Comic Con

I just got back from Comic-Con, and Holy Canole, that was cool.

The best part was getting to meet and chat with a lot of awesome artists, and get super inspired. Thanks to everyone who traded sketchbooks or took a second to look at my portfolio.

I had the chance to meet Francesco Francavilla and Steven Gordon and get their sweet sketchbooks.
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Stephen Silver had the only credit card reader of the lot which made him a couple of extra bucks from me, and he said my sketches had nice construction! He couldn't have given me a better compliment.

Next door to Stephen was David Colman, whose booth I had the misfortune of finding after I had maxed out my Comic-con budget. But I shall prevail with a David Colman sketchbook in the end!

I was blown away by Chris Sanders' sketchbook, and I watched over his shoulder as he worked some magic with his Faber-Castell Polychromos pencil. He said the leads are stronger than prismacolor and are much less prone to shatter. And like it was nothing, he said, "Oh, yeah Glen Keane tipped me off to these." I'm ordering some of those pronto. I expect nothing less than to draw as well as Chris once I break them out.

I picked up the "Morsels" compilation from Gary Ham and Scott Tolleson, and Dean Yeagle made the most generous sketchbook trade of the Comic-Con by swapping me for his Scribblings sketchbook.

Some of the best moments of Comic-Con we're the unexpected finds like Lark Pien's Long Tailed Kitty, and Jordan Crane's The Shortcut. I gave Long Tailed Kitty to my wife, who had just found out that her cat Peeko died. It's a beautiful story about a cat who gives up one of her nine lives to help someone out. After I bought a copy of the shortcut I had to run back and buy another copy for my brother, cause I knew he'd dig it.

The biggest disappointments were showing up late to the Judge Dredd retrospective with John Wagner and Brian Bolland and missing out on the Sketchbook Sessions sketch session. Judge Dredd is where my love for comics started, and it was one of the few seminars that was a must see for me, but alas, I wrote the time down wrong!

And of course, it was awesome to see finally see Kohl Glass's Der Ostwind. I believe Kohl is going to have the entire thing on the web soon, but until then check out the trailer.

Well Comic-Con has got me pumped to complete some personal projects and spice up my portfolio. I'll be posting as I go through that process.

Thanks again to everyone for all of the inspiration.

Testing Flock

This is my first time trying out Flock's blogging-made-easy capabilities. We shall see if blogging is actually made easier. I found out about Flock from Peter Abila's blog. Flock is basically a web browser that's supposed to enhance the social aspects of the web. It pulls together web services like del.licio.us, flickr, and blogger in such a way that they're all much more usefully and easier to use. I also really like Flock's built-in RSS aggregator. It does some really fun stuff, so download a beta and try it out.

REPORT: Okay, so if you're reading this, it means I've finally posted this blog entry. Turns out Flock is not quite ready for prime time, which is okay. It is beta software, so a few bugs are expected. When I tried to make a blog entry from Flock it loaded my post with a bunch of html garbage that kept it from posting correctly. I finally just had to re assemble my post from scratch on blogger.

Flock is still loads of fun to play with, so I'd still recommend trying it out. Just wait on the blogging features.

Okay here's some sketches. The top two were finished with a pilot fine liner and ink and brush. The last one was done with micron pens.

Tags: Flock, Del.icio.us, Flickr, pilot, fineliner, RSS, aggregator, Micron, pen, ink, brush, witch,

Der Ostwind

My first exposure to the San Diego Comic-Con was when I was invited by my friend Kohl Glass to go check it out while we promoted his short film The Promethean. It was an awesome experience, and I'm glad to say that this year Kohl will be presenting another incredible short film: Der Ostwind.

It's years in the making and a just a taste of the incredible storytelling ability of this guy.

If you're going to be at Comic-Con make sure its your first stop. It's playing Thursday the 20th at 1:30 PM. Check out your Comic-Con catalogues for more details.

Also check out the trailer here:

Der Ostwind Trailer

Comic-Con Warm-up

I'm heading to the San Diego Comic-Con at the end of this month, and one of the activities I'm eagerly anticipating is attending a real sketch book session. I'm also working on compiling a little sketchbook to take down that I can trade for other artists' sketchbooks.

So with that in mind I've been trying to fit in the sketching when I can. Here's a little of what I did last night.


I drew this bit below from the drawing jam on Shakira on the drawingboard.org. It don't look too much like Shakira, but in this case, I wasn't trying to do a caricature or get a likeness.
This face looks like Raven Symone. Ah well.

I've been trying to nail this expression that my wife does that I call "duckface". It's basically just pouting, but it kind of looks like a duckbill. I think I finally nailed the expression here, although my wife looks nothing like this.
The highpoint of sketching last night. The Lemur's okay, but I love how this girl's face below turned out. Very loose and energetic, although I messed up because she's underlit everywhere except for a shadow under her chin. Bad habit.

She's also got a unique expression--part duckface, surprise and sadistic delight.



I love eagles and hawks. I get super stoked when I draw one that even turns out okay.

My boss has a copy of a collection of art by Stephen Silver. I've been looking it over quite a bit lately and I've been keen on how he renders some of his sketches. He usually lays in some large flat areas of color with marker or colored pencil and then layers strokes of colored pencil over the top to add texture, define form, and accentuate the core shadows. He also renders things frequently with a rim light which is also cool.

A couple of my sketches here have attempted to do the same thing, but this one is particularly easy to see as an example of what I'm talking about.

Tags: Comic-Con, comic, comicon, Comic-con, sketchbook, session, sketchbooks, sketchbook sessions, Shakira, , drawingboard, drawing board, Raven Symone, Lemur, marine, ogre, eagle, hawk, bowler, Stephen Silver, Stephen, Silver, rim light