The Many Moods of Oa

Oa is the home planet of the Guardians, little blue folks with big heads and red robes who float around screwing up the universe and then send out Green Lanterns to fix it or make it worse or something. Here is what I came up with in Photoshop for their central location.

One major problem from an art direction perspective, with GLAS and anything Green Lantern in general, is the overabundance of green. It can be difficult to come up with nice color palettes when everybody and everything in the scene is glowing green. Matters were not made better with the introduction of Red Lanterns, as we now had the world's weirdest Christmas to deal with.

Anyway, I tried a few things with Oa. Some were just different times of day, others were different takes on the palette. I think we went with the greenest one.

    All images © Warner Brothers Animation

GLAS Pitch Posters

Drawing by Bruce Timm - Color by me   ©Warner Brothers Animation

 One of my first jobs on Green Lantern Animated Series was to help pitch the concept to the network. I was asked to create some artwork to use as posters in the pitch meeting. It started with a sketch Bruce Timm did in a Sharpie marker, which I then colored in Photoshop (image above).

 

©Warner Brothers Animation

I then worked up a few concepts to illustrate the scope of the proposed series. I tried to keep it loose in an attempt to match BT's original sketch- not an easy thing for me to do.

©Warner Brothers Animation

Throughout the process, I had regular notes from Bruce to help me capture the feel he was looking for. Bruce has an amazing collection of classic sci-fi pulp book covers, and we often referred to that stuff for the somewhat retro feel we were going for. We would later find out how hard it is to stop CG folks from over-rendering the hell out of stuff and piling on obnoxious textures, something that is decidedly not retro.

©Warner Brothers Animation

The posters served their purpose and the show was greenlit. We then started down the long road to actually designing everything in CG, a medium most of the crew wasn't overly fond of. My journey into madness had begun... 

Green Lantern Animated concept: Rigel Ruins

©Warner Brothers Animation

Here's a BG concept from my time as the lead designer on the Green Lantern Animated Series at Warner Brothers back in 2009/2010. I produced so much stuff it is all a blur, everything from characters to BG's to full-on CG models in ZBrush (something I had to learn on the job). It was a crazy time. I haven't looked at this stuff since I produced it, but I'm cool with a lot of it now, so I figured I'd share a few things.

I plan on expanding my galleries a bit to include more of my studio work now that most of the productions I worked on have aired. We'll see how many gems I can unearth from a pretty big pile of dirt.

It's all part of a "spring cleaning" of sorts to get any worthwhile old stuff out there and out of the way.

More soon...

Wolf

A little wolf sketch just for fun. I might draw more animals.

NYCC, Line book update, and a Dejah Thoris

Click for full image - WARNING: contains delightful nudity

Hello again, folks, and sorry it has been a while. I've been busy working on lots of stuff, none of which I am going to tell you about. Ha!

I will be attending the NEW YORK COMIC CON, October 11-14!  You'll find me sitting in Artist Alley as usual, and everybody knows that's where all the action is. As soon as I have my table number, I'll post it here. I don't know if I will be taking any commissions, but I will also post those details if I decide to.

I have been getting quite a few e-mails about the "Line" book I did for SDCC 2012. My apologies to the folks I haven't gotten back to yet. Here's the scoop: I had a small stack leftover from the show, but I still need to go through and count up what is spoken for and what I have left. As soon as I do that, I will post any remainders up here to purchase. I'll try to get to it soon.

Speaking of the Line book, posted here is a drawing in the book from a commission I painted a little while ago. This is the preliminary pencil drawing.

Thanks for stopping by.

Silk Spectre Thumbs

I have tons and tons of thumbnails for many of the covers I have done over the years. They almost always start as very small (2 or 3 inches tall) sketches in my sketchbook or on loose bond paper. I often scan them and add some color in Photoshop to help sell the concept, but sometimes I just send in sketchy pencils, as in these thumbs for the Silk Spectre cover I did recently.

This collection of 8 poses is what I sent to DC to pick from, and we wound up with number 7 as the first choice, with 8 as an alternate if I preferred. I stuck with 7 and turned in the finished cover a few days later.

Before Watchmen: Silk Spectre

Now that it has been made public on the DC Comics blog, I figured I would share my cover for Silk Spectre issue 2, part of DC Comics' Before Watchmen line.

As usual, this was drawn in pencil and colored in Photoshop.

Sword of Sorcery

Another one from Wondercon

Here is another commission from Wondercon 2012. The request was to recreate a sketch I did a while back, so I took the opportunity to refine it a little while trying not to stray too far from the feel of the original. Drawn in pencil on 11" x 17" bristol with ink for the gray tones.

Post-Wondercon Post

Thank you to everyone who managed to attend Wondercon 2012 and stopped by my table in Artist Alley. The show was a success with great crowds everyday, and I really enjoyed meeting so many nice people with a shared love for comics, animation, and illustration. An extra thank you to those of you who picked up commissions. Your support of my original art allows me to spend more time creating more personal work and developing my skills as an artist. Speaking of commissions, here are a couple from Wondercon with more to come. These two are both ink and colored pencil on 9"x12" watercolor paper.

WONDER WOMAN 611 ORIGINAL ART AUCTION

An auction for the Wonder Woman issue 613 611 original cover art is up and running. Click the image to be taken to the auction.

Some folks have also contacted me about the website store I have been promising. I am happy to say I finally found the time to set it up. It will open next week with a few sketches and a print or two to get started. After that, I will try to keep it stocked with at least a few pieces of art.

I'm going to try to offer items at all different price points in the shop, so hopefully interested parties can find something without having to break the bank. Of course, there will be a few bank-breakers, too, for you big-spenders out there. I certainly wouldn't want to exclude you folks.

Finally, you may have noticed I have been doing some tweaks to the website. Hopefully, you will find it nicer to look at and easier to navigate. If anybody comes across something weird or broken, please let me know.
The most significant change is probably to the galleries, which should be easier to navigate and include more images. Most of the art is not new, but is stuff that was missing. I added all of the sequential pages from the old Sky Between Branches issue 0 to the Comic Book Interiors section, and restored the Book Covers section, which also features a few images I hadn't posted previously. The Comic Book Covers section features one previously-unseen Batman cover (bottom row, second from the left).

As always, thanks for stopping by.

UPDATE: Correction: This cover was published as issue 611, not 613.

CHEEKY ELF

UNFINISHED

Once again, it has been too long since my last post. That means I've been working too much on stuff I can't share and not drawing anything new that I can share. Well, I have to move that Dragonborn post down the page somehow, so here are a couple of sketches I came up with a while back but never finished.

I drew the Berry Faery several months ago. I remember feeling kind of down one evening when I was struggling to draw, so I abandoned whatever it was I was working on and picked up a new sheet of paper and sketched out the figure on this sketch without much thinking. To my surprise, she looked pretty good, so I quickly snapped a photo of the page with my iMac (didn't feel like messing with the scanner) and sketched in the rest of the concept digitally. I was all fired up to finish it when I hit a wall- I couldn't decide if I should attempt to paint the final piece traditionally (my initial instinct) or to just do my usual digital thing. I put it on the back burner and eventually abandoned it.

The Medusa was another misfire. The idea for a Medusa portrait just popped in my head one day, and I could see it pretty clearly. I drew the figure in pencil without reference, thinking I would get something stylish and pushed like the image in my mind, but much to my dismay, my pencil was stuck on "realistic" and I wound up with this boring portrait of some lady. I scanned it and tried to make it work in Photoshop, but only made it worse by adding more rendering and lighting to increase the photo-realism factor. It was going even more in the wrong direction, so I had to abandon it completely. There is just no way to "stylize" something after the fact. You have to go big in the first place and whittle it down.

Perhaps given the time and motivation I will revisit these two ladies, but for now, they are living on the island of misfit drawings.

On a side note, some folks have been asking about original art sales. I am working on a new online shop and hope to have it up soon. I'm going to be selling whatever remaining comic art I have, including covers and a few interior pages, along with some sketches and the like. I'm still figuring out the print situation, but hopefully I will be able to offer some prints, too. I'll post another notice when I get closer to putting the shop online, so interested parties should stay tuned.

Thanks as always for stopping by. I'll try to come back soon.