ANTHOLOGIES!

I'm making my sequential art debut this Summer with the same story appearing in two different anthologies. The first anthology to see print will be the Sketch Charlotte FCBD Anthology, which I'm also editing. It's a collection of original stories from local creators from the Charlotte, NC area. It's going to end up being about 40 pages and will be available on a very limited basis to a few shops in the Charlotte area. I'll be sketching at Borderlands in Greenvile, SC for FCBD (Sat May 7th) with good buddy and Sketchbook partner Terence Hoskins, so I'm sure I'll have a small stash with me there!
The second one will be for the yearly convention anthology that the guys over at the Dollar Bin put together, the theme was buried treasure. I actually created this story for that anthology and then adjusted the art to fit SC's size requirements.
This almost gave the story a different feel based on layout alone. It's interesting to see the two together, so I thought I'd post both here to not only tease both anthologies, but to show you how different two anthology books can be.

Top: the Dollar Bin piece; bottom: the Sketch Charlotte piece

Preorder your copy today!

$5.00 each (with custom sketch)
Con't US Shipping & Handling: $1.50
Outside of the US (e-mail for details)

Available beginning June 3rd, 2011
(debuting at 2011 Heroes Con)
BigDogsStudio -at- gmail.com

Check out our deviantART pages for moer art:
Brandon - http://bigdogsstudio.deviantart.com/
Mark- - http://markg72.deviantart.com/
Terence - http://teeminus.deviantart.com/
Henry - http://oh-the-humanatee.deviantart.com/

Lunch Sketch - Batgirl!

I catch a lot of flack for rarely drawing women characters. Well, I'm never really asked to draw them...guess that could be because people haven't seen my womern! That is something I need to rectify. So I decided today during lunch to try my hand at the Barbara Gordon Batgirl. I've also been kicking around the Bruce Timm style as of late to see if I could find any room to evolve my style, so this is also one of those experiments.

40 minutes - pencil with prismacolor pens & copic markers - 8-1/2 x 11

Lunch Sketch - Demona (colors by Rico!)

Did this as a quick warm up the other day at lunch. I'd seen Eric Canete's Demona commission a few weeks earlier and that image crawled into my head and nested!
Well, it sat around a week or two unsure of its final destination. So I stuck it in my satchel and pretty much forgot about it. After all it's just a sketch I did for fun, similar to what I'll be doing on the backs of our upcoming sketchbooks.
So I came across it at last night's Sketch Charlotte and I asked the uber talented Rico Renzi if he'd do me the honor of putting some colors to it. That guy colors all day long (and I'm pretty sure in his sleep too) so there's no harm in asking him to color something else in his spare time is there? Okay so I'm inconsiderate, but if I hadn't asked this would have never seen the light of day! (THANKS RICO!) He came late so he didn't have his normal cache of color, so he borrowed a few pens from Henry Eudy & me to crank out this beauty. Hope you like it 1/2 as much as I do!

2011 Sketchbook prep

This is one of my favorite times of the year: convention season. I'll spend the next 2-3 months gearing up our annual sketchbook. I'll take scans of commissions, assignments, random drawings and sketch group pieces from the previous year and start cobbling them into what will eventually make their way into the book.

Here's today's example: BPRD's Trevor Bruttenholm

I originally did this one for a Sketchercise over at www.sketchcharlotte.com
It was nice enough, but lacked a certain "oomph" needed to be in the sketchbook. So I set up the dimensions and finished drawing out the piece to fill out the area. I then added the tentacles and the background I had created in photoshop (a take off on the Abe background I used last year).

Here are the before and after pics:

before:




And the after:


Volume 5 will debut at the 2011 Heroes Con (with new artist Henry Eudy!).
Copies of vol 3 and 4 of the Big Dog's Studio sketchbook are still available. Both feature the art of Mark Godby, Terence Hoskins and myself. For more information G-mail me at: BigDogsStudio

Lunch Sketch - FELL

Decided to trade away my FELL comics last night. It took some doing, but I finally pulled the trigger. I picked up the tpb last Summer and was fortunate enough to have Ben Templesmith sign it for me at last year's Heroes Con. So trading the actual comics was something I was prepared to do...even though I LOVE this story! If you haven't read it yet, do yourself a favor and pick it up.

So while I brooded over the decision today at lunch I decided to do a quick send up of the lead character Detective Richard Fell. I'm not even in the same universe as Templesmith, but I sketched it out anyway! I tried to keep my style (whatever that is) out of the piece and just try to capture the character. So this piece was pretty quick...most of the time was spent in photoshop filling in blacks!

Hope you enjoy it...and go read some FELL! :)



apologies to Ellis & Templesmith...ESPECIALLY Templesmith! ;)

Lunch Sketch - T-Rex close up

I've been contemplating drawing a Tyrannosaurus Rex in a 2 page story I'm writing, so I decided to take a stab at doing a few quick studies to see if it was something I would end up using.
Enter the neat lil' 5 x 7 sketchbook I got as a Christmas present. Perfect for just this sort of thing. Rather than try and squeeze a lot on a small page I decided to zoom in on an area of interest...the T-Rex's eye.
Did this at lunch with an everyday ordinary pencil...funny thing is that even though I'm pleased with the outcome I may end up not even using it!