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.
A random collection of material from comic artist Kevin Nowlan. Started with the best of intentions, but like most other efforts, doomed to perish from neglect as soon as the novelty wears off.
Saturday, May 23, 2009
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.
Friday, May 22, 2009
Merv Pumpkinhead, page two
Thursday, May 21, 2009
Wednesday, May 20, 2009
Weird Western cover sketch: 2001
Tuesday, May 19, 2009
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.
Sunday, May 17, 2009
BPRD: The Black Goddess #2 cover
Saturday, May 16, 2009
Metal Men preview, with COLOR!
Friday, May 15, 2009
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.
Thursday, May 14, 2009
Wednesday, May 13, 2009
Elongated Man origin: page two
Sunday, May 10, 2009
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.