Again, just messing around, gettin’ my digital fix. WIP.

I’ll give you three attempts to guess what I’ve been watching lately, and the first two don’t count.

Update:

Still need to fix that face.

Found this sketch going through my old school files and I thought it’d be fun to paint. I think the assignment was to do a movie poster for a movie about ourselves. It’s “Coming Soon” because I don’t look like this… yet, lol.

Still a work in progress, and I probably won’t finish it for a while. This, and Amanda Palmer, are on hold until I can finish the stuff I’m getting paid for :P.

Bill was a friend from high school and a fucking awesome kid.

He died last week and this is a tribute to him. He was wicked adventurous and totally unstoppable at anything he wanted to do. He was a huge Batman fan (the memorial was littered with Bat symbols) and a big barefoot enthusiast. The shoes are Vibram Five Fingers and once I showed them to him he hated to wear anything else :).

Bill was one of a kind, and I miss him a lot.

For anyone who might be interested, prints are available here.

Just a little side project, testing out my new desktop. My younger brother built himself a new machine and I bought his old one off him. He’s a pretty hardcore gamer/programmer so he builds INSANE machines. For instance, he built this one 3 years ago and it still runs any game coming out today on near maximum settings without fail. So I upgraded to Photoshop CS4 and I’m in love with how it integrates graphics acceleration (among other perks).

This is what I was up to yesterday testing it out. Still not finished, but I thought I’d show the process.

If you don’t know Amanda Palmer of the Dresden Dolls, you should probably check out her solo album Who Killed Amanda Palmer.

Ps. Windows 7 was temporarily the bane of my existence, and now I’m fully satisfied being back in XP. It owns.

Pps. As I’m typing this in Firefox, I’m also listening to iTunes, running Photoshop, and I’m about to return to my paused game of Mirror’s Edge, which can function at full speed with all the above still going.

I fucking love my brother.

Now that all the design work has been approved, I’ve moved on to working on the 5 page intro we’ll be using for the pitch. Working from Frank’s script, I’ve roughed out the pages to give him an idea of how I’ll handle the storytelling. I made several adjustments from his script to make it flow a little better visually, all of which have been approved. I’m pretty happy with how this sequence/story is fleshing out.

This is way beyond what I would do for thumbs/roughs if it was just for myself, but because I’m working closely with someone else it’s important to make sure I communicate my (and his) ideas across visually as best I can, and still leave room for some things to be changed if necessary.

I’ll post some of the other stuff I’ve been working on for a pitch soon, but for now here’s the inks for the Spiderman cover commission. Colors to come shortly!

The Hawthorne comic show I was at about a month ago, that Jason swore we’d make a killing at, actually went pretty slow. I did manage to make my money back this time, with a little profit. One guy asked me to do a sketch for him of Spiderman on a blank comic book cover, and when I was done he also bought a Spiderman/Rockwell print that I signed for his (currently gestating) son. I thought that was pretty awesome. Anyway, he found me online afterwards and sent me a message through my site asking about a commission. So Jan, if it’s cool with you, I’m officially counting you as my first non-family-or-friend-fan (although we are facebook buddies now). :)

The commission is to do an illustration redux of the Amazing Fantasy #15 cover, with Jan as the dude being carried by Spiderman. And in honor of receiving the first half of the payment for it in the mail today, I thought I’d share my pencils.

And in totally unrelated news, I got the John Buscema Sketchbook from my aunt for graduation today, courtesy of amazon. Soooo gooooodd…..

So after doing my self portrait and having a rather good time of it, I decided to do a bunch of friends and family for practice. Something to keep me busy and enganged in my down-time. Anyway, this is my youngest sister, Annie.

Stages:

The hair gave me some trouble. I’ll have to find a good way to do that.

Finished the one I was working on and banged out another. 4 to go. Uahhh…

For my final project in Advanced Technique and Style, taught by Todd Doney, we have to take one image and render it in 9 different techniques/styles/media. Here’s what I’ve done so far, in order of completion.

Still in progress:

And here’s the photograph I’m working from.