2015 wip

Here's basically a bunch of behind the scenes stuff from the last year or so. Villain designs, layouts, panels, thumbnails sketches etc. I did up a few controllers for my friends. Had to basically redraw the lower half of the cover for the Endless Incident and even then one of the figures got redrawn by the inker, but I understand the cover means a lot to the book so it's got to just be right. The release date is 24 Feb , please do publicize this wherever you can! Website - http://www.comixplay.com and facebook page - https://www.facebook.com/comixplay The price will be $6.99 ($5.99 promotion in the first week) Also had a double page spread layout that I got a little too into and ended up having the reader going top to bottom in the middle, then along the bottom towards the right, then up the right hand side, then right to left by the end. it was a little too much. Also stacked a panel on the left in the graphic novel that needed one of those 70's style arrows down so readers didn't get confused.

Defiant 37 and Aquajones

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.

Definat 35

Defiant 35 was probably my least favourite cover I've done for pendant. But this time everything, including the script was better. I was even thinking of giving up doing covers from them because I just wasn't inspired anymore. It's hard to make Star Trek exciting and not make it look like a bunch of stuck up sci-fi geeks standing around in spandex, they don't have the muscles to make them look cool like super heroes so they just look like regular people in extra ordinary outfits. This last episode had the crew disguised as the Breen, which despite having a helmet directly swiped from Boush from Star Wars is pretty damn cool. I was looking at this book of fleer star wars trading cards I had lost as a kid and recently was given as a gift - anyway its got lots of pieces by lots of famous artists I now know, but didn't at the time and this one particularly caught my eye. I quickly saw it was Mignolla and was just blown away at how powerful his stuff always is despite being simple and he uses so many techniques that are his trademark.

Anyway, So I scanned it and swiped the colors and was really hooked on the yellows I think I was channeling Dune or something, but eventually I just wasn't sold on the whole "yellow snow"-thing, call me weird, or just a boy. So i eventually but a blue layer over the top and set the layer to hue. I had tried messing with the colors and adding more blue and sucking out the red to make it feel colder but it still didn't sell the idea of "cold" like blues and purples.


Another fun thing was that I knew I would need texture for the snow but it would also need to be coloured white so instead of drawing it out and then having to color the snow white in photoshop I just drew some scratchy textural things seperate in black, inverted them in photoshop and added them as a layer above the line art after i set the layer type to cut out all the black - the same process I used for the Kryton logo and any white on black text I do in comics. So anyway, it worked, it was fun, and it looks frign' sweet.

I did fight with the size of the Defiant cover, as I usually do. With the text on top (unlike comic books) and the title centered at the bottom) and the whole cover being closer to magazine format than comic book, by the time you get done you really are working with a safe area that is more of a horizontal rectangle than a verticle one, so i swiped and clone tooled my way out of it but as always it catches me off guard as I am used to working in comic book format. The composition was inspired by a splash page Tim Sale did of Batman in a riot outfit, in The Long Halloween.

Star Trek: Defiant, Ep. 36 by ~xaqBazit on deviantART

Defiant 34

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.

batman cover tights and style choices

these are the tights that ill be pencilling for thursday. ill be inking one of them and ill be inking one of someone elses, as well as they will mine. not to mention i have to ink teh 1st 4 pages of maelstrom (iss 3) by monday and finish pencils for 9-12 by tomorrow.

this 1st cover was the 1st version of the other cover after i found out i put the grizly side of two face on the wrong side, but i couldnt just flip it because the face on teh coin pointed the right direction in my picture so me and tom talked and settled on teh one below and to teh left.

people have been telling me my style seems to shift too much from cartoony to realistic, and it does but i think i found a nice medium with this shot. kind of combining mark weringo and peter cheung. i did some similar faces on the 1st two pages i did for phil.
here's a link to the finals

DC Cover, Iss.738 TWO-FACE 2 by ~xaqBazit on deviantART

DC Cover, Iss.738 TWO-FACE 1 by ~xaqBazit on deviantART

Qutluch assassin

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.