12WC: Week 5: The Strange Fruits of Labor

"Goggles"

I am happy to have pulled this piece together... finally. The ardent reader will recall that this image was actually started some 7 months ago*. It is unusual for me to put something away like this, but at the time, well, let's just say "stuff came up," and leave it at that. For the last few months this piece was actually pulled of the board that it was taped to, and stuck on my wall... staring at me... watching... waiting. Every time I worked at my desk, it would be there, looking back at me all un-done.

So, I took this opportunity to set things aright, and pulled it down from its lonley and dusty place, taped it back up and started making moves. The process was realitivley easy going, almost alarmingly so, but perhaps during its time on the wall, it was ripening. Ah, such are the fruits of labor. For this painting, I didn't stop to take process pics, things just moved along smoothly from one stage to the next.

*I'm keeping this post short, but if you're interested in the first stages and the story behind the image, please check out the first post { here }, and the second { here }

Stay tuned for more to come, there will be another painting coming up in the next two weeks. Thank you to everyone who's been leaving messages it's really great to hear from you.

Cheers,

Goggles Comic: Cover Up

Well, here is some work in progress { and I use that term loosely.}

I was working ahead with the cover image when a conversation with the author provided me with some crucial character info that I missed in my reading of the story... baddaboom, big baddaboom.

It turns out that the Goggles themselves need to be more chaotic, and wild. I think I can still save this image and add onto the drawing, it's still early enough in the process to make those kinds of changes. But I feel like a heel for missing that character element to begin with. So, I'll continue to try to save this image, and in the end if I have to burn it, so be it. But I'm not ready for that just yet.

Previous Post: here

Goggles Comic: Cover on Board

After sitting on this for a while, life's cleared up, and the next project is up and running. A friend and I have worked out a story, and developed it for release as a comic. And by developed it, I mean that he's written the darn thing, and now I need to deliver the art! Our objective with this project is to have a bit of fun, we're both comics fans, and decided that we'd give it a go. The plan thus far is to produce a sample of the work, and then approach a few different publishers, to see if they are interested, and if that fails, there's always self publishing.

After doing considerable thinking on the matter, the cover is going to be the first thing, then I will work out the pages. So, with out further ado, or a-doo-doo...

Part of my intent with this cover painting is to keep things quick and loose. I feel like often by the time a drawing makes it to the final board, a lot of life has been wrung out of it through tracing. So, I've intentionally left this one looser.

First a few free-hand color comps. I really like the earth tone pallet, but after some consideration, I started thinking about James Bama's Doc Savage covers, images here, I like the tone of his images, he pulls a hue as the major key for his images. Which I thought would work better for a comic cover ( I do actually want people to buy this!)

I started working using white to knock back the background. The image below was started with a wash of orange, then knocked back with chinese white. There's an intentional halo around the edge of the shadow and figure, my hope is to create a little edge vibration, especially between the blue shadow and the orange edge.

Now, the drawing is on the board, and at least one thing has changed from the preliminary drawing, notice the tentacles along the bottom edge, which I am seeing as being in the foreground. I think they help to really emphasize the danger that our heroine has walked into.

I'll apologize now for the quality of the photo, it's just a snap shot that I bent around in photoshop to get the lines to show up.