got to do a comission for my friend's girl friend. Charcoal, 18x24.
here's the original inks, used some quill, some tech pens and sharpie. here's the inks with some textures from a few posts ago, and some more blacks digitally filled in (sorry still has the glow form the coloring layer on the candles.) here's an alternate colored version, i wasn't satisfied with it (the real one) the night of but woke up the next morning and gave it another look and saw it was fine. it will be my final cover for pendant audio as i move on to even more ever more time consuming projects. below is the final version.
Star Trek: Defiant, Ep. 39 by ~xaqBazit on deviantART just finished my last page for the 8 pg pencil/ink project i found through digital webbing, some of my best work yet. cant say much till it gets published but i learned a lot doing them. also just finished my cover for what the flux comics, still needs colors but it rocks already.
Here's my new cover for Pendant Audio's ongoing fan radiodrama. The drawing was hard actually, I've fallen kind of out of it but am working on getting back on top with a few other projects because I've been so busy, and it looks like I'll be moving yet again here in a few months. The inking was okay, using brushpens and tech pens again, and I got some cool fx by setting two similar photo textural layers (of the sunset through a dirty windshield) to "multiply" (grayscale) and the other to "color burn" overtop and under my line art. The streaks gave it a cool brushed painterly look at certain spots but overall the photo gave it an awesome color palette. The stars were the same texture page I made for the last cover but overlapped and used bigger to look like stars instead of snow. You can listen to this and other episode at pendant audio's website.
Star Trek: Defiant, Ep. 37 by ~xaqBazit on deviantART I've also been doing some promo-pack covers for a local band called Aquajones. 10 down 40 to go. And I might be doing t-shirt designs with a Denver based clothing company DVLP soon. No word yet on the skatboard designs, poo.
Star Trek Defiant, Ep. 34 by ~xaqBazit on deviantART This was more of an experiment in lighting and coloring than anything. And speaking of reference here is what this character is supposed to look like... but I dont think i did a good job of transforming myself into him sine I was looking at my face and trying to age it. Anyway, I blew my chips on the battle scene that ends in this episode so the rest of it is slower and not as action packed and I didnt want to do two covers of space battles one after the other so I chose this. Either way you can check out the colored version on my DA page by clicking on it from here or listen to the episode and see it with the title and credit overlays on Pendant Audio's site here. I suppose this cover is more a portrait of myself with all the work I'm doing rather than a fictional character on a radio drama.
i put two new videos up on my youtube page about my family.
this is for Will Eisner week. everyone in norris is doing one and were hanging them up.
this is my sketch and inks for the new Star Trek Defiant cover which you can listen to here, or see the color version here. i was really proud. im getting better at drybrush mixing with linework. cool camera placement too, kind of got the idea of the framing from my previous cover. i did fudge it a little i mean i was looking at the blueprints for the warbird infront of me when i drew it but some details are off but i had no reference for such a crazy angle, though i still think its recognizable. about a 1/2-hr pencils, about 30-min inks and about 2-hrs coloring -with a pen thank god i hate potato coloring. i do think its hard to make star trek look action packed and cool but i think i nailed it here. just goes to show if i can make this work i can should have no problem doing gigs like batman etc. where the cool factor is already inherent. im not saying star trek isnt cool im just saying that its not exactly synonymous with action and edge of your seat excitement like some titles are.
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. See More X-Men: Deadly Genesis Various at IGN.com See 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.
i did the inks on the plane back from tx, here's a couple different versions i was messing w/. i dont know why i like lens flair i know its cheesy, anyway w/ my girl friend's help i came about the final version which you can view on my deviantart page here i put a glow around the top side of the knife which was inspired by this poster i have in my room and i love how it was colored. while i was in tx, i stumbled on a david mack gallery that was awesome and the best comic shop and biggest ive ever been in. they had an entire wall of discount graphic nocels all for like 1-8 bucks. that was awesome.
heres a wallpaper i did for my bubbie, she's so beautiful. heres the roughs for 24 pages of y the last man, done on 1 and a half 8 1/2 x 11's and heres the tight roughs - done 2 to a 8 1/2x11. heres my "tight" roughs, lol - for the just in time script which i peciled in one night and did tights and blew them up the day before. heres the 10 mins sketches we had to do to come up with an original astronaut, mine won when the class voted ,and then a spaceship to match, mine lost - big time even though i liked the ship more than the astronaut. they were for goto for an inclass storyboard assignment.
and here is the original sketches for noah, the 1st is more of a Charlton Heston thing going on - he's fun, not necessarily animatable but fun. then goto said to push him farther and i did, loved it, blew it up on the artograph and inked it. figured now that im posting some stuff id add a few easter eggs as well for those of you interested enough to visit this page. so heres how i originally drew and inked the parts of the drawing. because i was in colorado i didn't have the size paper nor did i know the dimensions of the art or if he was going to want me to change anything so i did it in pieces. next i assembled the pieces in photoshop using the multiply layer option. and then made blocks of color under the ink layer so i could color each effect seperatly and on their own layer without messing with or effecting the rest of the art. this was an alternate idea i had for coloring based more off some old marvel silver surfer stuff that i was inspired by for the line art as well. you can find the final image with title and everything by followingthe link in the previous post or checking my deviant art http://xaqbazit.deviantart.com/
this is my drawing of kate that i tried for my lost animated characters, and the 1st sketch of ben that actually looked like him. i also dicovered men were much easier to characterize and make extreme and exagerated, women just got ugly really quick - however i felt this version of kate was too close to generic female and wasnt as close or iconic of a look as the others i did, which i will post on deviant and link soon. i also posted a few more videos on my youtube account, have to get back to ga to split up drown and scan storyboards for it. http://youtube.com/user/xaqbazit
