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!

Muppet Secret Invasion!

I've had this comic for quite some time. I never could think of a neat enough idea to do it justice. It's for a good friend afterall, so I wanted it to be nice!

These sketch covers are something else...I feel like I have to wrestle it just to take ink! It looks like Marvel and all the other publishers would just print on standard bristol stock...y'know what comics are usually drawn on?! But no, these things are quite slick! That being said, I decided to just leave the pencile in for the background. I was afraid it would smudge all over, so there you go.

It's always daunting staring at a blank sheet of paper, let alone a sketch cover! Not like you can throw it away and grab a new one if/when you mess up! You just have to push through and finish. (sounds like I'm bracing you guys for a crappy cover huh?)

I typically draw out what I want to do first and then transpose it over to the sketch cover. That's how I did this one at last night's Sketch Charlotte meeting.

So here's the one I did for my buddy Brian Eison of the Dollar Bin. I hope you like it! :)

Sketchercise - Music related art: Roy Orbison - part 4

Took a week to get through all the steps, scanning and posts, but here it is! I haven't worked like this in awhile. I used to use Photoshop a lot more than I do now,
but I find that the drawings lose some of their life and personality when manipulated digitally. Besides, whatever commission I've gotten havre called for the entire
process to be done on one sheet, so I didn't have the luxury of using Photoshop to help make up for my many imperfections!

I did some light touch ups around the hands and on his hair. I then added the gradient in two steps using all of the markers I have 10% - 90%. Not quite as good as I'd hoped or practiced, but I gotta
keep moving! I also added some greys to his glasses to help build the contrats for the piece (30% & 50% cool greys). I actually liked how that turned out!

step 3.0




I scanned it in this morning at 400 dpi and tweaked the brightness/contrast ever so slightly so as to not disprupt the gradients. I then went in with a burn tool and darkened everything up equally. I trimmed the edges arond the piece and there you have it!

step 3.5 - the final!




For the few who actually stayed with me or this I really appreciate it and I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did!

See you next time!