WHO YA GONNA CALL?

Pen & Ink on Standard Stock, Digitally Colored
Original Completion Date: June 8, 2014

Not much to say about this little character study, really. I tried to limit the time involved for color, just to test the overall process duration.

30 years since this movie. Wow.

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.

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.

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.

88 MILES AN HOUR

Pen & Ink on Standard Stock

Original Creation Date: Apr 27 2014

Lots of experimentation with new things in this homage to Doc Brown and Marty McFly. New pens (which I did NOT care for), new vector ideas (notice the blue outline around the black details on the right leg), and some new coloring tricks on top of the vector elements. I certainly learned some things about the process along the way, and all in all had a lot of fun with this piece.

BUDDIES

Pen & Ink on Bristol.
Original Creation Date: Mar 4 2008

Some of my oldest friends. Really like how Chewie turned out.

BUMBLEBEE

Pen & Ink on Bristol.

Original Creation Date: Jun 2 2009

This piece actually began as a rough sketch for students to ink over; I guess I decided to do the project as well.
I always used some sort of comic-book or otherwise geek movie as a subject for in-class illustration work,
just because it immediately engaged the young artists. Also gave the prof a little cred, too.
Pen & Ink on bristol.

DUM-DA DUM DUMMM!! DUM-DA DAAA...

Pen & Ink on Bristol.
Original Creation Date: Aug 20 2008

This Indiana Jones piece was started as an in-class tutorial about different inking techniques, and I remember choosing
to finish it out just for the sake of completion. I also remember working a bit too loose from the pencils and having that right
eye just look... off. In my own defense, this was not worked from a photo, so there's no Struzan-esque likeness captured here.