Wednesday, February 4, 2009

x-men, star trek phil's pages, rendering and stories

X-MEN: DEADLY GENESIS - ISSUE 5, PGS. 7-10
Here's the link to the final pages in case you didn't get here from my DA page.

10 hrs for four pages, from the tight rough stage, that's actually a lot for me. and I'm really proud of them. some pages i actually spent hours on certain panels, like the sentinel crash. i've kind of changed the way i work and the way i render a lot since doing the spider-man pages. Now i blow up my tight roughs using an artograph so i can resize stuff, like i always did but i trace it using a mechanical pencil, finish it using a mechanical pencil and x-in all my blacks, some side of pencil stuff but not much. also i was getting a lot of comments that my spider-man pages looked very dated, as far as rendering went, very 90's. that's not a bad thing, those techniques worked and they got the job done but there is certain connotations with a 90's mainstream artists that i did not want my work labeled with so i spent a lot of time looking at some new stuff and kind of found a new way to render. its something they don't really cover in school but has, i think, helped this project tremendously. i stared at this piece by Frank Cho

and this one by Bryan Hytch

Ultimates 2 - Inks sample by ~retardacon on deviantART
quite a long time to see it and then realized even some of my Favorite contemporary artists like Oliver Copiel and Shawn Cassiday use it as well. so from what i can decern its a kind of sketchiness with straight lines, moving different directions to describe a core shadow. it kind of helps to think of it in a planar way. its actually really fun. I think i pulled it off especially in shots like the close up of cyce's face. I also spent a lot of time on my metal textures and making the sentinels look metallic. I drew a lot of inspiration originally from Adam Kubert's run on some of the first issues of Ultimate X-men, (you can tell he works so fast). And I tried for some of the same aesthetic/simplistic and quick rendering he did, with sort of thick thing wiggly lines around the outside and towards the core of the form but it just didn't fly, so I went back and looked at some JR+JR and Niel Adams etc and saw the circles they would cut back out of the blacks, and after looking at, coincidentally, 90's stuff enough I think I got it. The actual artist for the page had good rendering skills but his storytelling was atrocious, and he played it so safe with all of his camera shots, no real angles, as i tried to push A LOT, he kept the figures far enough apart that he never had to do an up or a down shot. It was good reference for the costumes though. Here are the actual pages in case you actually wish to compare, only pages 8 and 9 are on there though of the pages I did.
X-Men: Deadly Genesis VariousSee More X-Men: Deadly Genesis Various at IGN.com
X-Men: Deadly Genesis VariousSee More X-Men: Deadly Genesis Various at IGN.com

STAR-TREK DEFIANT - EP. 32
On another note, my new star trek cover is out. You can see the colored version on my DA page, here. A completely different style altogether than the X-men pages but its still cool in its own way. Lots of dry brush and a kind of cool design. I've heard from a couple people at Pendant that they think I come up with some of the coolest covers, conceptually and I've heard the next few episodes should be a very different tone and shorter - less reading for me, more time for art - yay! Anyway this image is based off of a photograph and I inked it in my sketchbook, lol. I blurred things further away to give it the effect of depth of field, and because I didn't really draw anything back there, lol. And then layed a light texture over the Blood to make it look liquidy, and sadly yes it is potato-colored and it took forever for not even that great of an end effect. However the inks were really fun and I was very pleased with how they turned out.


PHIL'S STORY
I've also had a little while to work on Phil's book, and got a few pages done, or as done as I'll do them before inking, during which I'll add a lot.


STORIES
And I've also been writing some one-act plays for my "Writing for the Screen and Stage Class" that can also be viewed on my DA page here.

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