Shaolin Cowboy cover sketches

Patrick Wedge made a passing reference to this cover in the comments for the Weird Western sketch.  Small wonder that Geof Darrow picked idea number three. The others were pretty weak.

Merv Pumpkinhead, page two

Well, since yesterday's art asked a question, I probably shouldn't keep you waiting for the answer.  

I neglected to mention that this was written by Bill Willingham and lettered by Todd Klein.

Merv Pumpkinhead, page one

Pencils and inks for page one of a two page story.

Weird Western cover sketch: 2001

This is another cover that was thrown at me cold.  No ideas from the editor, they just wanted something that fit the title.  I came up with this sketch but DC said they already had a similar piece from someone else.  So that was that...

Ash and Irma pin-up

I did this for Jimmy Palmiotti and Joe Quesada's Ash comic in the 90's.

The thumbnail sketch is very small, about two inches wide.  From there I went to an 8.5 x 11" layout, copied it, filled in some black areas with a marker and finally the final art.  I didn't save a copy of the pencils.

I like the layout better than the final version.  It lost something.

BPRD: The Black Goddess #2 cover

The evolution of a cover, from Mike Mignola's sketch to intermediate layouts to final pencils and inks.  The three panels at the bottom were dropped when they didn't work on the cover of #1.  I liked them but Mike thought they were getting in the way.

Metal Men preview, with COLOR!

This is just half of the first page but I wanted to give you guys a taste of the beautiful coloring by Trish Mulvihill.

Drink and Draw in LA

No time for a post today, so here's Dave Johnson, Dan Panosian and Jeff Johnson(?) drinking and pretending to draw while a blonde lady yells at them.

First video

Second video

Anybody know who drew this cover?

Elongated Man origin: page two

You can see me struggling with the first panel here.  The pose in the preliminary sketch almost works but it's a little weak.

Batman Confidential #26: a half-inked panel

This one was bit of a challenge.  As I've mentioned elsewhere, José intended to ink this series himself so the first two issues weren't quite as finished as the final one.  Most of it was clear enough for me to take directly to inks but a few pages threw me.  His approach to Gotham City is different from mine and from what I've seen, is based on NYC.  I wasn't always sure what to do with the buildings shown here.  Generally, when it comes to Gotham City, I follow the old Wallace Wood adage:  "When in doubt, black it out".  But as you can see, we have two distinct layers of action and making the background black just won't work, even with little slivers of light to represent windows.  I could do it if I changed the lighting on Batman; lit him from both sides instead of one or used a rim light.  The black area on his cape in the upper left would probably get lost if the building behind it was also black.  No, the more I thought about it, the foreground needed to be darker and the background lighter.  We needed a lot of contrast to show the distance between the two.

On the left you see José's pencils.  On the right you can see the same panel after I inked all of the foreground images and was starting to firm up some of the background details.  You can check out the printed book to see if we pulled it off, and how much the colorist, David Baron, helped us out.

Elongated Man origin: Page one

No big surprises here, but I held onto scans of the layouts, pencils and inks so I thought this would be worth posting to show the way things developed from rough idea to final colors. This was published in DC's "52", number 13, 2006. It's the first of two pages.

I've liked this character since I first saw him in Detective Comics in the 60's.  I don't remember which issue it was but the story had some beautiful Carmine Infantino art.  For a change, he was doing his own inks and even though they were a little "scratchy" compared to Anderson and Giella, they looked great to my young eyes.  Lots of energy and imaginative design work.

Those early stories were always fun, with bits of good natured humor. 

Metal Men page 1 pencils

DC is using this in their promotional material so I guess it's okay to show the whole page here now.  The image size is about 16" x 22"!  This is for Mark Chiarello's Wednesday Comics project so it'll be printed very close to original art size.  Needless to say, I'm inking it tight.

Legends of the Dark Knight #101 cover painting

Someone requested a larger scan of this painting.  I finally found a color copy which is probably a little closer to the original than the printed version. 

Original art

Here's a link to a page with some art for sale.  Do I really have to tell people to click on the thumbnails to see larger images, or do we all know that by now?

I should also point out that I have a few preliminary sketches for sale on eBay this week.  You can find them here.

Metal Men

Be sure to click on the thumbnail to see the larger image.  Seriously now, have they ever looked better?

A new project

Let's make a guessing game out of this.  I just got the first page of pencils for my next inking job.  Once again, it's over the amazing José Luis Garcia-Lopez, but for now that's all I'm saying.  If you inspect the pencil scan you'll figure out the rest.