Challenge1

Elias Jimenez recently issued a challenge to me to draw a character I've been developing. He would do the same with a character he created. It can be a sketch or a full-fledged painting. The art just has to center around that one character. Here's a start of many false starts.

What to do. What to do.

So, Afua Richardson, Marc Bernadin and Adam Freeman created, "Genius," a comic that was featured in Top Cow's 2008 Pilot Season (the name implies what it means).

Today, Newsarama had a spotlight on "Genius" and the image to the left just drew me in immediately.

(Post wrap-up: The image on the right is a pin-up I finished in mid-July 2010. I'm not really cheesed about it. The composition is different, and the comic series itself doesn't touch on any of the concepts that I want to explore through my narrative. I will say though, that Richardson has improved a lot since "Genius" first appearance in 2008. Obviously, I still have a lot of work to do (everyone does, really).)

That's that. Good thing I took a whole day to write this post.

Bark

Monday Scarlet

Scanned it wrong, and it's ugly.

Winter Scene

I won't have access to a scanner in the next two days, but I'll try to upload something I did not too long ago. In fact, it was a week ago. Two weeks ago.

I was selected to develop a painting for the Vice President of NJCU. Well, me and Stephanie Herrera. The VP had an art auction going on, and wanted some student artwork in it, too.

To cut some corners, I made this illustration into a letter for a greeting card I was also a part of developing. Obviously, I had the letter 'E' to illustrate, but I wanted to to a nighttime scene, as opposed to the obvious snow man for the winter greeting card.

See you here in two days.

Plusfive

Granted, I'm not very good at any of the Call of Duty or Modern Warfare games. I don't play enough to be very good at any game. I love fighting games, shooters, platformers, action/adventure. I know I don't have any time for RPGs, but I do give some a try.

(Mass Effect 2, you'll be done soon enough!)

Research and sketches

Riot Laugh

I usually don't like uploading until illustrations are published (even if it is for my own magazine), but I can't find anything else I've scanned at the moment.

You can find this one in Instigatorzine 9.

www.instigatorzine.com

100: Retribution

Hi. So, my initial plan for my 100th post here was a special illustration of either Dexter, Firefly or Caution, my own personal project. I started thinking of a kind of mash-up with the three groups, but then it started to get out of control. While I'm still planning some kind of special illustration, for now, I present to you how I worked through an Instigatorzine spot illustration for a short story by Robert Jason Clark, called "Retribution."

First up! Pencils. Not actually first up. I went through, maybe, five pages of thumbs trying to get something interesting. This first drawing, which is actually the last in the story, took forever for me to figure out.

For Retribution, I decided to do something different from the usual brush and ink finish. This might look like ink here, but it's really grease pencil (Chinese marker or whatever) on acetate.

'Cause paper don't shine like this.

Invisible.

Usually, if one chooses to use this method, the image underneath the transparency is fully rendered and realized. Here, I just blocked in some colors to save time.

And here are the finishes.

I was inspired by a post on the Today's Inspiration blog, featuring Bob Peak. It quoted him using grease crayons on acetate. It was an interesting concept. Probably try to work with it some more.

Maybe at the next landmark-numbered blogpost, I'll be prepared with something special.

Via Gurney Journey: How Ink is Made

Gurney Journey: How Ink is Made: "This eight-minute documentary shows how they make commercial printing ink. The colors and textures are so delicious that you’ll want to eat..."