Eight Legs of FURY!

So, as promised, I thought I ought to post some artwork here for you, so that you don't think that I'm a slouch or some such nonsense (and, hey, look at me blogging on a regular basis!). Over the last couple weeks I've been preparing a ton of odds and ends for WonderCon - including some buttons and prints and whatnot. This one kinda serves a dual purpose.  At the con you'll be able to get this in either button or print form.  Check it out, an octopus!

I'm not sure what's with the fascination with cephalopod artwork, or cephalopods in general , is all about, but there's something cool and intriguing about them. In fact, I thought it was just me, but like many things, once you go to the cons, no matter how weird your interest is, there's someone exploiting it. So this might just be one more octopus among a sea of squid and octopi (and my favorite the nautilus), but it seemed like a good opportunity to get to draw an octopus, so I took it!

I'll probably share more of these little drawings in the coming days. After pretty much drawing the same characters, subject matter, and style day in and day out for almost three years, its been a fun diversion to get to get outside the usual routine!

Anyhow, hope you enjoyed this one.  More to come!

(OH, and for those of you interested, I did the line art in Manga Studio, and the color work in Photoshop.)

Mastorism Color Work

So the whole advertising thing has been working out really well for Mastorism.  REALLY well, in fact.  I'm pretty much beside myself with the amount of traffic I'm getting.  Not bragging really, just saying, I didn't realize the benefits of advertising!

Anyhow-- one of the things I've been really bad at is making good ads-- So, previously I had thrown up some basic logos, and one older image--  But I wanted something fresh, from the newest pages, and black and white art was not going to cut it.  Normally, for color, I would hit up my go-to guy, Norman Wong, but I had very little time, so I thought I'd have a go at it myself.  I've been working on some digital painting techniques, so I mainly applied  those here, just in coloring black and white line art.  I was pretty happy with the results.

You'll notice I only colored a portion.  In fact, beyond this cropping, there's no color, and you can see the color cuts off at the bottom, and I only colored the two figures.  The reason for this was because I only had a couple very narrow ad boxes to illustrate, so I didn't see the point in spending the time coloring the whole image.  I only colored what I thought I was going to need, and in fact, I probably ended up using quite a bit less than that, even.  Keep an eye out for the ad spots, and you'll see the final cropping.  I  think they came out well.

And for the true process junkies in the crowd.. Here's what the first step in this process looks like:

Before I even start in with the color, I go through and do a grayscale toning of the image (an in depth process I'll go into another time), in order to kind of get the values for the color image.  I think this is far from perfect, ditto for the colored version.  I didn't spend too much time really making sure the values made me 100% happy.  With the limited time I had, for this project, and what it was being used for, I found "passable" to be the quality I was shooting for.    Anyhow, a quicky version of what I do is simply drop the colors over the values as a base and then tweak/add to them (shadows, highlights, etc) until I feel the picture is more or less realized. 

Some time I might explain the process in detail, but frankly, I actually think I'm pretty underqualified to be giving anyone guidance or instruction on color and/or digital painting at this point in my life. But, it was a lot of fun, and it gave me a useful opportunity to practice some of my digital painting techniques.  I've never been too huge on color, so its a pretty big leap for me. 

Anyhow, I hope you enjoyed this little peek into the process here.  I mainly wanted to come up with an excuse to share this colored bit outside of the context of an advertisement. 

More stuff as it comes!