Tatooine Orbit

Just for the fun of it I spent a couple of nights this week doing a Star Wars illo, something that looked as screen authentic as possible. I built a very basic Star Destroyer over the course of a lunchtime at work. There are many Star Wars blueprints available online and if you stick these images on planes in the X/Y/Z views within a modelling package, you will have the correct scale and proportions in no time. In the evening I slapped on some textures to the corresponding areas and very quickly the model looks a lot more complex than it actually is. The starfield was made up using a tutorial and the planet was a simple gradient with ground and cloud colours applied with hard brush strokes slighly motion blurred and hand smudged.

4 silhouettes, 1 hour.

Done for the Dare2Draw promotions. Very quickly. No fuss , no redrawing.

H is for Hercules

A quick Hercules sketch - one of the few characters that it's legit to go OTT on the muscles (and hair). One of my personal bug bears is artists who draw all characters like this - probably not as common these days, but it always annoyed me when characters like Cyclops were drawn beefed up like this - his nickname was'slim' fer... anyhoo,that's that off my chest.

Princess Leia... in the gold bikini. Sketch.

Dr Who Card Game: Venice

More Who again this week from Cubicle 7's card game. Venice!

©2012 BBC/Cubicle 7 Entertainment Ltd. BBC, DOCTOR WHO (word marks, logos and devices), TARDIS, DALEKS, CYBERMAN and K-9 (word marks and devices) are trade marks of the British Broadcasting Corporation and are used under licence. BBC logo © BBC 1996. Doctor Who logo © BBC 2009. Tardis image © BBC 1963. Dalek image © BBC/Terry Nation 1963. Cyberman image © BBC/Kit Pedler/Gerry Davis 1966. K-9 image © BBC/Bob Baker/Dave Martin 1977

Star Wars - Chewbacca

What a Wookiee! Yeah he's a walking carpet but he's pretty cool with it. As a kid my running order of favourite 'good guys' in Star Wars ran R2-D2, Han Solo and Chewbacca, I was never that bothered about Luke really. Chewie is a pretty straight forward character, he hangs with Han, he's a good pilot, he fixes things and he lets everyone else do the talking. Sure he shouts pretty loudly when stuff isn't to his liking but overall he's pretty chilled.

At the end of A New Hope when they are handing out medals how come Chewbacca doesn't get a medal? I figure that might be what he was having a shout about during the ceremony.

Vampire Vixens, Axed!

Is scream queen Libyenah for the chop, or will she merely give a hand to the Nazi cause? If only she had a 'weapon' to defend herself.

Cover rough

Can you see what it is yet?

H is for Hulk

A quick 15 minute Hulk sketch - playing about with a bit of a looser sketchier style.

Tony Stark.

Dr Who Card Game: Moldovarium

This is the second of a bunch of images painted for the recently released Dr Who card game from Cubicle seven. Loved this job.

©2012 BBC/Cubicle 7 Entertainment Ltd. BBC, DOCTOR WHO (word marks, logos and devices), TARDIS, DALEKS, CYBERMAN and K-9 (word marks and devices) are trade marks of the British Broadcasting Corporation and are used under licence. BBC logo © BBC 1996. Doctor Who logo © BBC 2009. Tardis image © BBC 1963. Dalek image © BBC/Terry Nation 1963. Cyberman image © BBC/Kit Pedler/Gerry Davis 1966. K-9 image © BBC/Bob Baker/Dave Martin 1977

Star Wars - Millenium Falcon

I figure there where certain key elements to the success of Star Wars in 1977 and one of them just has to be the model work produced by ILM (Industrial Light & Magic). You'd had spaceships and model work in loads of films before (probably the best being 2001 A Space Odyssey) but this just looked something else, this was spaceships in space, I mean the film even opened with a sequence that blew your mind as an Imperial Destroyer just kept on filling up the screen as it followed the more moderately sized Tantive IV carrying Princess Leia. Nothing matched that model work back then it but it inspired countless copies on film and TV.

'What a piece of junk!', yes he is right, the Millennium Falcon is a trash can but its also really cool and every kid wanted to fly in it. To my eyes those models where the real thing and still to this day outmatch any updated CGI version they've fiddled with. You can watch a recent version of the film and spot the 'real' (model) parts to the 'fake' (CGI) parts every time, yeah that's made it loads better hasn't it.

Jonday - landscape

Bit o' fun in ArtRage.

Man with a mission

An old page from Missionary Man, Promised Land. Published in 2000ad in the late 90's

Sketching at the Dare2Draw

I do a thing called the Big City Dare 2 Draw every month at theSociety of Illustrators here in NYC. These are 2 minute drawings I did at the last one. Lots of drama and weapons, which is fun.

Children of the Damned - full page

Probably the last Children of the Damned that i will post for a bit (proving to be a lifesaver though as i have primarily been doing design work rather than illustrations recently - will try and knock up a batch of quick sketches for Scotch Corner next week). Anyhoo, this is the first page (pre-lettering) for the Jean origin short story.

DR Who card game art: Sardickstown

This is the first of a bunch of images painted for the recently released Dr Who card game from Cubicle seven. Very interesting job and enjoyable job, this one, with a very specific set of parameters to work to.

Now for the legals - ©2012 BBC/Cubicle 7 Entertainment Ltd. BBC, DOCTOR WHO (word marks, logos and devices), TARDIS, DALEKS, CYBERMAN and K-9 (word marks and devices) are trade marks of the British Broadcasting Corporation and are used under licence. BBC logo © BBC 1996. Doctor Who logo © BBC 2009. Tardis image © BBC 1963. Dalek image © BBC/Terry Nation 1963. Cyberman image © BBC/Kit Pedler/Gerry Davis 1966. K-9 image © BBC/Bob Baker/Dave Martin 1977

Star Wars - Emperor

So this'll be the Emperor then, I'm pretty sure in the first three films he was never called Palpatine so for my purposes Emperor will do just fine. Much like my childhood un-acceptance that the bald guy underneath the mask was Vader, my ten year old self wasn't really up for there being someone worse than Darth Vader. Vader didn't need some old monk telling him what to do and he proved that by throwing him down that shaft, still if he'd done it because he was more cool and evil than because he'd turned into a goodie goodie then I'd have been happier with that.

Hande Hoche

More nonsense from The Vampire Vixens of the Wehrmacht this week. Hans the former circus strongman gets caught short by Vixen Libyenah. He should have kept to lifting weights instead of playing with the bad boys.

Harry Houdini

This is a pin up I did for my buddy/archnemesis Sean VonGorman's The Secret Adventures of Harry Houdini comic.

(more) Children of the Damned

Really struggling for time to do some doodles specifically for Scotch Corner lately (and looks like that for the next couple of months) - so here is another panel from COD - think this is the first time i have had to draw horses.

The Irons: Hybrids. Madefire. Process.

The Irons: Hybrids portal chase sequence. This will be our French Connection moment. Leto chases a perp (Multon) through the planet sized city using portals to jump to other areas and time-zones. Writer and co-creator Haden Blackman and I envisioned a multi-zone chase highlighting the texture and richness of  The Irons world.

Creating one new world environment is hard enough but we really wanted to push for a variety of different areas: some more frightening and unusual than the main Blade Runner influenced world shown here. The chase allowed us so many possibilities and the Grand Central Station opener will be the money shot!

Crank zoom panels. We cut from the larger panel to these inserts and zoom to close-ups of Leto and Multon (shown in red) Should help to convey the frenetic pace of the chase? Possibility of a faux-handheld camera shake effect with the Madefire tool to add that personal 'in scene' experience.

So many possibilities are available creatively with the added sound and motion options. It really is an exciting and new approach to story-telling.

The inks shown are pencils only. Still to apply an ink draft and colour by Yel Zamor.

Cossack

A Cossack watches retreating French forces in the winter of 1812. Trying to go back to my pencils and work images up more tightly, more completely before going to digital. Although this one is a winter scene, I reckon I might be relying too much on the white of the page.

Star Wars - Vader

Been a while since I did any kind of theme on Scotch Corner so I thought I'd run with Star Wars for a while, no idea for how long but it'll be a few months at least. Being a child of the 70s and being into sci-fi then of course Star Wars plays a big part of my childhood memories but I'm very much in the original three movies and Han Solo shot Greedo first camp. I may well stray into drawing some of the newer characters but I doubt I'll travel far from the 'classic' set.

I remember sitting in the cinema on my first viewing of Return of the Jedi and thinking 'who the hell is this egg head guy' when Luke took off Vader's mask. I don't know that I ever thought about what he would look like without his mask but it didn't look like that.

Roller Grrrls pencils.

Behind the scenes sketches for proposed Roller Grrrls covers and characters this week. Tried some forced angles and a couple of Klimt parodies (Judith I and II). Just a small selection of ideas drawn on the train while passing the time. There's a proposed zombie chase cover and a locker room phonecall.

For more derby images please visit the Facebook page to order the Roller Grrrls sketchbook SK01 or email orders_rollergrrrls@hotmail.com for details.

Sorry for the lack of posts recently. A radial fracture break of the elbow kinds spoils the mood when trying to draw. Working through the worst of it.

M's predecessor?

George Bentley is the boss of the Special Occult Executive (SOE) in Vampire Vixens of the Wehrmacht, a sly and aloof individual who keeps his cards close to his chest. He's a WW2 version of James Bond's M character but no where near as benign. In the scenes below he is giving a briefing to assembled heads of the military. When it comes to WW2 as a subject matter I've quickly found out that there are many experts out there. I'll hold my hand up and admit I am not one of these although I know enough to get by with what I'm attempting to do. I this case I posted these images up on my own site and was quickly corrected by a chap that colour projectors weren't around in WW2. I checked it out and found he was completely right. Suprisingly he didn't point out there were no Vampires either:)

Eugenia Vladimirovna Makarova

Another commission. Sorry for being so erratic. I'm in Yucatan right now.