Sketchbooks

Here’s an old (over ten years old) sketch book of mine that got water damaged. I can’t bear to throw it away. Have a look!

A color sketch of Tori, my youngest daughter.

So water damaged you can barely see it. It’s a leaf!

“Planning for a Sci Fi illustration. Robot looks like it has its creative origins from “Doc Magnus Robot Fighter”. And the old rocket ship pictured above, standing on its fins, was a retro design at the time. Not today though, thanks to Elon Musk’s SpaceX endeavors!

My portable tool box back in those days.

Illustration: Albert Einstein.

Here’s a  tight color comp for a book cover.     I’m working digitally, as usual these days.   Picture above is of me drawing with my Intuos 4 tablet.    This was fun to do as it combined two of my favorite subjects: illustration and physics.  I purchased Isaacson’s biography of Albert Einstein and plan on reading it this summer.   His bios on Ben Franklin and Steve Jobs are fascinating!

Illustration: Comic Book Cover

Good photo reference and prep work makes a lot of difference in an illustration.   Here, I’ve googled reference for tombstones, graveyards, a 45 pistol and an ancient ceremonial knife.    I’m also the model for this, shooting pics with my Iphone camera.   Quick and easy to do.   I find , like every other illustrator, that good reference adds lots of detail you wouldn’t necessarily imagine, and once you set it up makes the actual drawing go very fast.
Here are the digital pencils, which took me a couple of hours.   I found a really cool photo of trees in silhouette against a night sky.    Once approved by my publisher, the drawing will be  digitally inked and colored.    By the way I came up with the logo for this cover also.    “The Grave” is a spooky vigilante series set in the nineteen twenties.

Illustration

Here’s an illustration I did for a regional welder.   I kinda like how it turned out.  Could see it used as a tattoo.

Illustration

Crayon sketch on the butcher paper table cloth. Here is “Gleep”, my little space man that I often find myself sketching on the tables of finer restaurants about Tulsa.

Sorry ’bout the mess.

Character Design

The “Manic Pixie”  character is being created for famous Tulsa Illustrator,  Rosemary Daugherty.  Rosemary owns  Manic Pixie Studios, located in Tulsa’s uber cool Pearl District.  Here are the comps and final pencils, produced with creative input from Rosey, herself!  Check out Rosemary’s creative illustrations at Rosemarydaugherty.com.

Illustration: Super Lawyer!

Tracy, recently had the honor of being selected for the accolade of being a Super Lawyer.   A designation in Oklahoma  for being …. well… a Super Lawyer!

Just for fun, I decided to illustrate her as the heroine of a comic book title:  Super Lawyer!

Here are a couple of pencil sketches that I started with.

After seleting between the two, I enhanced the sketch a bit and added some photo reference.   Uhmmmmm… did I say photo reference?  Actually I decided to apply a couple of Photoshop filters  to give  a more illustrated look and use them in the illustration. This by the way saved me a load of work.  No, I’m not cheating,  Norman Rockwell would have done the same thing if he could have!!!!!  By the way the filters I used were Posterize in combination with Cut Out.

Next I turned off the  background layerss, and changed the pencil line work to light blue.     ( Command +U/ colorize and mess with the sliders).  I used the Brush tool and the Pen tool to digitally ink the blue pencils.  This by the way is the first time I’ve ever digitally inked a digital pencil drawing of my own.  Oh, by the way Tracy made me put pants on her instead of the former mini skirt.   I guess lawyers don’t wear mini skirts to court.  Who knew?

After completing the digital inking, I added the color flats.

Here it is fully rendered with the logos and type.  I just hope this illustration doesn’t  get her barred from practice!

Illustration: Green Giant

Working at the Cherry Street Coffee Shop today.    I get more work done in coffee shops than I do at the studio.

I’m working on some comic strips for Green Giant.  I actually feel like I’m working on something worthwhile here; Getting kids to eat more vegatables.   Have you taken a look at kids lately.  Most of them are so fat!  What happened kids? I’m creating the pencils , colors and lettering digitally via Intous 4, with digital inks by Scott Youtsey.   Both of us, of course, doing this job via Miracle Studios.   Check out the first strip here.  Green Giant Strip

Miracle Squad: Cover art

Here’s the final cover art for the first Miracle Squad graphic novel.   Pulp 2.0 press is publishing it this spring.   The logo and type haven’t been added of course.     I’m looking forward to getting my hands on a copy.  There will also be a digital version available.   It will be my first digital book!   The first Miracle Squad Graphic Novel will contain the first four issues we did for Fantagraphics plus a short story,  and loads of extra behind the scenes notes from John (Wooley)  and developmental  sketches and such from me.

Tutorial: Comic Dots!

If you look at  older comics closely you’ll notice the colors are comprised of these little color dots.  Those are inherent in the “four color process” that generates all the colors from four basic colors of ink; Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black.  It’s also referred to as CMYK color.  Why  K is used for black , I have no idea.  The four color process is still used today but advances in technology have made the dots less noticeable.   In this illustration of a fifties circa mom I wanted to use the dots to give the background a retro feel.

Open up Photoshop and  create a GRAYSCALE file.  Using the GRADATION tool put in a grey to white gradation.

Next  go to the filter menu at the top of the window and choose  PIXELATE/COLOR HALFTONE .  A  window pops up and asks for a maximun radius size for the pixels.   I’d suggest you play around with different settings to find what looks right to you.   In this example I chose 25.

Now you have some black and white dots.   Convert the file to RGB or CMYK.    Here I have selected a blue color from the pallette.  I chose Cyan to accurately reflect the ink in the CMYK color process.   Use the PAINTBUCKET tool to drop color into the black and white dots.  Be sure to turn OFF  “Contiguous” in the settings for the PAINTBUCKET tool.     With contiguous turned off,  it just takes one click to fill in all the dots with the color you need.

Now copy and paste your retro dots into the background!