Joker sketch cover process

Even for something like a "sketch" cover unless I have the idea concrete in my mind's eye, I try to plan stuff out and that involves numerous steps. Here's some pics detailing the progression from thumbnail sketch to final painted piece. My original plan was to do the final piece in Prismacolor markers, but I thought I'd try painting one for once despite some fears about whether the paper covers could handle acrylics. I'm happy to say they did really well and it opens up a lot of possibilities for me on future sketch covers. But here's some of my initial marker sketches for you to check out....

For the next step I used a lightbox to roughly trace my last marker sketch. Then I mixed up some reddish purple and acrylic matte medium to lay down an underpainting. Since 1997 I've used Basics Acrylics for painting... I've used a lot of different brands but to me they are just the perfect consistency - I find a lot of other brands to be too watery for my tastes and I mix everything using primary colors and white. But I'll start by mixing up a dark purple and paint darks and lineart really quickly, then cut back over it to clean it up. Here's a couple pics of the painting in various stages.

Here's how the final piece ended up. I put it up for auction on Ebay if anybody's interested.....

Goad Batgirl/Joker sketch cover auction

Sketch covers up for bids!

I put a couple new sketch covers up for bids on Ebay - a new Star Wars one of my favorite character Boba Fett and a Batgirl one featuring my favorite comic villain The Joker. For people not in the know, you can do a search on Ebay for "blank comic sketch cover" and some issues are released with blank white covers (except for info) to draw on. When I first started doing these I treated like the sketch cards I do/did for Topps.....just on a larger scale. By that I mean inking and coloring with markers. But the other day it dawned on me to try painting one for a change. In the past I had thought about doing that but figured the surface might not hold up well to wet media i.e. it would buckle, warp, disintegrate, explode, etc. But I finally said what the hell, grabbed one of the less popular Batgirl blanks I had and just went for it...I'm really glad I did because it freed me up immensely. Usually when I do these comics in marker it would take me a couple days to do. The process would go : sketch out ideas in my sketchbook and keep revising till I had something pretty solid, make sure it was the right size in Photoshop, print out, lightbox to the cover, and then ink my main lines using Flair pens. Then I would go to Staples and make several copies of the cover and line art to practice some color schemes with my Prismacolors. The problem with using markers, and maybe this is just my limitations, but you can obviously only use the colors you have. I learned a little working on sketch cards for Topps about layering different marker colors on top of each other to create new ones / shades of other colors. But painting frees me up because I can pretty much just mix any color I need....and if something doesn't look right, I can paint over it, or tint it to push it more towards what I need. Plus it just looks less flat to me and has more energy. A few months back I went a little crazy buying blanks online so be on the look out for more to come including more Star Wars, Princess Leia, Batgirl, Batman '66, G.I. Joe, The Muppets, and more. P.S. If anybody wants a commission of any of these subjects and wants it on a sketch cover let me know. Anyway here's a link to my auctions..... Auctions

Art block!

So I've kind of been going through a little period of burnout/artist block and thought maybe I could resurrect my blog as another outlet, while I figure this shit out. This happens to me every once in awhile and I used to get freaked out about it, until I realized instead of hitting a wall, I was running into the side of a step. Hopefully, when you're an artist what you do or have done in the past isn't enough anymore and you have this need to push yourself to do better and grow. But if the answer about how exactly to do that isn't entirely clear, it can be very frustrating. So I'll either go play video games, take a walk, watch movies, or just push myself to create anything no matter how bad it is. Honestly, I still haven't figured out which of those is the right answer, or more simply whether it's just a matter of taking a break or better to work through it. I do always manage to get through it, but it's scary as hell when it happens. I find myself falling into this cycle of thinking I'm washed up, I've lost my "powers", freaking out thinking my work will eventually dry up, and people will forget about me, etc. But then I'll get an e-mail about a job or from a fan, maybe I'll see a movie or play a video game that inspires me and then I'll get out of my funk. So that's where I'm at right now - right in the thick of one of those funks. I did however do this sketch cover the other day. For a couple months I've had a stack of blank sketch covers chilling in the corner that I have slowly amassed over the past year and have been meaning to knock out. Normally I do them with Prismacolor markers and even though I was getting pretty good at layering different colors to create new ones, you are pretty much limited by what you have/ are willing to spend money on. Some colors I would have to (ugh) go to Hobby Lobby to get them because I couldn't find them at my mainstay, United Art and Education but they jack up their prices on art supplies, because they're dicks. But it dawned on me that I should just say screw it and try actually PAINTING a cover - I could mix pretty much all the colors I needed and also could do some looser style pieces. The only downside I saw is not knowing how the covers would react to wet paint being applied to them i.e. would they get super wrinkled and buckle? But I was sick of seeing the stack and just kind of jumped in. I'm happy to say besides a little bit of warping that will probably go away in time the paint didn't really affect the cover at all. Best of all, by painting it, things went a lot more quickly AND in my opinion, the final product looks more energetic and stands out more than one of my Prismacolor ones. It'll be interesting to see how doing things this way translates to a Star Wars sketch cover.

Inktober Pieces

It's been awhile since I've posted to my blog, mostly because I've moved onto / am distracted by other outlets like Instagram, Flickr, Tumblr, and of course Facebook. I'm getting pretty burnt out on Facebook so I figured I'd take the tarp off the old blog and get it started again. I've been participating in this years Inktober challenge and so far so good. The plan is to compile all my pieces together in a zine / sketchbook for sale. Also I've been putting my daily pieces up for sale in my Bonanza shop...so check em out....here's a little taste of them. I've been trying to challenge myself to flex a wide variety of styles and subject matter moving from tight pen pieces to abstract and splattery pieces.

Maybe I'll be more in depth as to the inspiration and meaning behind some of these pieces, but in the meantime just check them out and buy one (or two or three) if they strike yer fancy.

Toy Stories - Episode 2 : Help me, Beastman

Growing up, around the time I turned 6 or 7, my mom moved from being stay at home to going to work as an occupational therapist with Grandview Hospital. My dad was the manager of Hauer Music on Far Hills and through that job we really became close with the Hauer family, in particular Ed and Martha Hauer. Around 1980 "Aunt Martha" ,as my brother Todd and I called her, became our babysitter. She would pick us up after school and either watch us at our house on Marshall Rd. or take us to her house in Moraine to hang out with her German Shepard and FIVE poodles - side note: I developed a dislike for poodles as a result, but that's another story. "Uncle Ed" had recently died so I think my brother and I were a really good distraction for her and she used to take us to the toy store and a lot of movies when she watched us. This one rainy day the plan was as follows, 1. go to Children's Palace and get a small toy and then 2. go see a movie. One thing I should say is that Aunt Martha took me and my brother to a lot of age inappropriate movies, but for the most part looking back it was a good thing as I got to see stuff like 9 to 5, Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, Stroker Ace, and Six Pack (which actually was kind of a family film) but sometimes it was a bad thing, as was the case on this day. Now when I was a kid and knew I was going to the toy store I used to get horribly sick to my stomach from the anticipation but it would go away the second I got there. I mean it was almost an immediate thing once we arrived, the stomach ache would quickly dissipate and then I could get down to the business of looking at toys. So this was about the time He-Man and the Masters of the Universe were just coming out and Children's Palace had a wall of figures to choose from. I've always been attracted to the colors orange and red, so I was immediately drawn to the Beast Man figure and after getting him we left to go to the movie theater in the Dayton Mall to see POLTERGEIST. What would follow would be two of the most terrifying hours of my little life. Well actually the first half hour wasn't that bad, but after the part where the tree crashed through the son's window and tried to eat him, I spent the rest of the movie clutching my Beast Man figure, nervously chewing on multiple pieces of Hubba Bubba, and watching the rest of the movie either with my eyes closed or through the spaces between my fingers.

As if the tree eating part wasn't bad enough there was that FREAKING CLOWN who came to life and tried to strangle the son. I already had a pretty hefty fear of clowns thanks to a painting of one my great grandmother had done and was given to me. For some reason my mom thought it would be a good idea to prop up in my closet and when I would wake up in the middle of the night he would be there staring back at me.

Needless to say I left the movie pretty shellshocked that day, holding onto my Beast Man figure for dear life. As a result, for years I was creeped out by trees. Yes, TREES. Especially climbing on them because I would see these different seams on them where the branches met the trunk and imagine them opening up and swallowing me whole at any given moment. And then I would think about what would happen if you did get eaten by a tree. Would you get digested? Was it a gateway to another dimension? Would you just be trapped inside the tree and suffocate? It's kind of funny because since then I've caught bits and pieces of Poltergeist on tv and laugh at how horrible some of the effects are , especially the part where the guy hallucinates that he's tearing his face off, but at the time, man oh man, that stuff was terrifying to me. Luckily Beast Man was there to look out for me.

Toy Stories : Episode 1

Growing up, my childhood was awesome. I was and am still surrounded by a loving family and because I was a good kid and almost never got in trouble I was given free reign to lose myself in my toys, my art, and comic books. I have so many great memories associated with these things that I've become a very nostalgic person as I've gotten older....whether that's a refusal to let go of my childhood or just holding onto the stuff that made/makes me happy, regardless I have a lot of tales to tell. One such tale took place in the spring of 1983 right on the cusp of the release of Return of the Jedi. This was obviously before the internet and rampant speculation about the plots and characters in movies so it was amazing to go into a film with no idea what was going to happen, except for the little glimpses you saw in trailers and tv commercials....and did I mention action figures? And this is where our tale begins. In Centerville there was a K-mart where Spring Valley and Main street crossed that we used to go to when I was a kid. And this one glorious day, I would have been 9 at the time, my trek into the toy department was met with a huge wall of action figures from Return of the Jedi. I just remember it was like visual overload, that classic Star Wars packaging that upon seeing it would spark the happy part of my brain and probably 90% of them featured characters I had never seen before. I don't want to speculate as to who all was available because I know ROTJ figures came out in waves and I know someone's going to call me out and say "that particular figure came out in the second wave so he/she couldnt have been there." All I know is I gravitated right to the Bib Fortuna figure aka Jabba the Hutt's right hand man. He had these cool tentacle looking things coming off his head and just looked like a complete badass...in my little Fundip addled brain I imagined he was probably some sort of bounty hunter who knocked people out with his staff and howled over their corpses. My brother decided to play it safe with a Jedi Luke, and I probably bragged and bragged how I made the better decision with my action figure choice and would be vindicated when the movie came out. And came out it did. I think I saw Return of the Jedi about three times that summer. Twice with my parents and a third time with my grandma. The time with my grandma is a whole other story. Let's just suffice to say I spent the moments after walking out of the theater with my grandma trying to convince her that she NEEDED to take me to Children's Palace IMMEDIATELY and buy me a Wicket the ewok action figure. No if ands or butts. She was very skilled in negotiations and I ended up losing that particular battle.

But back to Bib Fortuna. The guy for weeks I thought was going to be one of the most bad ass bounty hunter characters in the movies ended up being a creepy pointy tooth droid molester. Moral of the story : don't judge an action figure by it's packaging.

The Art of the In-Sect at 4frnt