Flashback to my brief career in comics...

Portion of my watercolor guide for Silvestri/Batt double page spread from Cyblade Shi#1

Here's a cropped scan of a Marc Silvestri piece (inked by Batt) from Cyblade/Shi #1. I was the colorist for the book but there was a team of people doing digital color due to the tight deadlines. (At one point I was doing five or six pages a day.)

Tyson Wengler did the digital color for this based on my watercolor guide:




 Click on the image for higher resolution.

Loose lunch sketch on the lot.

Last weekend

Here's a quick impressionist background that no one will ever see. One of five I did last weekend. It's going to be an underlay jiggling around under very dark/near opaque tinted glass in a kidnap van, so you'll be able to see maybe 10% right at the center.

Fun.

I get to draw and paint with big brushes!

For the last few months, I've had the great privilege to work on the third season of the Ricky Gervais show. Frequently working straight from storyboard roughs, I've been drawing and painting on the fly. The style has been a lot of fun, varying from cartoon 50's high style to painterly impressionism, Tex Avery to Spanish Baroque, whatever sells the gag.

Background for Columbus selling the idea of exploring.

I've had a lot of fun. Thanks to Richard Lee and Dan Fraga for sympathetic eyes, encouragement, freedom and constructive criticism. Thanks also to Ricky Gervais and Karl and Stephen for having such wide-ranging and whack conversations.

Trafalgar square

Here are some recent backgrounds. Some of these images are crops from very large pans. Click on the pic for larger image so you can see how loose they are.

Hotel

Kuwait GW1, somewhat realistic parody sequence. 

Karl's Kitchen. 

Karl's sadly vacant fridge.

Desert Isle crop.

Desert isle shoreline

Karl's garden with space for lettuce munchin' slug

Birth control centuries ago. Citrus fruit for diaphragms.

Rough board of Karl in imaginary catacombs under the surface of Pluto.

Light flowing into imaginary underground catacombs under surface of Pluto.

London mashup.

Italy mashup, syncs to earlier London mashup. 

Mentalist's house

Nasty pub urinals. 

Nasty pub urinals, reverse angle. 

Park in London

Rain rolls into park. 

Rough board I worked from for my trench warfare BG. 

Trench Warfare

Huge multi-plane trench warfare pan, increasingly snowy. 

Ibiza safe and gloomy

Cropped in on an island I imagined off the coast of Ibiza. 

It's a lot of fun to see these with the animation on top of them. 

Trying to get back into painting.

I've been making a living painting dramatic buildings and landscapes and evil villainous lairs out of my head for the last fifteen years.

But I've never really painted outdoors. (I've done some pastels & watercolors, but never oils.) I've prepped a bunch of boards and I'm going to try to get fluid. Here's the first one. Figured I'd add yet another Arroyo Suicide Bridge painting to the thousands that have already been painted.

There's so much information in the real world! Overabundance. The problem goes from trying to make stuff up, create color scapes from scratch, textures, tones, to editing it all out... I'm busy removing texture, smashing together tones, composing by elimination of visual noise. The creative problem is almost diametrically opposed to what I've been doing for all this time though the subjects are the same.

I'll see if I can find a villain's lair to paint during a storm. Reference makes all the difference.

Tonight...

We're trying to put the baby to sleep. Reading cozy Christmas stuff about gingerbread cookies and flying reindeer and evergreen trees. Suddenly we hear scratching noises coming from the hallway. I figure it's her poor dog going senile and trying to bury her dog biscuit again.

"What's that dog doing?"

"That's not my dog. It's your damned cats again."

We pinpoint the sound in the hallway. Christine's ear is next to the vent, diagnosing. It's coming from the main air intake duct for the heating system. Christine looks up, eyes like watery saucers.

"It's a SKUNK!!!"

I'm thinking "now how in the hell does she know that from the skritchy skritchy sounds coming from the duct? Probably a possum again." Then it hits me. The first wave of the atomic stench. It's kind of thick and oily, like the smoke from green wood.

The damn thing deployed underneath the house, maybe INSIDE the ductwork to the A/C system. Won't know until we remove the duct tape and trash bag sealing off the vent. Not that it helped much.

So now we're camped out in the living room with a fire in the fireplace, all the windows wide open while it rains in successive waves outside.

Merry Skunkmas to All, and to all a good night.

...

Googling..."A skunk went off underneath my house".

A few recent sketches

The workshop at Fox tends to have short poses. Typically two to five minutes.

Next plein air sketch

I should probably add some detail to the foreground. 

Plein Air sketches

Here's the second of (hopefully) a number of quick plein air sketches:

This one is actually the first of the attempts: