Gotham Control Program

I see these ironic pop culture T-Shirt mash-ups all the time, so I thought I'd try my hand at it.  I never really ever have good ideas that last, usually I just end up focusing on one theme and work it out, dropping the mash-up, but this one came to me really fast.

How fast?

I was watching Tron : Uprising, and during the commercial I was flipping through the guide and saw Dark Knight Rises was going to be on.  Boom, that fast.

The Sentinal type pose also arrived pretty quickly, as it's a fairly classic look for ol' Bats - but the symbol was fun to work out, taking a bit of time reducing it down to the bare minimum of geometric shapes, to read both Tron-verse, and clearly represent the bat signal.  I surprised myself to discover that it was that the most simple of concepts - three triangles - was all it took.

And for a further challenge, I did it in six colors.

So watch yourselves, Programs...

Kitty Pryde and Lockheed!

Up to no good, it looks like...always sneaking around.

I had a lot of fun with this one, and worked on skin textures moreso than in the past.  I gave her a texture pass on her face, and figured out how to do freckles.  Now everybody's getting freckles.

And I hadn't really done a creature yet in this newer technique approach - I like how it came out, but I can see the potential to push it a lot further...

A Portrait of DOOM!

I, Dr. Doom, shall practice the mathematics of your destruction!

Iron Man Head Study

This is just a quick paint up of Iron Man, taken from the drawing for last years' Iron Man flying with the Warthogs painting.

I wanted to take what I had learned doing this more painterly approach with organic figures, and apply it to a wholly mechanical image.  (Pushing it a little further than I had with the Optimus sketchbook cover)  Then I thought to really explore the test, I added in the nicks and scratches - just to see what I could do with it.

Not A Movie Skrull

The Avengers was awesome, wasn't it?  I thought so, but I really didn't care for the alien (not going to even bother looking up how to spell Chi Atari) designs in the film.

As I sat down to crank out some warm ups, I had that Junker Ship going, and I also needed to do a figure design (a vehicle and a figure, wow, wonder what I was getting ready to work on...) and in the design I was going for, was going to be a new take on a Skrull.

Well, somewhere along the way I added a tail, and when I roughed in the hands and feet I did them very reptilian...and I started to get away from what I thought could be a cool Skrull design, and just refocused on the technical details, which was the point of the relatively quick exercises, not some grand statement.  So I painted it all up in monotone, and when I switched over to finish the Junker, my friend Adi released one of his designs from the film, which I absolutely loved - it totally re-inspired me - and when I came back to this final this Not A Skrull, I colored it with comic book themed colors.

So...it started out to be a movie Skrull, then it became just a monster alien design, then came 'round again to be a Skrull.  But not.

Junker Ship

Sometimes, I'm working on projects, or have something coming up that I'm out of practice on, and I need to switch gears.  For example, one week I might be doing Fighter Pods, or something similarly cartoon/animated style, then need to jump on to a high resolution design project.  If I have the time, I'll whip up something to shake the rust off, and this is one of those images.

Because I wasn't going into it too seriously, I don't think I even set up perspective lines, I just started out with a black blob and worked out details from there.  I felt it was worth posting; I worked on it longer than I meant to, because I see what could be a cool concept in there - if I ever need a cargo ship, I might dust this one off and do it properly.

I almost posted this almost-non-post, but I thought maybe I should post my quick Starfield Photoshop Recipe to add some value - I take the airbrush, set it to dissolve, one click it with the mouse at 1% with around 20-30 size brush.  Then I scale it up to fit the frame.  Then I'll copy the layer and reduce opacity to around 50% and flip and rotate it to offset the copy.  Then I'll randomly reduce stars with a light eraser, or blow some out with a hit of soft airbrush.  I do it all with white, and let the cloud/background colors blend to add colors.

Alien Warrior

Here's a companion piece to the Predator image from earlier this year.  Same techniques as before, etc., etc., so on and so forth.