skull mask logo 2

did some quick sketches of a logo I'm working on while the kids are getting cleaned up:


Here's the same idea but a little more refined. I think is a pretty cool image.

here's a variation:

logo 1

lady warlord sketch

here's another design for the lady warlords

sketch: Warlords MC

Playing around with colored pencils today doing some more designs for the Warlords Motorcycle Club members. Reminds me of drawings I used to do in school. I've been going back and forth with the idea of giving the female bugs human female characteristics ("boobs" or "no-boobs"). Right now I am leaning toward "boobs", mainly because I think it looks cooler. Also, I think this design for the female roach racer is ok but the leathers are too modern for the gang. I'll be rolling the clock back for her in the next design.

sketch: Charlie

Another Card

Marker on bristol, 2.5" x 3.5 "

Trickster Cards

Tonight I worked on a couple trading cards for Trickster. I'll do a couple more tomorrow.

Interview City Paper

There's an interview with me from the City Paper Arts Desk.

Kitchen Race

The last paper I am trying out is the 500 Series Illustration board for Wet Media. It's nice and big, 15x22. and the drawing came out pretty nice. I put a lot of water on this and it held up great. I doubt I'll use it again because it is large and pretty stiff making it a pain to scan with my pathetic scanner.

Sketch: More Wasp Gang

Not my best drawing but it's ok and was fun to draw. These drawings im just trying to get a sense of what the different characters in Bug Bomb will look like. The Wasp gang is patterned after Capsule gang - the lads from Akira. I like the preppy look too.

The Wasp Gang

Working on some wasp characters for Bug Bomb. Here's a sketch:

Roach Rider

Doing some sketching since my kid's baseball game got rained out. I drew this on Strathmore 500 Series Bristol with a Vellum surface. Really nice. Not nearly as toothy as the watercolor paper I used in the last post. Plus this comes in 11 x 17 sheets. Pretty cool. i have one more paper to try out but it hasn't come in the mail yet.
The 500 series Bristol did warp a bit more than the watercolor paper but not as much as the 400 series bristol. So I like this one the best.

New paper - Strathmore 400 series cold press watercolor pad

I've been working 'wet' lately, doing ink washes with gobs of water and the bristol board I've used was getting all warped. So to combat this I am trying out some new paper. First is the Strathmore 400 series Cold press Watercolor paper. Really heavy duty, comes in a 12x17 spiral pad.



I did this sketch of some roach dudes with brushes, Rosemary and Co Series 33 size 2 for the lines and size 4 for the wash.



The paper held up great to the washes. It's pretty toothy and seemed to soak up a lot more water then the bristol so I had to mix more washes and dip my brush more. Pretty nice though and held up better for this type of work then the bristol.

Trickster Promotion

from the Trickster blog:

A bunch of contributing artists to Trickster: Native American Tales: A Graphic Collection will be at Big Planet Comics in Vienna, Va., this Sat., May 15, for a signing from 2-4 p.m. In attendance: Matt Dembicki, Andrew Cohen, Evan Keeling, Paul Zdepski, Chris Piers, Jacob Warrenfeltz, Mike Short, Jerry Carr, Rand Arrington and Scott White. We'll also be doing sketches and giving away artist trading cards featuring Trickster critters (see below)! I'll also give a very brief talk about the project. Come by and join the fun!

See you there!

Bug Bomb page 1

page 1 completed

BubBomb 4 tiers of panels...one more to go

Some more work on "Bug Bomb" page 1 tonight. I like these panels. you can also faintly see the layout of the final panel on the page. not sure if my scanner could suck worse though. Apologies for the crappy looking scan and weird blotchy areas. it's amazingly bad...the big gray bar in the middle of the bottom part of the page is mind blowing. not sure how that got there. really annoying.

Trickster Nominated for a "YALSA"

From the Trickster blog,

Trickster was recently nominated for the Young Adult Library Services Association's 2011 Great Graphic Novels for Teens.

I'm amazed and excited by some of the press and reception this book is getting.

Links

Some links Kevin snowed me today

Mars import comics and whatnot
League of Movable Type open source fonts

Reference: Presentation tools

I do a lot of presentations at work and found a couple cool little apps from the Duarte Design blog

The first one is a visualization app for streaming/showing live twitter feeds during a presentation - visible tweets
the second is a slick presentation tool called prezi. It makes really nice transitions and allows you to zoom in and out really easy. Here's one I did jsut to play with it. Took me about 30 minutes.

drawing process on Prezi

a little more page 1

working on a tier-a-night getting more comfortable with the washing technique. Right now I'm not happy with the backgrounds but I think everything will look ok when the word balloons are added in.

Two tiers

Bug Bomb top tier page 1

here's the first three panels of page 1 of "Bug Bomb" (written by Kevin Panetta). Kind of a bad scan - bluryness in the second panel. But overall I like how this is coming out.

roachy heads and whatnot

sketch book

Trickster is Available

Reposted from Matt Dembicki's blog:

Trickster is now available at Amazon.com. You can order here.
It will very soon be on the shelves of major bookstores and indie stories.
Thanks for your support!

Greg Rodgers and I have a story in there called, "Giddy Up Wolfie" (Page 111) Check it out!

sketch book

Reading a little manga got me geeked to draw. so I did a version of Monster fight's Cassie with my watercolors.

old tttfomb page

here's an old page from an old unfinished project.

doodles and scanner hate

is there anything worse then dropping a couple hundred on new hardware and it's a piece of shit? I hate my new scanner. SO I went to plug in my 10 year old canon even though it only worked in spurts....well too bad for me, there are no cano scan drivers for mac so it's too bad for me. Whatever. sticking with the crap for now but god it sucks.

Anyway, for your enjoyment, here is a crappy scan of a mediocre sketch.

sketch: dirty dishes

back to work: colors for Monster fights 1

Been a while since I had a working computer, tablet and photoshop all working but I finally got it all last back together again so I can get back to coloring. Here is the latest page of monster fights one that I drew last year but still haven't finished coloring. more soon.

into the black : more bits and pieces

OD Carved out

OD Rocky

Touched up drawing

into the black inks

sketch: into the black 2

another perspective

Sketch: Into the Black

a design I am working on.

sketch again

Fixed my scanner I think...the first image is the old image with the crap scan; it just looks really harsh. The second is after the fix and is much tamer. Not exactly sure what was wrong with it but it looks better now.

Papa Roach

Got a new scanner and it sux so far....regardless here is a sketch I did last night of a roach pops. brush and ink washes.

page 18 - backgrounds and scorpions

Page 18 colors - more work

Made some good progress.

page 18 color

No heat in my house tonight so I'm coloring in the cold. Here are the flats for page 18. This took me a looooong time. My fingers are getting really cold. dang.

Sketch

Got some new brushes I wanted to try out only to realize I don't have any ink left. dug out a bottle of Higgins Eternal and remembered why I stopped using it. Here's the sketch.


Now off to dick blick to order some decent ink.

John McNamee at the Daily Cross Hatch

Funny dude and fellow Super Wrestle cartoonist John McNamee was featured a couple days ago over at the Daily Cross Hatch. Also checkout his strip, "Pie Comics".

Oregon Ridge Nature Center

The folks from the Oregon Ridge Nature Center used a drawing of mine in their newsletter this month

sketch

random painting

roach racers

Sketch: Greaser Roaches

Reference: roaches

Some good sites
http://webs.lander.edu/rsfox/invertebrates/periplaneta.html

http://www.microscopy-uk.org.uk/mag/indexmag.html?http://www.microscopy-uk.org.uk/mag/artjul05/wdparasite2.html

Reference: "american greasers"

Post about American Greasers from the Secret Forts Blog.

LINK: POSES

http://mjranum-stock.deviantart.com/

and page4

leviathan pp1-3

still working on this for now. cleaned up page 2 and details of page 3.

some quick cuts

more wacom work

Worked a little on trying to draw a little better using the wacom. Took a pic from yesterday and drew on top of it. doing this all electronically allows you to move objects around to improve the composition. Here I moved the dingy in the foreground over to the left to improve the balance of the drawing.

wacom sketching