Phew . . . lots of X-Men

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Psylocke

Shadowcat & Lockheed

Storm, this one is my fave.

Dazzler

Domino, well she's actually X-Force, but whatever . . .

Samson's Dilemma was Delilah

I just read about Samson's life from the book of Judges 13-16 in the Old Testament in my quiet time, and when I was done, this image came to mind. It's pretty amazing to see what the Lord is willing to enable His people to do. I mean, he killed a lion with his bare hands "as if it was a goat" from what scripture says and took down 1,000+ Philistines by himself with God's aid. Amazing . . .

Summer drawings

It's been almost too long since my last post and even then I'm not too hot about the last one. It's been a long summer, but despite that I've still been drawing in my leisurely time. The old man is based off a neat photograph I saw, the girl is based off of what I call "the Starbucks Girl" whom you see everywhere at any Starbucks and the dogs were a shot out of my comfort zone cause I haven't spent a lot of time drawing them.

It's that time of the year again . . .

So here's my Christmas card submission this year at Radical Axis. I think I like this one more than the one I did last year (see 12.11.07 post).

Sketching Ahead

Ok that title was a really bad joke but I had to do it. I wanted to do a quick sketch last night just because Halloween is a good excuse to do something like this.

Ode to the X-Men

One of the biggest artistic influences in my life were the X-Men comics growing up, read them then, and I still read them now. I realized that I hadn't done any fan art of them so I'd give them a shot.

This was a difficult piece because I don't have the same artistic freedoms as I did the last post, especially with color because these are obviously preexisting characters. I tried to take some liberties with color without deviating from their trademark palettes. I think I'm satisfied with it, I feel that it's missing a little something but that's okay. I've spent enough time on this one, time to go on to the next one.

We start with blue and red color erase:

It's scanned and colored in Flash and then given softens and blurs in Photoshop:

Surfers and sunsets

I went to Waikiki Beach, Hawaii in mid April for a wedding and I saw a ton of surfers everyday I was there and this vintage postcard was inspired by that. I also posted the process so you can see what I did.

This was purely an experimental piece and in all honesty I had no real idea what I was doing, just screwing around with Flash and Photoshop and see what I can do with the drawing I had available.

Again, the preview is kinda small so you'll have to click on it to see better:

So first we start with our drawing with blue and red color erase pencil on 11x17 xerox paper:

We then scan it into Flash and layout the line work and assign line width. Also in this stage I do my corrections I feel necessary and in this case I felt the clouds didn't convex very well so I laid out a faint grid and redrew them in Flash:

Now in this stage I just played around and experimented with color. There was also a lot of changes in the design of the water because I didn't think that they were working from the drawing.I also stretched the background by about 40% and it looked waaaaaaaayyyy better that way:

Finally it's dragged into Photoshop and given filters, textures,blurs, and all that good stuff:


Hope you enjoy, and there's more coming like this . . .

As I promised . . . more!

Here's just some more random sketches:



And there's still more to come!!!

I'm not dead

I know it's been a little while since I've posted anything and I've been getting alot of gripes and complaints through emails and comments about why I haven't posted any new stuff. Well for the record I'm not dead and there's gonna be new stuff up soon. So here is some filler till then.

These are scans from my Moleskine sketchbook. I only use this sketchbook when I travel.

This is from Stockholm, Sweden. The Venus de Milo was just a replica in a Flemmish Museum:

This was outside my Hotel in Paris,France:

And this was from inside the Lourve in Paris:

These are from when I went to Waikiki Beach at Honolulu,Hawaii:


This was when I was in Tennesse (which is a lame state from what I saw) and was inspired to sketch out Jesus Christ, a man to whom I owe my life to . . .

King of Kings and King of my heart

This is a submission to The Church of Buckhead. They're planning on the next four weeks to dive into the life and ministry of Jesus up until Easter. The theme they sent me to be the inspiration of the piece said, "Christ built his ministry on selfless love and acceptance." He is truly and honestly the king of ALL hearts that come onto Him with willing minds and devout hearts, forfieting your old self, and renewing your spirit. He's the very throne of my heart and I'd be just flat out lost and blind without Him. This past year walking with Him has been the most joyous year of my life, period. There's a verse the Lord speaks that particularly rings true to me that tugs at me everytime I read it and that's very appropriate for this piece:

Ezekiel 36:26
"I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh."

Secrets . . .

I haven't posted anything in a while and I feel bad about it but in the meantime while I prepare more stuff to post, I posted this to show my secrets, er, I mean, process. The first step is the drawing with good ol' fashioned blue pencil and paper. The second is the line work that's done in flash. Third, the flat colors are chosen and the lines are colored a darker shade than the inside .This sometimes takes a little while to pick the right colors. Fourth, the gradients are added to break up the flatness of the color. Last, all the finishing details such as: shadows, highlights, make up, and tapering the lines. Ta Da! And we're done! It's posted a little small and you may need to click on it to see it better.

Oh Christmas card, oh Christmas card

These were two Christmas cards I did for a card contest at work and one of them won! Yay! The one on top was the first one I did, and the second one with the snowglobe was the one that won. The irony of it was that I spent half the amount of time on the one that won than the one that didn't . . .

Dancing away

Here's one more Flash drawing that I've forgot to post up . . .

My Heroes

Here's some comic illustrations, I don't do these all too often because they take eleventy billion years to do and I don't have as much time on my hands.

A buddy of mine asked for a drawing of Batman in exchange for one of his pieces so this is what he got.


These are some older ones I did . . .

Some Old Paintings

These are old paintings I did a little while ago. It's good to occasionally go back to your fine arts roots just to remember the fundamentals of using raw mediums.

They're watercolor and gouche on coldpress paintings of . . . well hopefully it's done accurately enough that you can tell who they are :-)

People people everywhere

Here are some sketches, I decided to just do a lot of different characters and a lot of them are just inspired by pictures of other cultures I looked at . . .

Waaaahhhhoooo! My blog!

Well after all this time I finally have a blog, since I don't have ANY way to display my work. :-) Well I'll just post up stuff here and there as I go along making new drawings (if I actually do make new drawings) and hope that everyone enjoys.

So these first set of drawing are are drawings that I have done in Flash. The drawing were scanned in and dropped into flash and completely finished in it. There was no aid from Photoshop or anything because I wanted to see what I could do with the program illustratively. They were quite fun to do and they were done really FAST! Flash is a great program to have things look complete and slick in very little time. Also too if you like any of these drawings that I post up I do make prints of them for sale. I'm still figuring out the whole paypal account thing but I'll I'll get that up soon.

So this was the first one I did.




I was really happy how the octopus lady came out . . .





This one is kinda big, you may wanna click on this one to get a better look.