Quitely

I googled myself yesterday to find that the three first image results were all drawings that I had done for Project Rooftop. Not sure how Google's search filter thing works but I'm guessing that means that those are the drawings that got the most exposure to people online. What's funny about that is that for Project Rooftop, I intentionally try to draw like someone else, Frank Quitely.

So, I wish I could articulate to those of you that don't know who that is, why he is as awesome as he is, but I'm sure if you look around, you can find people to do that to a far greater effect. In fact, here's one.

Even though I have tried pretty consciously to mimic Quitely because he's become one of my favorite artists, I generally fail pretty hard at doing that because my basic drawings aren't very good. Here are the pencils for a Wolverine drawing which was the first time I got an honorable mention.



It's pretty old. Wolverine's face is hilarious and not Quitely at all but this is before I just tried to straight up ape him completely. Here is that drawing colored. In the one that comes up in google there are more drawings on the side of it but those sucked so I cropped them off this one.



This also shows up in that google search eventually, it was a comparison of how I drew in 2005 compared to 2010. As you can see, 2005 was an unfortunate time for me. And yet people never told me how bad I was. Enablers. Very nice guy saw this on twitter and put it on his Firestorm blog. So that's why it shows up.



Another Project Rooftop contest was Aquaman. I love Aquaman so I had to enter it. Here are the inks for that. Never scanned the pencils because they were too light and loose. The benefit to trying to draw like Quitely for me has been that I can draw way less initially because I do almost all the rendering in ink. Maybe that's a problem.



Here's that drawing colored. That splashing behind him was a lot funner to draw than to color. I'm sure that shows because I didn't bother coloring it. Also, that A on his chest in gray looks really weird. I thought it worked even though it feels completely out of place. I've never been a very good designer either.



When Dwayne McDuffie died recently, there was a call from Project Rooftop for Static drawings and so I did one. I can honestly say, I never watched the Static Shock cartoon nor did I read many of McDuffie's comics but his impact on the industry was undeniable and I wanted to draw something to honor that with the other people that contributed in that.



And so I did another shameless Quitely inspired drawing.



Lately, I've been drawing stuff that I really liked and drew growing up because I think a lot of the things people my age were into growing up is starting to become nostalgically cool. So I drew the Power Rangers. The idea was to make it like those awesome covers that Quitely does that are sparse but have a big impact. Yeah. About that. Didn't work out.



But you know, eh... whatever.



I think there's something really helpful about drawing like people like Quitely who has a very distinct style because it seeps into your drawing when you stop drawing and the more you do that with different artists, the more you get a style that is a Frankenstein's monster of cool people. Right now, I don't think I have a monster but we'll see how that goes.

Ditko

This is a drawing of the Creeper, Hawk and Dove, and Shade the Changing Man.



They are all DC characters created in part by Steve Ditko or completely by him.



They prove that you can make interesting superheroes that aren't interesting because they're violent or angsty. They don't shoot guns. They don't kill. They don't wear black. They're awesome.

Some Recent Drawings

Frank and Elenore

So as some of you know, and given that probably no one but like a few people who work on the comic with me, I do a comic book called "Frank and Elenore In..." for Pyschotronik Comics with one of my best friends and the super talented Adam Messinger. It's pretty awesome if I do say so myself and its a lot of fun...

Anyways, the point of this blog is that, that comic is part of an anthology ingeniously called Psychotronik Comics Presents and in that we have rotating covers where every issue one of the artists does the cover for his story. Well number two is mine so I thought I'd share that cover.

After being far too classy and original the first time around, Brandon, the editor in chief type indivdual asked me to do another one. Of course I bitched about it and tried to avoid more work but he insisted I didn't capture the tone of my own comic and asked me to reconsider.

I did.

So this is the result of my humongous cave in. An overworked mess.

Which became a colored overworked mess.


Brandon is gonna dress it for me but is holding out for new art from the other contributors. I await seeing that because it will mean we are inches closer to publishing number two of this thing. I'm hoping i can have it distressed a little so it looks like an older looking comic the way they have been doing on the varients for Death Defying Devil... other things too, I'm sure but I just can't think of any others, those just are at the top of my head. The point is make it look like an old comic.

Soo... yeah.

The Seven Soldiers of Victory

This is another contest I entered just for the fun of entering contests and it's a pin up of the original seven soldiers of victory. The theme was golden age and I think the group represents everything awesome about the golden age of comics. You got the big time pulp hero in Crimson Avenger,

you got the western stories with Vigilante,


the fantasy with Shining Knight,

you've got the superheroes with a child being put into extreme danger... and tights in Star Spangled Boy and Stripsey,then of course the same thing but with bows and arrows in Green Arrow and Speedy. Because archery is badass!

Hmm, if the blue turned just a bit ago, that is totally not intentional. Sometimes I just can't control the font that appears on my screen. Hope that isn't a link to nowhere...

Anyways, so I put these all together with some magic and no computer work whatsoever and this is the end product.
Feel free to click it and see its true size. I think it will show in full size anyways, its done so in the past.

Anyways, hope all of you (YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE) like it and stuff.

Victim of Resizings...

Well, I had some pretty big pipe dreams of entering this project rooftop Batman 2.0 challenge thing that's going to go down soon and I spent a lot of time working on a high resolution image of Dick Grayson as Batman with a cheesy Japanese hero/batmobile/batman beyond mash up of ideas that probably didn't work out as well as I would have hoped they did... Anyways, I uploaded the bastard on photobucked and say how silly it looked shrunk down so I went into Gimp which is what I use to color and work on it at 427 pixels wide which isn't very big... then I save OVER the psd file! Argh, huge headache and now all that high res work I did is essentially ruined with only a rougher draft left as a relic of the image that I had going. I am going to use that one to show anyone reading this blog here and now:


Course you click on it and see it at its full size.

Anyways, so here was the one I ended up emailing to the fine folks over there at project rooftop.


So there you have it. It's not very different from the first one and its not like extremely tiny but the angle is different the background is lighter and there are just some minor differences that I was getting really caught up over that became my undoing in the end when I couldn't go back to the pre-image scale version.

I probably won't even be in the little mentioned ones because the more I look at this, the more I see everything that's wrong with it.

DC Superheroes

Some of my favorite dc characters done in a similar pin up style that I have a lot of fun drawing.

Let's talk about... Wonder Woman.

See the thing with Wonder Woman that I respect is that She is a strong feminine character but what I can't stand is that everyone has to let me know that she's a strong feminine character. I feel like with this character I am told too often that she is beautiful and wise and noble and powerful but I rarely told this in an organic fashion. Even in the best interpretations of her (I don't read the Simone book but I should) like George Perez's acclaimed run on the book, its a lot of putting her in this grand position in the DC Universe. I think the character is done proving herself and there was a simpler time when the character was created that she was allowed to act independently of her status as a symbol and could be degraded and bound and beaten like you know... pretty much every other character does. That same equality isn't there and by making her a feminist symbol that is always this stoic figure, it feels like a contradiction to me.

MR. A.