Wednesday, December 31, 2008

Last post...

...of 2008! Yay.

So issue 11 was inked by the multi-talented Cliff Rathburn. If you haven't checked out the Reaper book he drew for Image a couple/few years ago do yourself a favor and track it down. Its a great action fest. Anyway, I thought yous guys might want to see some of the pencils. If not, then stop reading this post. It was a cool experience for me to see my pencils inked by someone else, especially someone as talented as Cliff.

By the way, have a great new year. If you have been regular viewer of my little blog here, I just want to say thanks! I appreciate the comments and I hope your 2009 is super fine.


Monday, December 22, 2008

Merry Christmas!

I hope you all have a great holiday this coming week. Hopefully you have some time off from work/school and are able to spend some time with family and friends. Remember the true meaning of the season and try to avoid getting caught up in the commercialization of the holiday. Of course if you want to be commercialized, well who I am I to stop you? In fact let me even suggest something that you can spend your money on. Shipping to finer comic book shops everywhere this week are both parts of the Invincible/Wolf-Man crossover. Invincible 57 actually continues the story from Wolf-Man 10, and leads right into Wolf-Man 11. Lots of cool stuff. I got to draw Invincible which was fun. And Ryan Ottley draws a great Wolf-Man. So check it out.

Saturday, December 13, 2008

Cover 14

I don't think this cover has been shown anywhere yet, so you get an exclusive preview here. Who else would do that for you? First up is the layout/design. Pretty simple concept, Wolf-Man goes to jail.

And now the finished piece. The color scheme changed a bit, but otherwise it stayed pretty close to the sketch.

Sunday, December 07, 2008

10 Pencils

Just a quick one today. Here are some of the pencil pages for issue 10.

Sunday, November 30, 2008

Time for 10

Issue 10 should be out this Wednesday. Its the big "secret orgin of Zechariah" issue. Here is some of the process stuff for the cover (the original black and white art for this, is for sale at splashpageart.com. Plug. Plug).

After talking about the type of image that we wanted with Robert, I did a couple small sketches. I wanted something with a "Batman" feel. This one seemed to have potential so I dropped in some color to start getting a sense for what the final image might look like.

Once I got the OK on this sketch I began the pencils. After seeing how it worked with the logo dropped in place, I decided that the design worked better facing the other direction.


Then on to the inks. This was done with a real brush. This marks a switch for me on Wolf-Man as previous to this I had mostly been using brush markers and pens to ink with. Since this cover I have done a majority of the inking with a real brush.



And here is the final cover all colored and with the logo and other trade dress in place. So as not to make it seem too "girly" I left out the pink background in favor of the red. Sorry to any girls who would have preferred the pink :)


Tuesday, November 11, 2008

Cover 13 Process

I've been super busy the past couple weeks. But I always make time for you my lovely internet. Well, maybe not quite so lovely. Anyway. Here is a sneak peak at the cover for issue 13 of Wolf-Man. Plus the development sketches that went into it. I think most the sketch stuff is pretty self-explanatory. But if you want to know what I have to say about them, read one of my other cover process posts, I am sure much of the same stuff applies.

Monday, October 27, 2008

9 is mine!

And on Wednesday it can be yours. Issue 9 is full of all sort of comic book coolness. Lets see, there is some talking, then some fighting, then a little bit of running, then some more talking, interrupted by some clawing and jumping, then we have some angry talking plus a bit more fighting and then a surprise. I hope that doesn't give away too much, but as you can see a whole bunch of cool stuff happens. After the issue comes out I will post some pencil pages and such, but for now here is the cover.


Also, I mentioned the 24hr comic book thing in my last post. I will at some point give a more in depth review of the event, but leading up to it one of the local papers wanted to run self portraits of the artists involved. Below was my submission.

Thursday, October 16, 2008

24

No, not the TV show with Keifer Sutherland getting blown up once an hour, I am talking about 24hr comic day. This Saturday, October 18 I will be participating in 24 hr comic day at Clem's Collectibles in Lansing, MI.

www.clemslansing.com/wordpress/?cat=16

If you are in the area stop in and wake me up.

Thursday, October 09, 2008

Wolvie

Here's a Wolverine that I did just for fun. Everyone likes Wolverine right? Yes, I know that his costume is not quite right. I based it on the JR JR design from the Enemy of the State run, and the web image I found for reference was tiny and I missed some details (5 geek points for anyone who knows what the costume is missing). Then as I was coloring the image I realized I had this trade on my book shelf which is full of non-tiny art and would have made great reference. Oh well.

Wednesday, October 01, 2008

8 Process

So, here we are again. How's your week going? Good? I'm glad to hear it. Now on to business.

This time I thought that I would show some of the process stuff for a couple pages from the recently released issue #8. First a little background. Starting with issue #8 (actually it started with the short story in Monster Pile-Up but since that was not a full issue I will just say "starting with issue #8") Fco Placencia has been helping me out on the coloring of the book. Fco also colors Invincible as well as the neato Gemini book from Image, check them out. Anyway, I am big nerd for color. In a perfect world I would have a clone of me that did all my coloring for me. This clone would also have more talent and be more skilled than I. While I know that I am not the worlds best colorist, I enjoy coloring my own work, and I even more than that I like having the control. Thats the reason why for the first 7 issues of Wolf-Man I colored them. But the reality is that this stuff has to be done on a relatively quick time table and it is hard enough to pencil a monthly book, let alone pencil ink and color one. In order for me to be able to spend the time necessary to do the level of quality I want to do on the actual drawing (and hopefully improve), I needed to give up some of the coloring. This is where Fco comes in. He takes my flat colors adds light and shadow and brings them to life. So on the following 2 sets of examples you will see the whole page from the rough pencils/layout that I do, to the inks, to my flat colors and finally to Fco's finished colors. Enjoy.









Wednesday, September 24, 2008

A lil bit o press

Just some plugging of things this time. But if I don't tell you who will?

Robert did an interview with Newsarama last week talking all about our favorite comic book, The Astounding Wolf-Man. If you haven't read it yet you can check it out here-
www.newsarama.com/comics/090817-KirkmanWolfMan.html

I was on the Around Comics podcast a week or 2 ago talking about the book and getting threatened with physical violence for not being a big enough Grant Morrison fan. It is episode 201. The interview with me is about half way through the show, go find it here-
www.aroundcomics.com

Speaking of Around Comics. They are putting on a one day convention in Chicago on October 25. I will be there along with many other great guests, so if you are in the area come by and say "hi". You can also buy stuff from me. Learn more about the convention here-
www.windycitycomicon.com

Issue 35 of the super great ImagineFX magazine has a one page blurb about me in their FX Posé section. I share some pretty awesome company in that section with Eric Canete and Sean Galloway. I am not sure how that happened, hopefully some of their skills will rub off on me. If you want to check it out here is the cover of the issue-

Wednesday, September 17, 2008

Super 8

Word on the street is that issue #8 should be out today. Buy it!

Wednesday, September 10, 2008

Something different

Just playing around here. These might end up in a sketchbook someday, but other than that I just did them for fun. The first is the Batman from Superman Red Son. I love the Dave Johnson art, but I had never drawn this version of Batman he designed. So now I have. The girl is a character I just made up because I wanted to draw a gun.


Wednesday, August 27, 2008

Trade me.

Today the first Wolf-Man trade should be in comic book stores. The book collects issues 1-7, plus it has a nifty sketchbook section showing many of the unused designs and other stuff that went into creating the book. Buy it, it will make your life better:) I got my copy a couple days ago and it was like Christmas. It is pretty cool to see all that work and all those pages collected together in one place. Here is the cover so that you know what to look for.Now, I dont want your trip here to be lacking any new art to see, so here is the cover I just finished for the second trade paperback. I still have the background collage to drop in but I am waiting until I have a couple more issues drawn to do create that. As you can see we are following a consistent design approach with these covers, once we have a few out they should look pretty sweet all together.

Monday, August 11, 2008

Cover #8 process

It has been a while since I have gotten around to one of these cover process posts. I am kind of a process guy, I tend to feel that my work generally gets better the more opportunities I have to refine it. This has created a fun challenge for me as lately I have been trying to be more spontaneous in drawing pages and not spend so much time on layouts and other drawings that don't actually end up being the final drawing. How do I get everything necessary into the final page while still at or above what I feel is good quality work? I am not sure yet, but the one thing I like about just drawing a page without doing much in the way of pre-drawing the page is that it is more fun. When I drew stuff as a little kid, I never did thumbnails, I never drew a rough layout there were no lightboxes or computers, I just drew what I envisioned right on the paper. When I finished it was done and I moved on. Some where along the way I got concerned about composition, design, anatomy (sort of), perspective and all the other things that go into a "good" drawing. The idea of start to finish drawing the finished drawing on the same piece of paper became lost to me. So for now I am working to recapture some of that lost art. I do miss some of the opportunities to edit the drawing that other working methods provide, but I am hoping that taking this direction will force me to make better choices and learn some things along the way.

Now to totally contradict what I said above about trying not to doing multiple layouts and extensive pre-drawing. The idea for this cover came from a conversation with the writer. My first sketch came very quick and I kinda liked it so I dropped in some color to help me think about the design a little. I wanted some good contrast and energy so I went with a complimentary color scheme (2 colors opposite each other on the color wheel for you non-art school kids). After discussing this with Robert, we felt that it might work better to show more of Wolf-Man and a little more background.

I didn't like that one much as it is DULL and BORING. I tried to keep the same idea but punch it up a bit with this version.
I felt this one was working but the figure behind Wolf-Man was getting lost. Just showing 2 little eyes did not seem like it would be enough to suggest a menacing figure behind poor Wolf-Man. Also Wolf-Man looked a little too freaked out. He is supposed to be cool you know. I tried to address these with the next layout.
I felt this one was almost there. As you can see I dropped the logo in on the sketch to see how everything fits together. I didn't like the way that the elements fit in with the arc on the bottom of the logo. Flipping the image worked better, I also redrew Wolf-Mans pose and expression to look less angry and a little more startled.

With the design and most of the drawing figured out I dropped some color into the layout in order to get a feel for how the final design would work. I tried to stay with the complimentary scheme from my very first idea, but I pushed to green a bit to teal/blue side to get away from the Christmas colors that most people think of when they see red and green used together.
I then enlarged my layout, and lightboxed it onto the final board where I inked it.
And then the final colors in which I lost the red in favor of a simpler more subdued color scheme (analogous ?). This allowed me to be a little more representational with Wolf-Mans costume colors and create nice night time mood. I added some trees in the background at this stage, I felt they really helped add some depth.

So there it is. A long post this time, and a little bit of the crazyness that can go into a cover. By the way, this issue should be out sometime soon, it has been done for a little while. Once I know the exact date I will post it here.

Wednesday, July 23, 2008

Invincible vrs Wolf-Man

Here is the cover for Wolf-Man #11, which will be an Invincible crossover issue. Poor Wolf-Man is getting beat up... :(To balance things out, here is a rough cover sketch that shows the fight swinging a little more in Wolf-Mans favor. For some reason Robert didn't want to use this one...
Also, I think that the Monster Pile-Up book that I mentioned in a previous post is supposed to be in stores today. It has an original 4 page Wolf-Man story that picks up right after Wolf-Man #7.

Also, also the big San Diego Con starts this week. But not for me. I am staying home to work. At the time I made the decision it sounded like the responsible thing to do, but now I kinda wish I was going. Oh well.

Thursday, July 10, 2008

Behind the 7

Well, I am back. This time I thought I would show some of the behind the scenes stuff for the recently released issue 7. Before that however, I wanted to say thanks to everyone who is buying the book. Issue 7 seems to be pretty well received. I think it wraps up the first arc well and sets a cool direction for the series. If you haven't be buying the book the first trade collecting 1-7 should be out sometime soon, a great place to get started. Or tell your friends to get started:)

Anyway. With issue 7 I started skipping the small size layouts and penciling the pages right on the board. Overall I am happy with this change. It seems to be less steps in the process for me and allow me to finish pages faster. So here are a couple pencil pages. Once I get the OK on these I starting inking. In some areas where it is really loose I will tighten them up a bit before I ink them.