More experimentation with lighting, color mixing and creating mood. This time out I used a familar subject- Blake from the Makeshift Miracle. It was fun to exaggerate his design a bit to make it feel more cartoony. Comparing it to my old comic pages, I can see better flow in the lines and more solid construction.

Coloring-wise I’m trying to get more bold with my application of light and shadow, leaving brushstrokes and rougher bits there to add some texture instead of over rendering the heck out of them and sucking the life out of it. In time I hope to find a happy medium between sketchiness/energy/gesture and a strong quality of rendering. As with the other Mini Paintings, the whole thing took between half an hour and forty minutes, from idea through to posting here as I noodled away at it.

Otherwise, my weekend:
I caught a matinee of X-Men 3 on Friday afternoon with the-caveat and his lovely lady. The movie was actually better than I thought it would be. It definitely goes all over the map in terms of X-Men comic canon and doesn’t leave much time for character development, but it’s entertaining and keeps things moving at a good clip. Not deep and meaningful, just action-y and bombastic, which seemed to fit the mood I was in when I saw it.

Anime North went well. I only attended the show on Saturday, which thankfully gave me more time to get other work stuff done today. The full spread of costumed fans, full blown anime junkies, gawkers and more were in attendance. Keith Burgess was working at the Manga Entertainment booth right next to us. I’ve met Keith several times but this time we really got a chance to talk, chatting and laughing like crazy. He had a little speaker system set up with a mic to make announcements about free Manga Video giveaways and stuff, but within 15 minutes we’d turned it into our personal PA system, doing little routines and funny voices. Keith also does voice acting for Manga, which made things even more hilarious as he did impressions of Akuma from the Street Fighter anime (which he voiced) ordering fast food, getting a stomach ache and begging people for a cookie.

Last night was the book launch party for Scott Pilgrim volume 3 and the Dinosaur Comics first collection. After the autographing session and general social hanging out, I grabbed a bunch of artists who weren’t wiped out from the day at the con and we engaged the might of karaoke. After wrecking our voices and minds once again, music_slut thankfully drove me home. Apparently classic Van Halen is a damn fine driving home in the middle of the night soundtrack. Finally crashing after 4am, I thanked my lucky stars I didn’t have to be up early for the con today.

Today was both work productive and apartment cleaning productive but not at any sort of brutal pace. It didn’t feel like a difficult or tiring day even though I got a bunch done, which is always nice.

Up at Udon house in the middle of the night grabbing some checks and getting up to date on happenings before Anime North starts tomorrow.

The Onimusha: Night of Genesis manga is in and looks sharp. The book is larger and more detailed than the Japanese original, which is quite cool.

Anyways, while I’m puttering around the office waiting for Erik to finish scanning comic art for the crew, I notice another crazy thing he’s added to the collection. You see, Erik is a die-hard geek of epic proportions… his nerd collection is out of control. Thousands of comics, books, statues, games, dolls – you name it. It’s a mish-mash museum of anime and comic stuff.

But there before me was a new plateau for even him – Return of the Jedi shampoo. The bottles were actually shaped like the characters… in this case Wicket the Ewok and Jabba the Hutt.

These were still sealed, but back in the day you would’ve ripped off Wicket or Jabba’s head and poured their shampoo innards over your hair for some Star Wars-tainted cleanliness.

Zub: “Erik, you bought Star Wars fuckin’ shampoo.”

Erik: *laughs* “Collectable shampoo bottles. They’re hard to get you know.”

*Jim checks the date on them*

Zub: “Dude, you tracked down 23 year old Star Wars shampoo. What the fuck is WRONG with you?!”

Erik: “The Chewbacca one is in the bathroom cause it got damaged when we moved houses. Shampoo oozes from his neck.”

Today’s mini-painting:

I like how it turned out.

I actually did the colors on this one while the image was flipped horizontally so that I could correct the natural “lean” of my line and brushstrokes. When it was almost done, I flopped it back and was surprised how big a difference it seemed to make.

As with all the other mini-paintings I’ve been doing since my birthday (except for the landscape one last time), here’s the basic method:

– I sketch out the little pic.
– I scan the drawing into Photoshop and adjust the line art so it’s relatively clean, popping it up onto its own layer and changing the layer Mode to Multiply.
– I load up the PSD file into Painter 6.1 and build up the background/base tone on the Canvas layer with the Simple Water brush, experimenting until I find a tone that I like.
– Using that base color to mix from, I work on the skin tone and other elements, loosely blocking in major light and shadow areas.
– Highlights and fine color blends are usually done on a new layer with the Smeary Round or Round Camelhair brush.
– I save a back up version of the pic as a Painter native RIF file.
– I resave the same image as a PSD file, “drying” the canvas on the watercolor layer. This means I won’t be able to use the Simple Water brush anymore if I bring it back into Painter later on, hence the back up version.
– I import the file into Photoshop again, tweaking it with some color correction, use of the Dodge tool and Brightness/Contrast/Saturation control.
– I add the signature and export the web-sized version with Photoshop’s ‘Save For Web’ feature.

Well, as I promised myself (and all of you reading this LJ), I went to a Figure Drawing session this week. It will not be the last.

Checking my old files, the last time I went was April 14, 2005. Considering it’s been 13 plus months, tonight went okay. The initial gestures were tough as I tried to get back into it but once we hit some medium length poses I started to see some okay stuff emerging. The figure drawing headspace is raw and rusty, but hopefully over the next few weeks I can build up my confidence and then push further.

Click here to see my two best drawings of the evening.

This time out I didn’t do any line art, instead heading straight to the canvas digitally.

All the sketch stuff so far has been character driven, so I went for a quick environmental one instead. I think it turned out atmospheric, if a bit indistinct.

A mini painting of a cartoony Spider-Man. When I was a kid I thought Spidey’s black suit was extra-super-duper cool. It’s iconic, sleek and presents a challenge in terms of highlights and shadows. The suit just seemed way more appropriate for a character out in the night kicking butt.

I’ve done very few fan art images over the years. I think I worry that I’ll do a terrible job depicting characters I like so much. Hopefully this Spidey pic will spur me on to try some others.

Oh yeah, and an amusing dialogue snippet from Friday night:

Zub: …You know, like each hero’s Rogue’s Gallery. Spider-Man villains, Avengers villains, Iron Man villains, whatever.

Ray: Does Iron Man even have any specific villains?

Zub: Uh… the Mandarin.

Ray: That guy with the rings?

Zub: Yeah, him. I’m having trouble thinking of any more than that. Oh yeah, Crimson Dynamo. Hmm, any others?

Ray: Don’t forget his arch-nemesis – Johnnie Walker.

Zub: You win.

The piece just felt like it needed a word balloon even though it was all by itself and isn’t part of a comic page.