He-Man 01

I've been on a He-Man kick recently, getting some of those new figures from Matty.com, (all apologies to my friends and lovers at Hasbro!) and going to that gallery show - I decided to do my own, after being inspired by all of those wonderful pieces.


It is a smaller canvas, so I kept it to just He-Man, Skeletor, and the Castle Grayskull in the background, I tried to find a series of poses that would fit together into a good composition.

I also needed to draw the castle separately, to comp it back behind the figures. The other poses were cool, but I think I already found the composition in those very rough thumbnails.

And on to the canvas - back to hot press paper with gesso! - with the final composition and costumes. I went with a ram's skull, instead the more representational version I had sketched out, but I think that's the only new addition to the culmination of the sketches into the final.

Wicked Witch! Look Out! 04

Final! As predicted, the pencils were a pain to work with on this canvas, moreso with what I wanted to do with the background, than the Witch herself...anyways, lessons learned, and I have about 1/3 of the palette set for the big one...which I'll probably get going on next month.

Wicked Witch! Look Out! 03

Here's the airbrushed color, I kept it to two colors, the bright green skin tone, then I mixed in some brown and black to gray it down, to that dark muddy green of her clothes.

Wicked Witch! Look Out! 02

Here's the blacks and texture added in. Even though I was using a brush, and not a pencil tip, the canvas still grabbed at the bristles and modified the intention...darnit. Regardless, it still came out pretty strong - now on to the colors!

Wicked Witch! Look Out! 01

So all this work is gearing up to do the big poster size Oz painting, that I did all the comps for last year...I had a scrap of canvas board lying around, so I'd thought I would do a quick test.

Already I can tell you it was a mistake to use this canvas board, rather than a custom gesso'd illustration board - the grab on the pencil was a pain in the ass to deal with, so I only expect it to get worse when I start working over the paint...let's see how it goes...!

Junipurr 2

If you recall the post from last September, we lost one of our cats - it's become tradition to do a little portrait for my wife, and for fun, an animated angel version for her laptops' desktop screen.

So here's Juni in his classic "did someone mention food?' pose.

Captain America Final

So here it is, and again, the scan does it no justice. I tried to bring up the saturation to match the real version, but it started to pull out some of the overspray bits too much as well, making it look a little blotchy...so, the real one looks better, but...

...while I'm happy with the red, white and blue colors, the flesh tones came out a little undersaturated, so that's a lesson learned. Next time I'll over saturate, and then bring it down with the pencils. I'm also happy with the chrome wings, but the shield never came together, at least in the way I'm used to, in a smaller format using templates. And the red color transition got lost in the highlight - I was really happy with the flow of cool red, to warm red, and that got all covered with the white.

Overall, I give it a B; it's not going to make it into the portfolio, but I learned a lot, and that was the point of this one. Maybe when/if the sun comes out, I'll take a proper photo of it to post?

Captain America 03 & 04

Here's some more tone added, textures, both additive and subtractive...


...and here it is after some airbrushing. Again, I forgot to scan/photo at the milestone; I had spent about 20 minutes with the white colored pencils working on highlights, before I realized - the image changed drastically with just a little bit of pencil work. The masking in the shield was all freehand - the hope is to shore up the inconsistent curves with the pencils...

Captain America 02

I'm kind of tearing through this one...I get a little ahead of myself and forget to scan at every milestone, so in this one I've already drawn over the 2H pencil layout with the 8B graphite. I get more color into the face by drawing in some of the tone with colored pencils, in this case, beige and burnt sienna, color - but very dark, still.

I changed up the mission into two pieces...this one is exploring portraiture, and I think I'll do a bit more of an action scene with that leaping Cap from the previous posts' sketches. And why not, throw a Wolverine in there?


Here's the photo reference - I had to throw it up here, because it's so ridiculous, my wife took a look at this printed out, 'Is that your PAINTING?!?!' No...it's just the set-up. It's a heavily photo-shopped image of Damon's Bourne, with the shield from my Universe figure, and Wacom sketched chainmail and head/mask and wings.

So you can see when it gets transferred to a drawing, all that Frankenstein-ing comes together. Well, I think so anyways...

Captain America 01

I was doodling one day, and kept going back to Cap...and I decided to test myself by doing a larger scale portrait with the airbrush/pencil technique. And this is the beginning of that...

Holmes/Watson Final!

Done and done! I'm happy with this one, the image came out pretty good, but I learned TONS to take into the next one. This scan is not perfect, in person there's so much more life to it...

So there it is, Holmes/Watson, 12"x18", acrylics and colored pencil on 140 lb. hot press paper.

Holmes/Watson 05

This is more an update that a bona fide post - still working the pencils, I would say it's about 2/3 done, but lots more to go...it's coming along pretty nicely, though, I think.

Holmes/Watson 04

Colors! Here's the airbrushed colors...now I have the dark and mid-tones all in there, time to break out the colored pencils for the light tones, and to sharpen up the shapes.

I also added a bit more texture, a paint on water spatter, then lift with paper towels reduction technique, to get those lighter splotches in there, to add more energy to the piece.

Holmes/Watson 03

All right, all the darks are set, got some splatter going for atmosphere and texture - time to get the color paints out for some airbrushing...

Holmes/Watson 02

Here's the final pencils for the under-drawing...next, on to paint with black to fill in all those large blank spaces, and bring the pencil back for a little touch-up.

Holmes/Watson 01

A painting for fun. Sick of being all digital, time to break out the paints and pencils. Here's the layout for the drawing, just a quick scan, it's on a larger frame than this, but there's nothing to show just yet.

I liked the movie a lot; this is a comp of some publicity stills, but the main inspiration to do it came from the the badass end titles, weren't those great?

Kanyon Kountry Killer Kitties

Here's a quick post...I made a T-shirt for one of my wife's Xmas gifts, a fictional derby team for her to be the captain of. She loves skating and wants to get into derby, so I did this as kind of a novelty to get her excited about it. Of course, at a party last weekend, she got a bunch of girls riled up to form a team, and they're going skating this weekend to start practicing.

I believe a monster has been unleashed.

Back to the art, the cat logo on front, numbers on the back of the shirt, a short sleeve red-matching ringer Tee.