Sphinx I series sketch

Sketch on bond paper, 8"x10", title: "Speed Yer Head." This is the final graphite sketch for the piece. I'll do some test renderings on scrap paper before I move onto the final piece. I plan on blocking in the background with graphite power to keep the wisteria soft...another element I'll need to practice on scrap first.

Above is the initial digital sketch. I first drew it digitally so I could more easily play with the scale ( I probably should have made it bigger). I printed the image and then lightboxed it onto the bond paper.

These were some scrap paper tests for the design of the masonry. I only decided on this more complicated design after I was close to finishing the graphite sketch. It's one of the reasons the piece could have stood to be bigger, but I'll just stick with mechanical pencils for the smaller details and rendering...and maybe a magnifying glass.

I also post this personal work, in a stripped down version, on my second tumblr »

Dethklok drawing WIP updated 12/12

I'm finally back to working on my personal projects. This is the final drawing with the altered horses and various touch-ups, I'll start on the coloring from here and do any other altering during that stage. I did a minimal amount of shading to the figures, since this piece, unlike the gripping beast picture, is less about dense rendering and more about the overall flow.

Another update, about 10% remaining to do to the drawing, most of which is editing the horses to reflect famine, death, pestilence and war imagery of the four horsemen. Click image above for larger version.

I've gotten all the main Dethklok characters drawn, next I'll start working on all the peripheral imagery as well as tweaking the existing line work.

Above is a close up...I just noticed that I forgot Skwisgaar's guitar strap. I also need to print it out to get an idea of the scale and whether any more detail is needed.

This is the first section of finished pencils from the Dethklok sketch, specifically the lower left corner, which is Toki. I plan on doing extra shading later on, once I'm sure that all the parts of the picture are where I want them to be.  This part of the drawing will probably be the hardest part bc of the unusual angle on the horse and the guitar...the rest of the drawing is more straight forward though, and I'll hopefully burn through it faster. I'll be adding all future updates, for this drawing, within this post.

See the final art here.

"Loan Your Ride"

Over the last several years most of my artwork has been focused on sequential storytelling, and I was doing very little stand-alone images. Last year I started creating the red and black colored image series, as an offshoot of a style I had started to use for a graphic novel.

This lead up to a few months back, when I became determined to start producing more stand-alone images in the vein of my old commercial geared Illustration. The first one of these, "Loan Your Ride", is posted above and was created in Adobe Photoshop. Drawing in PS was a bit of a departure for me as all my comic book work was drawn in Illustrator. I decided to switch over to PS so I could use more expressive line work as well as giving the images a more natural feel. Once I have six or seven images drawn, I'll start coloring.