer), I decided to jump right into painting after darkening the lines with a ballpoint. I ended up doing ink touchups last time anyway and  figured I’d save some time and work. Stay tuned for the finished painting.

Step 1: Free hand drawing with my ink-filled waterbrush.

Step 2: Redraw with pencil, rub 6B pencil lead on the back side of the drawing and trace with ball-point pen to transfer image onto the prepared sketchbook page.

Step 3: Begin filling in flat sections of color.

Gouache Guardian

This gouache sketch started out as me using up some extra paint by painting an entire page yellow. Once that was done, I sketched a running figure in a funky futuristic armor. I redrew the sketch larger and worked out some details.

After carbonizing the back of the enlarged sketch with a 4B pencil, I traced the drawing with a pen, transferring a light pencil image onto the yellow background.

I inked the drawing with my rapidograph ink-filled Niji brushpen. I then began painting, filling up the inked areas with various colors. They were really bright and obnoxious so I went over them with a muddy red to mute them. I added the highlights with slightly dirty white paint and the shadows with blue. I left the goggles yellow.

In the background I doodled a futuristic city, adding some shadows and  few ink lines. I painting in the ground plane and added orange to the top corners to add focus to the main figure.

I still have paint left over so I began drawing 2…

Appliance World

Ballpont, rapidograph ink and watercolors. Color added at Panama Red.

Green Ghost Classic

Looking through old sketchbooks I ran across several 1-page Green Ghost stories I drew 4 or 5 years ago. I wrote out the script and then did some thumbnails before doing the full-sized pages. All the inking was done with sharpie markers. Not archival I know. I was going for clear storytelling and speed rather than perfection of line. Usually it’s the idea of a story that is most appealing and too much artistic pressure can kill some of the joy of drawing.

It was a good decision. I was able to crank the pages fairly quickly for a self-imposed deadline. There are a few things that I notice construction-wise that are a little nutty, some odd tangents, but the gags are pretty straightforward (except for the last one, the punchline of which is mysteriously absent—where’s the ON button?).

Which one do you like best (or hate the least)?

Green Rooftop

I’m going to refine this when I get the time: either Vector or hand-inked I haven’t decided yet.

The Premiere

I have a lot of stories bouncing around in my head. I usually try to jot them down immediately in a nearby sketchbook for later development. Sometimes they become a poem, a song, a short story, an illustration, or comic. In this case, I created a storyboard for a short film (could live action, could be animated). I had alot of fun working on this idea. It has a wide range of emotions and some nice acting moments. It works great in pantomime. It’s also the first time I’ve used a female protagonist. Enjoy.

The Sarge

Tooling around with a story idea, I sketched a few versions of Sarge. I like this one soI thought I’d walk through some digital inking, coloring, and texturing. For those of you with military knowledge, the uniform is a total fantasy based on poorly remembered war movies and cartoons (mind you own beeswax.) Real research to follow.

T-Shirt sketches

I volunteered to design a tshirt for my family’s summer reunion. My initial idea was to to set up a campground look with each tent representing the various sub-family groups. I set up an isometric perspective grid. The idea just wasn’t working. So I changed gears.

Concept 2 depicts iconography from the various states-of-origin for the participants. They’re assembled in a whimsical collection of floating islands joining together, a visual definition of a reunion.

As is often the case, I like my sketches  more than the final which I composited in Photoshop then redrew and tweaked in Illustrator. Since I have the illustrator files, I may do a colored version for fun at some future date. The tshirts will be a single-color silk screen so I had to work out how the lines and closed negative space would interact with the shirt color.

Green Ghost in the Shell

I was doodling around and thought it would be funny to see Green Ghost in Iron-manish armor.