Sketches

A lot of the times, people only see the last step in a job - the final piece. But the hours and hours of sketching, false starts, just kind of get lost along the way and left in sketchbooks and stuffed in drawers. You'll notice that for the most part I sketch using non-photo blue and indigo blue pencils - Prismacolor Berol Verithins. Here's a little sampling of some from over the years.....

Star Wars sketch cards

It's no surprise that I am a HUGE Star Wars fan. Sometime I'll go more in depth about my love for SW - let's just say it was pretty much 75% of my childhood whether it was movies, toys, or just things I liked to draw. So after contacting them, I was asked by Topps to create some sketch cards for an upcoming Mars Attacks trading card set. My hope was to do Star Wars stuff for them so I jumped at the chance and created over 200 cards for their 2012 Mars Attacks Heritage set. For people that don't know, sketch cards are blank cards that are sent to artists for them to draw original sketches on. These cards are then sent back to Topps and they are randomly inserted into packs of cards and sold to the public. Some of these cards go for big money on Ebay, and are highly sought after. So after doing Mars Attacks cards I was also invited to contribute sketch cards to their 2012 Star Wars Galactic Files set. Artists use a variety of materials for their cards, for the most part I did my cards with Prismacolor markers. The first thing I had to do was figure out what colors I needed to pull off the most amount of characters and found an infographic displaying Lego's versions of all their Star War figures. So looking at it blurry eyed I was able to figure out I would need a variety of browns, skin tones, oranges, creams, red, various greens, and a couple blues. A lot of people basically do realistic likenesses of the different characters and for a couple here and there I did the exact same thing, but overall I wanted to really give my spin on the characters of Star Wars, different scenes that had meaning to me, and basically show my memories of watching the movies filtered through my brain. Here's some of my cards from that first set.

Next up I contributed to their Return of the Jedi widevision set..I really had a lot of fun on these, because of the different format - allowed me to really be cinematic since that's the way I always view those movies in my head. There was also some special cards that had prop pieces embedded in them - in this case parts of the sail from Jabba's barge and fur from various Ewoks. The sail barge one gave me a chance to illustrate one of the biggest travesties in all of Star Wars history. I speak of course of the death of Boba Fett, who if you don't count the comic books as canon is most likely still being digested in the Sarlacc's belly.

Next up I worked on sketch cards for 2015's Star Wars Masterwork set. These cards were "special" in that they were high end product sold for $50 a pack and had high probabilities of getting sketches or other rare cards in them. I have to admit this bothered me a little bit because I wanted the average person to be able to get a hold of one of my cards, not just people who were going to open them and instantly flip them. So to be a little subversive I set out to do a number of them with unpopular and obscure background characters on them. I chuckled as I draw the Death Sticks guy from Attack of the Clones and I giggled as I drew Jar Jar Binks goofily giving a thumbs up, knowing there was a high probability some guy who couldn't care less about Star Wars was going to find them in a pack and curse the heavens. But I also realized I was also making some pretty rare sketches because no one in their right mind would ever want to draw Boshek or the dude with the horn on his head in the Cantina scene. Of course I've never claimed to be in my right mind.

HEY LOOK IT'S RIC OLIE!

But it allowed me to have fun with the cards and washed away any ill will I had about the price point. One thing that was good about these cards though was they were on a much thicker card, so this allowed me to use different media including watercolor and acrylics......

And last but not least I contributed cards to Topps' 2015 Star Wars Rebels set......I was kind of apprehensive because I would essentially be illustrating characters that already had a recognizable style, but I think my personal style melded pretty well with it....if you haven't checked out that show yet, it's great. They completely nailed the tone of the original movies and the new characters they introduce are really cool....

Anyway, check out Ebay as my cards show up from time to time. Coincidentally (wink wink), I also have two of my cards up on Ebay right now.... Luke Return of the Jedi card

Yoda Return of the Jedi stainglass

Anyway, hope you dug all these. MAY THE FORCE BE WITH YOU.

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