TMNT 30th Anniversary Tribute

For the 30th Anniversary of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, IDW is doing a special 48 page book featuring new stories by past TMNT artists including a new cover by Eastman & Laird! I was asked by editor Bobby Curnow to do a pinup for the book. I've mentioned before what a special and influential part TMNT played in me understanding storytelling, comics, and wanting to be a creator (it also was the link that started my friendship with the real life-Kenzie to my Saxon: Jesse Glenn). To the left you can see the finished piece, but below are the steps of creating it along with some though process as I worked.

The newspaper concept wasn't my first idea. I originally was going to do something with the four turtles each lugging along all their earthly possessions (in an abandoned shopping cart, milk crates, patched duffles, etc,) down a sewer tunnel as just around the corner NYC sewer workers were doing work in that branch of their home. It proved to be something I saw more as a story and had a hard time summing it up in a single image. Instead I focused on just drawing each of the turtles in a cool pose where I might be able to group them together well. As I did that the concept of a newspaper came to me and I drew a 'photo' of Shredder too. Each of these are on separate sheets of copy paper, which give me mental freedom to make a mistake and pitch something that's not working because it's not on 'good' paper or bound in a sketchbook.

I scanned the sketches and composited them in Photoshop into a layout.I asked Bobby if I could use NEW YORK TIMES for the paper, but he advised copying their masthead design could be a legal issue, so I opted to make up my own that felt like the times, but was different. I tried other newspaper names like Sentinel and Journal...but liked Herald best (There was in-fact, a New York Herald which stopped publication in 1924). The type (though much of it is blocked or goes off the edges) was all written like a newspaper article. It was about a crime wave that police had few leads for, but after a botched subway hijacking, police may have found links from "The Foot Clan" to Oroku Saki pinning him as the masked "Shredder" crime boss. The date is an approximation of when Kevin & Pete first created the TMNT (they say it was late Oct. or early Nov.)

I printed the composited layout you see above onto copy paper (it was larger than one sheet so I had to patch it back together with tape) and then taped it to the back of a sheet of Strathmore 300 series Bristol. I had toyed with not inking any of the newspaper elements of then the Shredder 'picture' and just use my digital type and layout to save me time inking, but I tend to find that when you try and blend type and art together that isn't dialogue or a sound effect, it always sticks out like a sore thumb. So tracing over the printout I was able to hand letter the masthead and all the article, giving it a bit of imperfection as I went to replicate printing errors on newsprint. You will also notice I added heap of dead/unconscious foot soldiers around the TMNT. My original plan was to fade the turtles out to white, but opted to give them a more solid base and help sell the story about the Foot Clan crime wave.

As I started the 'coloring' stage, I knew I wanted to do something special for this piece celebrating the origins of the TMNT. Back when I discovered the turtles, they all wore red masks, and with Eastman and Laird being heavily influenced by Frank Miller's Ronin, I thought it would be fun to carry that over to spot color accents like in Sin City. The masthead got a bit of red too for balance. For the rest of the cover, I wanted everything to be in greyscale. The newspaper text & Shredder photo I made all grey to help push it back behind the turtles. After a bit of rendering and then applying a faux-halftone screen (to pay homage to the old duo-tone pages from the original TMNT run) the final piece was done and can be seen again below:

2014 Appearances:

Comicpalooza: May 23-25

Phoenix Comic Con: June 5-8

Special Edition NYC: June 14-15

Heroes Con: June 20-22

San Diego Comic Con: July 23-27

Boston Comic Con: August 8-10

Baltimore Comic Con: Sept. 5-7

NY Comic Con: Oct. 9-12

Beyond the Western Deep Pinup process

Alex Kain, who wrote the Legends Vol 1 story "Potential" has been writing a talking-animal webcomic for a few years. The series is called Beyond the Western Deep and is drawn by Rachel Bennett. This year Alex and Rachel are going to be publishing their first collection of the series. The physical book will be first released at the Boston Comic Con in August and available online afterwards (To the left is Rachel's work-in-progress cover)
I contributed a pinup for the collection, and today's blogpost is the process of how I went about making the artwork.

My first step was to decide what to focus on for a pinup. There are several characters, and while I was tempted to do a piece featuring the less prominent ones, I did in the end decide to feature two of the main cast Quinlan & Dakkan. With the Legends of the Guard connection between Alex and I, I thought it would be nice to have this pair in a tavern setting. Each of the characters and the background were drawn on separate sheets of copy paper, then scanned into Photoshop, tinted, and placed into a template for the pinup's specs. This allows me to shuffle around the pieces individually, resize them if needed, and get my placement just the way I want it. The Celtic knot was a low-res pattern I found online, modified and repeated as top and bottom borders.

With the layout set, I printed the piece out (on two sheets of legal paper that I taped together) and taped it to the back of a sheet of 12" x 12" Strathmore 300 series bristol. On a lightbox I'm able to see through the bristol to the printout and use it as a guide while I ink. For pens I used Copic Multiliners (the 0.7 & 0.2 nibs). I can't take credit for the character, costume, or tavern design since I really just followed Rachel's work, but I did try to make sure I was drawing my piece with my own voice, my own line quality and texture sensibility.

The finished inks were then scanned and in Photoshop I started flatting the colors for the piece. Flatting colors is all about establishing color areas. Making one character's fur a different color than the others or than their clothes or than the walls. It's a grown-up version of coloring-within-the-lines. In some cases, I use really garish and wrong colors when I flat because I don't want to get bogged down with color choices when I just need to establish the different areas. In this case though, most of the palate was already there for me in Rachel's art in the series.

The last step was to render all the color. I added highlights, shadows and texture for the piece using the Dodge and Burn tools with a textured Photoshop brush. A few color holds and special effects layers were added to make the lanterns glow and Quinlan's sash look embroidered.

You can go now and read all of Beyond the Western Deep now for free on the website, but the physical copy (with pinup material etc) will be coming to print at Boston Con.

2014 Appearances:

C2E2: April 25-27
FCBD: Harrison's Comics: May 3

Motor City Comic Con: May 16-18

Comicpalooza: May 23-25

Phoenix Comic Con: June 5-8

Special Edition NYC: June 14-15

Heroes Con: June 20-22

San Diego Comic Con: July 23-27

Boston Comic Con: August 8-10

Baltimore Comic Con: Sept. 5-7

NY Comic Con: Oct. 9-12

Monsters & Dames 2014

The Emerald City Comic Con puts out an art book each year called "Monsters & Dames"...with the theme matching the title. The book benefits the Seattle Children's Hospital and is a great collection of artwork from many of the guests and artists in artist alley. I've done pieces for 3 of the past books: Beauty & Beast, Frankenstein's Monster & Bride, & A Dame riding a Dragon. To the left you can see this year's piece, and today's blogpost will cover the process for making the artwork.


The beginning of this piece had a few false starts, including the idea of a monster admiring fairies (dame-fairies), a dame/monster wedding, and a dame walking her pet monster on a leash. I kept playing with monster heads to get me into the right mood for the piece, but none of these were what I wanted. I did like some of what was happening with one of the heads though (middle top), and thought I could make it better...

Taking that head I liked above, I worked out a better head design and felt I got to play with the monster's personality a bit. It combined a few ideas from the past designs, with a little bit of a Disney tiger mouth/jaw structure. The full figure sketch followed, which gave me a sense of the overall layout and scale of Monster to Dame...and then set about getting a dame pose that worked. The final dame sketch was a hybrid of a few reference photos for the pose, dress, & umbrella. For the beast, I was still undecided on those horns...with or without...

I composited the sketches in photoshop into a template for the file specs of the piece. The yellow and orange border lines represent the edge of the 'live area' as well as the 'bleed' (or in layman's terms, where you want to keep all the important bits, and where you need to extend the art out to so when the paper is trimmed you don't have an unprinted edge). I tinted the image of the dame to help me make better sense of the lines and figures. And while debating the horns, I dropped in a photo of some real ram horns and liked them so well, I didn't bother redrawing them for the layout.

I printed out the above composite and taped it to the back of a sheet of Strathmore 300 series bristol. On a lightbox, I was able to see through the bristol and use the printout as a guide to ink by. The inks are all done with Copic Multiliners (the 0.35 & 0.7 nibs mainly) I focused on adding a nice amount of texture while still making sure the outer contours still read well. The bone landscape was roughed in very loosely in the layout, so I did pencil in tighter bones as I inked...referencing dinosaur, large mammal, and human skeletons.

The inks are then scanned back into photoshop and I start the coloring process. This stage is called 'flatting' because I'm simply establishing the color areas with flat base colors. I had no idea what my overall palate would be for this piece, but in the flatting stage it doesn't really matter, just color in the lines and differentiate areas that are meant to be different colors. I tend to make a new layer for most types of 'things' in my file: "beast fur", " skin", "dress", "sky", "bones", etc. It makes it easier to re-isolate an area when I want to render it or adjust the color overall.

Here again is the final render, which I achieved by using the dodge & burn tools (with the drybrush as my brush to add texture & mottling).



The Monsters & Dames book will be available at the Emerald City Comic Con for purchase (as well as the original art being auctioned off there) and remaining books are usually offered for sale online through the Emerald City website after the con ends.

Also this year at Emerald City, I'll be debuting an offset print of last year's Beauty & Beast piece and offering more of them for sale in my online store after I return home.

UPDATE:

Gordon Smuder Interpreted my Monster as a puppet:

2014 Appearances:

MSU Comics Forum: February 22

Emerald City Comic Con: March 28-30

C2E2: April 25-27

Motor City Comic Con: May 16-18

Comicpalooza: May 23-25

Phoenix Comic Con: June 5-8

Heroes Con: June 20-22

San Diego Comic Con: July 23-27

Boston Comic Con: August 8-10

Baltimore Comic Con: Sept. 5-7

NY Comic Con: Oct. 9-12

Bodie Troll Pinup Process:

My friend and fellow Michigander Jay Fosgitt has a new creator-owned book out through Red 5 called Bodie Troll. It's an all-ages book about a little troll who isn't big and scary (though he tries to be) so no one takes him seriously. Jay asked me to contribute a pinup for an upcoming issue, and I was glad to. Here's the process for the artwork.

Sketch/Layout:

After looking at Jay's first issue (the only issue available when I started the pinup)over and over for reference and to brainstorm on an idea, I decided that I really wanted to include the puppet newscaster Socko as well as an action shot of Bodie. I talked to Jay about Socko, asking what would he be made of, if Jay ever planned to show the puppeteer, if Socko should appear away from the puppeteer ever, etc. With some answers from Jay, I sketched out Bodie and Socko in my sketchbook, scanned them and placed them into a photoshop template with the bleed area marked out in yellow. I used a drawing of Jay's in my layout for the puppet theater and Socko's painted sign.To help with the layout, I quickly splashed some underpainted color onto the characters to help me see if the masses worked the way I wanted them to.

Inks:
With the sketch printed out to full scale, I taped it on to the back of a sheet of Strathmore 300 series bristol. I inked the piece on my lightbox where I was able to see the printed sketch through the bristol to use as a guide for my inks. I tried to give Bodie's varied fur types some texture and movement as well as to stitching texture to the theater's banner and Socko's wooden head. I only used Jay's version of the theater as a guide and added my own movement and embellishments to the curtains and awning.

Colors:
The last step was to scan the inks and color them digitally. Jay is using a lot of color holds on Bodie Troll, so I wanted to do a similar treatment. None of the lineart is black, but different shades of brown, with the lighter browns being used to convey distance. Otherwise the colors are just kept as close to on-model for Jay's book as I could get.

The pinup will appear in Bodie Troll #4 which is in Previews now for pre-order (ask your store to get you a copy) for release in October.

Watercolor Wednesday:

Here's another look at last week's watercolors in case you missed them. The first started as an exercise to use a mirror for facial expressions. But then I played and had fun with the beard, costume, coloration, and background. In fact, both pieces last week had patterned backgrounds.

The second of last week's pieces was a dragon in a knight's helmet. The background needed to be light once I'd painted in a strong red for the flag-ribbon...but the pale yellow was too dull...so I had fun with repetition

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Upcoming Appearances:

Boston Comic Con: August 3-4

Baltimore Comic Con: September 7-8

New York Comic Con: October 10-13

North Carolina Comic Con: November 9-10

Runners: "The Big Snow Job" Pinup:

I did a pinup for my pal Sean Wang's sci-fi comic "Runners" second arc: The Big Snow Job. Runners is like all the Han, Lando, & Chewbacca adventures you imagined happened in the Star Wars universe. I met Sean after his first arc had been collected and I was just in the middle of Fall 1152 and we clicked as friends pretty quickly. I did a pinup exchange with him back when he first started posting his second arc as a webcomic (you can see that process post here). Sean invited me back to do another piece, but this time in theme with the 2nd arc as he worked toward collecting it as a single volume...which is now being Kickstarted here.

Here was the process in creating the pinup. I drew out the characters in my sketchbook without really knowing the final composition. This was more a way of re-learning how to draw the characters and in their winter gear. This image is a bit of a photoshop-cheat for sake of the blog...these sketches were stretched over the course of 2-3 pages in my sketchbook and aside less desirable roughs of the character's heads & hands. But when I got a version of everyone that I liked, I scanned them to see if I could piece together a usable layout from it.

The result of assembling the various drawings in several configurations ended up being a square shaped group shot. To bump it up to a tall comic-sized piece, I added a bottom panel of a plot point from The Big Snow Job: a group of yak-like beasts the crew is interested in smuggling....but ends up being more than they bargained for. The inside-binocular framing and the yaks themselves were taken directly from Sean's pages for the sake accuracy in this layout. The lines you see framing the whole piece represent 'live area' and bleed'. Everything important needs to stay inside the innermost line, but I have the extend the artwork out to the outermost line to guarantee that when this is printed, the art goes beyond where the paper will be trimmed.

I printed the above layout and used it as a guide on my lightbox as I inked the final art on Starthmore 300 bristol. To tie the yak panel together with the characters above it, I added a pair of binoculars to Ril's hands. Inking a piece like this I focus on making sure each character stands out against whatever is around them. Sometimes that has to do with texture, sometimes it has to do with light on dark shapes (or the reverse), and sometimes just comes down to a strong contour line. I tried to give each character a different line treatment either on their skin or clothing so the mass of body shapes didn't just blend together. The linework was all done with Copic Multiliners and the bottom panel fills were done with a brush.

To start the coloring process, I layed in flat colors (no shading or texture) on the scanned inkwork. As I've said in all of my past process posts, flatting is a fancy term for establishing color areas that is the equivalent of coloring within the lines. It makes it easier to isolate each part (character A's skin, Character B's glove, Character C's hair..etc...) when it comes time to render the color. I included my layers menu in the screen grab of the flats. I tend to label them all to make life easier on me. The layer marked 'linework' is the scan of the inks. It is set to layer mode "multiply" so that photoshop allows the white areas to become like a transparency and the black linework to be opaque. All other layers are set to layer mode normal. You can see the layers above the linework are the color holds of opaque color on top of the linework, while the layers below the inks are groupings of color groups: skin, clothes, eyes, etc.

The final colors get redered and textured using the dodge and burn tools (terms used in photographic developing that basically mean lighten and darken or over/under expose). I use a textured brush to get that pebbled look to all the colors. Besides the rendering and color holds, this piece has a few other effects. The falling snow is added in digitally (for Mouse Guard I usually do this in ink on paper and then scan and invert the dots and streaks, but for this piece I just painted them in in photoshop). A few characetrs have cold breath coming out of their mouths, and the binoculars got a grain filter added to look more like a digital display screen.

Runners is a really fun and well written and drawn comic. You can read both arcs on Sean's website RunnersUniverse.com for free! BUT, consider going to his Kickstarter where you can get volume 2, and select not only volume 1 as a reward, but also BOTH of my Runner's pieces as prints!: Click here to view the Runner's Kickstarter

Watercolor Wednesday: 
First up from last Wednesday's offerings is a piece titled Applekettle. The word came to me a while back when I needed a name for something, but it ended up being too odd for that purpose. I later used it as the name of the mouse puppetry troupe that put on the marionette show in the 2012 Free Comic Book Day story. This painting was an attempt at a visual of the word...or perhaps the puppetry troupe's logo?

The second watercolor from last week is simply a radish.

I'll post a new painting in the store next week.


2013 Appearances: 
Fabletown Con: March 22-24
C2E2: April 26-28
Spectrum Live: May 17-19
Heroes Con: June 7-9
Albuquerque Comic Expo June 21-23
San Diego Comic Con: July 17-21
*more 2013 dates coming*

Monsters & Dames 2013 process

The Emerald City Comic Con has a fantastic Art book they put on every year at their show called: Monsters & Dames. The book features art with...well...Monsters & Dames by the various guests of the convention and the money raised goes to a Seattle Children's Hospital. As I am returning to Emerald City this year, I contributed a piece for the 2013 book. In year's past I've done a Frankenstein's Monster & Bride piece and a Dame riding a dragon. This year I wanted to do something a bit more fairy-tale-ish. So I did my take on Beauty and the Beast.

 I did a lot of looking at other versions of the pair, illustrations by Edmund Dulac and various other golden age illustrators, the animated Disney movie and stage play, and Jean Cocteau's La Belle La Bete 1946 film. The goal was to give something new, and Petersen-ish, but still familiar. I drew a Beauty and a Beast in separate pages in my sketchbook (so if I wanted to redraw or correct one or the other, I could do so without fearing erasing any part of the other) and then assembled them in photoshop. Beauty was inspired by a photo of Anne Hathaway and Beast is an amalgamation of my own illustration tendencies, Disney, and La Bete's wardrobe from the French film. The background is a zoomed in section of iron casting I felt made a nice design and set a mood of both beauty and danger.

The above digital composition was then printed out so I could tape it to the back of a sheet of Strathmore 300 series bristol. On a lightbox I can see through the bristol to the printed layout and use it as a guide while I ink. This also means that unless there is an area I want to tighten up or correct in pencil before I ink it, there is virtually no pencil on the finished piece to erase afterwards. I inked the linework all with a Copic Multiliner pen (mostly the 0.7 nib) and the ironwork with a brush. The embroidery on Beast's cloak and the lacework of his high collar & cuffs was inked in black though I wanted them to appear lighter in the final color version. At this stage I worried that committing Beauty's face to an almost binary black/white line had taken away the softness and tenderness I worked so hard to get in the rough.

The finished inked piece was then scanned so I could flat the colors in. Originally I had Beast's clothing in more of a black/navy configuration and Beauty's dress in more of a gold...but I realized that I was being too heavily influenced by the palette of the Disney movie and Cocteau's film (the colorized cover art to the DVD). I swapped out the blues for reds (a color of aggression and passion) and the gold for pale blue (a color of sweetness, calm, and innocence). Even when drawing this piece, I knew the background was going to be in the violet family, and luckily the clothing color alterations didn't force me to change my background color scheme.

After the color flats are established and I've set the basic palate  I render the piece adding shadows, highlights and color transitions. Normally I do this exclusively with the dodge & burn tools in photoshop (using a textured brush) but this time I also used the paintbrush for some color transitions and a feathered lasso to isolate and enhance the color in selected areas. To get back the softness I felt I lost in the inks from the pencils, I focused on rendering the subtlety back into Beauty's face (with a little help of the Anne Hathaway photo for reference on the planes of her face & neck). I added color holds on Beast's embroidery and lace and to the background iron work too. I didn't want the iron to overtake the emotion of Beast's torn feelings to reach out for what he wants while fearing the outcome and internalizing his own self-loathing (at least that's what I saw going on there...)

The Monsters & Dames book will be available at the Emerald City Comic Con for purchase (as well as the original art being auctioned off there) and remaining books are usually offered for sale online through the Emerald City website after the con ends.


Watercolor Wednesday: For those who missed seeing the Watercolors from last week's Watercolor Wednesday, here's another look at them.
First up: 7 Horcruxes. I'm a big Harry Potter fan. I came across a 7 pointed star design while researching patterns for my Free Comic Book Day story. It occured to me that it would be a great template to make a Horcrux chart. I organized them in the order in which Voldemort made each (starting with the book and rotating clockwise)

Second up is one of my favorite paintings I've ever done for Watercolor Wednesday...and I'm not quite sure why. It's a heap of coins. I painted this at the same time as the Horcrux piece, so the palate is similar (those are the colors I had wet and going). I looked at some historic ancient coins for inspiration, but for the most part, I let the brush suggest details rather than plan them out.

Third painting from last week is a bell. I'd planned on this being more of a Christmas themed painting, but didn't get it done and posted in time. The music below the bell is 'God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen".

Tomorrow I'll post more paintings in my online store.

2013 Appearances: 
Emerald City: March 1-3
Fabletown Con: March 22-24
C2E2: April 26-28
Spectrum Live: May 17-19
Heroes Con: June 7-9
Albuquerque Comic Expo June 21-23
San Diego Comic Con: July 17-21
*more 2013 dates coming*

Cursed Pirate Girl Piece Process

As many of you know, I'm a big supporter of Jeremy Bastian's Cursed Pirate Girl comic series. Jeremy's work is AMAZING! and I was honored when he asked me to contribute a new piece for his hardcover collection with Archaia. The new collcetion has a section at the end called "The Royal Portraiturist". Jeremy wrote quotes as though they were eyewitness descriptions of Cursed Pirate Girls deeds, then Jeremy chose a group of artists to draw those descriptions.

I was given the description: "This little girl fought, and those fine swordmasters the king bought, the ones said to be unbeatable...well they wee made out to be naught but frilly baboons."

Because I was going to be drawing a lot of humans (unusual for me) I started by taking photo reference. I took a picture of my oldest niece as CPG, and multiple photos of myself. Unfortunately, it looks like I deleted the original untouched photos of her in Ugg boots grimacing at unseen foes & gripping unseen swords. I do have this embarrassing grouping of photos I took of myself reacting like scared "frilly baboon" swordmasters.

 Because Jeremy's characters often have distorted anatomy and exaggerated features, I used the 'Liquify' tool in photoshop to warp the photos I took until I liked the characters that were emerging. I had to alter my niece as well. I made her head much larger in proportion to her body and altered her arm and hands a bit too. The composition of the swordmasters was arrived at by just moving around the various photos until they pieced together in a way that everyone was shown. I drew & inked the final piece based on this distorted layout.

Here is the final inked piece, which I'm very happy with. Because this piece was going to be printed in black and white, I needed to make the piece 'read' without color. To make sense of the figures and their costumes, I focused on strong contour lines to define their outer form and a well distributed group of textures & grey densities. (I've talked about making grey patterns before to help define 2D spaces in my Inking Grey post.)   After finishing the piece, I developed some backstories for the various swordmasters and their swords and fighting styles.

Here's a closer look at CPG and the Swordmasters:

Cursed Pirate Girl herself. I tried not to stray far from Jeremy's design of her

The Dandy & the Dwarf.

The Cultist

The Retired Gruff

Jeremy's hardcover collection of Cursed Pirate Girl is available now at your local comic book shop & bookstore. Jeremy also recently opened an online store for his hand stained prints: http://jeremybastian.bigcartel.com/

Watercolor Wednesday: In case you missed last week's Watercolor Wednesday pieces, here are all three in one image for a closer look. When I worked in the Ypsilanti antique store called Materials Unlimited I saw a lot of antique keys. Reading the Locke & Key series has awoken my appreciation for the beauty of keys both in their design & fabrication, but also in their symbolism. When I drew them out  (and I'd originally intended to draw more than 3) I added ribbons & labels so that I could 'write something clever' on each one. After the three were painted I gave they the attributes of Faith, Hope, & Charity and decided I didn't need to make another single key.

Tomorrow I'll post more of paintings in my online store.

2013 Appearances: 
Emerald City: March 1-3
Fabletown Con: March 22-24
C2E2: April 26-28
Spectrum Live: May 17-19
Heroes Con: June 7-9
San Diego Comic Con: July 17-21
*more 2013 dates coming*