THE SCARECROW

Pen & Ink on Standard Stock
Original Completion Date: May 23, 2014

The Scarecrow. Not much back story behind this one... I just have a list I made up a long time ago of things I wanted to draw when I started back on the horse, so to speak, and one of the entries simply said

"A Scary Scarecrow. The Batman one."

This was fast, fast, fast... and that's including doing all of the black with pen.

BESPIN

Pen & Ink on 11x15 Warm Press
Original Completion Date: May 24, 2014

I spent about two and a half years of my adolescence essentially under the delusion that I lived in the reality of the worlds depicted in The Empire Strikes Back. Small town Pennsylvania has a real propensity for being mistaken as Hoth, Dagobah or Cloud City when sprinkled with the right amount of youthful imagination. It might sound silly, but to this day, when I need to re-connect or re-charge my creativity, Episode V will always be True North.

Added to this is a lifelong affinity and loyalty to Boba Fett. Fett's always been the greatest lesson to me about the detail of non-detail; his greatest trait as a character is how very little character has ever been assigned to him. Sure, there's mountains of backstory in the EU and even in the monstrosity called Attack of the Clones... but for me, the very fact that so little was revealed about him made him only richer. Mysterious and alluring.

Not enough people appreciate the fact that the actual character design of the galaxy's most fearsome bounty hunter was not a product of George Lucas, but then-designer and current Hollywood director Joe Johnston (Captain America, the Wolfman, Hidalgo, etc). I won't attempt to be an authority on the subject, but from what I recall Johnston was a concept artist on Star Wars, and was lured into working on Empire with the promise that Lucas would pay for his tuition to attend art school. Or was it film school? Either way, I remember the day I learned that so many of the things I loved so much about George Lucas's second installment (Fett, the AT-ATs, the Snow Speeders) was not Lucas at all, but another highly creative individual. And above them all, the Boba Fett character design was his most prized accomplishment.

This drawing was a bit of an homage to something that speaks so naturally to me on an almost primal level. I did try to leave things much cleaner, not only because of the texture and surface qualities on Bespin, but also in an exercise of restraint. Conversely, I went for as much detail as possible on Boba's uniform, as there's just so much complexity going on, in a good way.

WOLVERAMPAGE, finished

Pen & Ink on Standard Stock, Digitally Colored
Final Color Completion Date: May 27, 2014

The Wolverine piece in color. Did some different things in the coloring process that I think worked out fairly well. I'm still on the fence with the lens flares, but decided to leave them in there, at least for now.

THE SLAIN KING

Pen & Ink  on 11x15 Bristol
Original Creation Date: Feb 23, 2005

A few years ago I attended a nearby comic convention, a bit of an outsider but with a small portfolio of stapled handout sheets ready to be distributed. Early into the day I was offered an unpaid gig as a contributor to  an anthology book from Angry Dog Press, and later that week I took it, mostly just to prove to myself that I could do it, to earn a published credit to my name, and to see what I could learn from the experience.

The final result was "THE SLAIN KING," a 10-page story about Viking lore. I learned a good deal about myself, my technique, and my speed while knocking out ten pages of original script, pencil, inking, and digital lettering and packaging.

I won't waste the bandwidth involved to display all ten pages, but along with Page 1 I've chosen to display these three sequential pages. I'm pretty surprised to see how well the compositions and pacing hold up after all these years, if not the font-crazed lettering.

And I'll finish with this final page. I'm pretty happy with the inking in here, especially in the giant's furry tunic and the girl's cloak.

WEREWOLF

Pen & Ink on Standard Stock
Original Creation Date: May 21, 2014

I have a concept for a graphic novel... It's somewhere between the final plotting and scripting phases of completion. To be completely honest, the sheer idea of a graphic novel is one of the most intimidating things I can think of; the scope, the massive scale of work, and most importantly, the huge sacrifices necessary to make it happen. And to do it right.

So, for the time being, I'm inching closer to the day where I have to decide: do I shelve the whole book, or do I sit down and start drawing?

At any rate, this book would indeed be a werewolf story... but one that never has been told like this.

The above was an ink test for what would most likely be the title character.

THE PUNISHER

Pencil on Standard Stock
Original Creation Date: May 20, 2014

The Punisher, in all his vigilante glory.

TRUE STORY: Those are actually Charlie Manson's eyes. And why shouldn't they be? Somewhere in the 90's Frank became some sort of blue collar good-guy hero, but lest we forget the lessons taught us by Amazing Spider-Man #129... The Punisher is a villain, and probably a deranged one at that.

Dude is nuts, and should be. Look for this to get inked at some point as well.

HARKILON HELL

Pen & Ink on 11x15 Warm Press
Original Creation Date: May 20, 2014

I treated this piece as if it were a full blown cover commission, done on 11x15 warm press and conceived, penciled, and inked over the course of about 48 hours. I purposely wanted the entire scene to be overwhelmingly filled with the alien attackers, but tried to use tangential eye lines and other compositional elements to push the focal point continuously back to our beleaguered hero.

The hero, of course, is the amazing Jugger Grimrod.

For those not readily familiar with him, Jugger was the sociopathic anti-hero of ALIEN LEGION, Carl Potts's epic space serial comic, originally released under Marvel's Epic Comics creator-owned line.

(Original Pencils)

I LOVED Alien Legion, and still keep the completed run of both series in a relatively accessible location. And yet I haven't read a page for a good ten years. Hmmm... I think I'm gonna go do something about that right now!

ATTUMA!

Pen & Ink on Standard Stock
Original Creation Date: May 17, 2014

Don't know why, but I've really had a desire to draw Namor's brutal brother-- I'm smack dab in the middle of "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea," so perhaps that's why.It's almost shocking that I haven't colored this-- my favorite thing about Attuma is his color scheme.

I thought the lower camera angle worked out pretty well here-- and who doesn't love drawing evil octopii?

BEACH CLOSED BY ORDER AMITY P.D.

Pencil on Standard Stock
Creation Date: May 12, 2014

I once was in a band named Chief Brody. So whatever expression of reverence for the character and performance I can possibly muster here will obviously fall short of that.

This will go in the "work up to a higher level of pencil and/or ink" pile.

UNCANNY

Pen & Ink on Standard Stock

Inked on Date: May 15, 2014

The Uncanny X-Men, say, circa 1983.

Aka my childhood. I knew these characters better than most friends and family growing up, and sitting down to draw them was certainly a great trip down memory lane.  The X-Men franchise today is an empire, an army of mutants and students and villains and villains that become headmasters and such.

But back then, they were just... family.

THE SORCERER SUPREME

Pencil on Standard Stock, Digitally Colored
Original Creation Date: Completed May 11, 2014

Doctor Strange. I think I read one of his comics once when I was a kid, but otherwise I know very little about him. In fact, I think I even made fun of him a few times in my Michigan Comic Strip in the past. But he was never one of my favorites.

Which, of course, is exactly why I sought him out. I wanted to draw a character I was unfamiliar with, and even prepare another piece in the more elaborate vector painting style I've experimented in the past, first with the Joker Madness and later the Nemesis pieces. Without giving away any of my secrets, or boring anyone in the process, pencil artwork is treated in very specific ways in Adobe Illustrator and then later embellished with additional raster treatments in Photoshop. I like to call it my "GrayPaint" technique.

As you can see here, the piece starts as a very loose, and free-form pencil drawing. It's almost as if the pencil doesn't leave the page at all during its creation.

And additional treatments are made for shadows, contrast, color, and in the final image, mystical magic bolts.

This drawing tested the technique in ways I'd never pushed it before... as well as the active memory of my MacPro. But as it always is, a solution is found, and I'm pretty pleased with the results.

COMPULSIVE DETAIL vs. RESTRAINT, or INKING ANGELS AND DEVILS

Yes, that's a picture of me inking, with a devil of sorts on one shoulder, and an angel on the other. If you look closer, however, you might realize that one side of the drawing is inked in an entirely different manner than the other. The devil, or my inking devil, as it were, is Arthur Adams, probably the single biggest influence on my entire pursuit of comic book illustration and just a huge influence in general since his big-league debut in Longshot #1.

Arthur Adams's Man-Thing

Arthur Adams is a beast for detail, to the extent that he's developed it into its own medium-- he seems to use ludicrous detail the way other artists wield acrylics or oils. He's taken it to an entirely different plane over the years. And, not surprisingly, he's had a reputation of sorts for not getting his books in on time.

Now I'm not going to go so far to presume that I draw, ink, or even wield detail to the extent that Mr. Adams does. But his work, and my longtime fascination with it, has inspired me to develop a style that really puts down a lot of ink, usually in small, and not always clean lines in hatching.

My Own Daredevil, with plenty of hatching

In the Daredevil piece above, you can see me sort of getting carried away with the inks, almost not knowing when to stop. The hatching is intended to develop form and promote the illusion of mass in his body, but very often I'm only flattening things out. In other words, I ink to the point of excess.

And I've recently acknowledged it, and am trying to stop.

--

The inking angel depicted above is, sadly, a real angel. The super-talented and super-nice guy Mike Wieringo tragically passed away in 2007 in the midst of a celebrated career as a comic book artist, and left a multitude of loyal fans to wonder what might have been. I met Mike in Baltimore a few years before his death, and I found him to be friendly, accommodating, and honest.

Mike Wieringo's Fantastic Four

Mike's own style certainly had its share of detractors, but he was also on my short list of artists to watch and be inspired by. And unlike Arthur Adams, Mike's style was greatly reserved and simplistic. There's no hatching, no heavy and laborious working, and seemingly no effort. Quite simply, he's the day to Arthur Adams' blackest india ink night.

Since I've gotten back into this style of artwork just a few short months ago, I've really struggled to find my own voice or signature style as an inker. I love the Adams look but certainly don't want to just mimic it-- plus I worry about becoming an artist who just can't work quickly enough because of all the detail. On the other end of the spectrum is Wieringo, who draws so differently than I do that I'm not sure how good such a simplistic style would look over my pencils. Either way, I think there's a fine balance between the two to be found, and I've spent some time recently exploring that balance.

My Own Flash, with no hatching whatsoever

In the Flash piece above, I laid down the law to myself:  NO HATCHING. NONE. And I think I still tried to cheat in a few places. But, as a professor, one of the greatest things I've learned in art projects is that by withholding certain practices or techniques, a student can learn to appreciate, execute, and better identify the need for other techniques. So I turned the tables on myself here, and learned quite a bit from my temporary ban on hatching. Mostly I learned how natural it was for me to just overwork things, and HATCH FOR THE SAKE OF HATCHING. Not good, and certainly not necessary.

I anticipate this to be an ongoing battle as I settle in to a more comfortable style. But I thought it might be worth sharing the struggle between the angels and devils.

MEANWHILE, AT THE BOTTOM OF THE OCEAN...

Pen & Ink on Standard Stock

Inked on Date: May 7, 2014

Really enjoyed throwing this thing together. Like so many other kids from the 80's who watched and loved the SuperFriends but ultimately became a Marvel reader... I've always had a thing for Black Manta. But I don't know much about him at all.

This will definitely be inked.

WOLVERAMPAGE!! Inked

Pen & Ink on Standard Stock
Inked on Date: May 7, 2014

So much for exercising restraint during the inking process, right? I guess I just saw exactly in my mind how I wanted this inked, and I executed it faithfully to that vision. I did manage to resist the urge to keep adding detail in an effort to separate the figure from the ground-- I'll admit the inks sort of blend into each other a bit here, and it lacks a proper focal point-- but I've learned that this is best left to the discretion of the colorist, and attempting to overwork the inks to compensate is typically excessive and tends to only hurt the final result.

Color will come. It's too late to turn back now.

NEMESIS

Pencil on Standard Stock, Digitally Colored

Original Creation Date: May 6, 2014

Thought I'd have a go at Mark Millar's contest over at MillarWorld. To be honest, outside of Kick-Ass I'm not very well versed at Millar's characters... but this guy Nemesis seemed like a fun little draw. He was once described as "what if the Batman was really the Joker." Which explains the bloody head.

Experimented pretty heavily with the vector technique applied in the Joker Madness piece posted not long ago, with some more traditional coloring thrown in over top for good measure. Lots of Illustrator, and lots of Photoshop at play here.

Also worth noting is that to achieve some of the textures and random lines throughout this piece, I actually took the original sketch and, well, crumpled it up a bit. Heresy, right?!

DARRELL

Pen & Ink on Standard Stock, Digitally Colored

Original Creation Date: Ink Completed Mar 26, 2014

Color Completed May 2, 2014

It's fair to say that in the past, I have had a problem with detail. Things just weren't finished until I added in extraneous details and obliterated large areas of white space. Sometimes I would throw in the occasional Easter egg for a watchful eye, or an inside joke for my friends, but mostly I would just add in this excessive detail into my pieces. As if the blank page was just a hapless village just waiting to be razed and pillaged. I just couldn't help myself.

Let's call it "Compulsive Detail."

Of course, this is not a good thing. During the creation of this commissioned piece the issue really emerged as a problem. I couldn't stop adding detail in the inking, which only served to flatten the piece out, and hindered the magnitude of the focal point. For the colorist, also myself, it became harder to work with, and also stretched out the entire process. As I've said many times before, every drawing is a lesson to be learned, but this one really taught me much about what I do, why I do it, and the consequences my decisions make on other steps of the process.

I let the compulsion issues play themselves out here, and as you can see in the final ink above, the drawing lacks clarity. It's flat. Once into the coloring process, I was able to create distance between foreground and background with color temperature contrast, but the final result was still too bright, too splotchy (see bottom left). So I brought down the saturation in the background areas, which not only helped push the hero further towards the viewer but also added a nice gloomy feel which suited the Walking Dead nicely. I even considered doing some selective color (see bottom right), but thought the whole thing just kind of reeked of bad wedding photography; It might have looked nicer had I originally colored those areas as grayscale, but post-converting the original color job just didn't work out. In the end I employed a healthy dose of my old friend Gaussian Blur to the background areas, and the piece finally announced that it was complete.


Lots of good lessons learned on this one. As I said, this was done over the course of the past few weeks, and many of the conclusions I'd come to on this piece benefitted other drawings already posted.
Yes, I've certainly been diagnosed with Compulsive Detail, and the prescription is Restraint Inking.

Also, who doesn't love Darrell? I'll probably do another one of him again, most likely more of a character study and less of an environment.

MAY THE FOURTH BE WITH YOU

Pencil on Standard Stock

Original Creation Date: May 4, 2014

Happy May the 4th aka Star Wars Day! I was a kid during the heyday of the original trilogy, and like so many men my age today, it had a profound influence on the development of my imagination and creativity.

Technically speaking, I'm really looking forward to inking this one. This was also my first official reintroduction of the Blue Prismacolor Non-Repro pencil into my process-- And I don't know what I was thinking not grabbing it before! As wonderful as advertised, and I plan on using them heavily moving forward.

WOLVERINE RAMPAGE

Pen & Ink on Standard Stock, Digitally Colored

Original Creation Date: May 2 2014

What started out as a quick pose sketch of Wolverine quickly evolved into a full-blown partial background, with the intent of providing a full environment to continue my inking experiments on top of. Lots of fun to draw him all ripped up like that.

However, I also went against my own usual method and put some heavy, soft graphite into the pencil drawing itself, and ultimately decided to try and flesh it out enough to attempt a direct digital ink job. I've already done some digital inking on my Michigan comic strip in the past, but with mixed emotions on the results. In some ways, penciling for direct ink seems to be more work, since I always seem to spend more time trying to recreate the graphic quality that inking lines naturally possess. It just seems less spontaneous, less authentic.

Digital Inking Attempt 1

Digital Inking Attempt 2

Digital Inking Attempt 3

As seen above, I took several passes at this, both in Photoshop and Illustrator, to achieve the final look I have in my mind.  Unfortunately, all of these are too loose, too muddy, or too sparse to satisfy my aesthetic sensibilities. I just see it differently, and probably won't be happy with this until I get it there.

In this particular piece, the lesson learned is that if I am going to do direct pencil work, I'm going to have to spend more time refining the background lines, drawn in a tight 3H as opposed to the figure's  bold 5B marks. As a result, several elements in the background-- the tree, some of the ninja fodder, even the pagoda-- just aren't tight enough.

I think I may sit down and ink this guy after all. Although it's sure to be a great big mess now with all that graphite all over the place. Still, some great lessons learned, and it's still likely to be my best take on a very popular character.

GREETINGS FROM THANAGAR

Pen & Ink on Standard Stock, Digitally Colored

Original Creation Date: Apr 26 2014

This thing, very small, was part of the inking experiments last week. It borders on cartoonish, mostly because I was trying to limit myself to a certain pen size.  Not the best ink job, but I enjoyed the coloring.

Also, Hawkman is really weird. I never truly appreciated how unique his color scheme is, however.

A FANTASTIC WAY TO RELAX

Pen & Ink on Standard Stock, Digitally Colored

Original Creation Date: Apr 29 2014

Just a quick character study, really, but one that focused on implementing some new inking ideologies and techniques I've been engrossed in lately. Hatching, I've found, is like black pepper; it does wonders to some meals but can quickly ruin them if used too abundantly.

In the days to come I may attempt a more elaborate post describing exactly how I've gotten here. Quite simply, I've pretty much torn down my entire inking style and started over from scratch, focusing on restraint and a more selective approach at decision-making. I make too many marks, too many lines, and at times it seems to radiate a sense of being just short of authentic. Moving forward my inks will likely have a different feel, or at the very least fall somewhere between how they were, and well, what you see above.  I just feel this has been long overdue, and while I'm still deciding how and where this will lead, I think this drawing really showcases a sea change in my inking approach.