Written by Steve Morris
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In Project Updates
Tagged Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Steve Morris, vampire, Willow, Giles, Xander
Buffy the Vampire Slayer – cover s10 issue 14
This originally started with Buffy walking through an attic, with the background/foreground assembling into a likeness of Spike. I was concerned about how well the likeness would read and decided to switch to the easier route and use a landscape...then going a step further I used a literal likeness of Spike carved into stone.
Final-ish Self-Portrait Painting
This is the final painting for a life-size self-portrait I started in late 2013. These photographs of the painting are ones I took, but I'll eventually have it professionally photographed. There are a couple of places I'll touch up, but I think it's 99.9% finished...seeing work in a photo always highlights problems, but photos (at least the ones I took) seem to make the painting look a harsher than it does to the naked eye.
I don't normally paint on paper mounted panels, but it was an experiment. In the future, I'm going back to my standard use of panels without the paper. Acrylics sometimes form unwanted textures, and in this painting I overworked the glazing medium early on, which created pock marked areas. I was concerned about abrading the surface of the paper so I didn't sand the pocked areas until much later on, but it was essential too late to get rid of the texture by that point.
I think I may have spent as much time on the background as I did on the face. I usually paint whatever exist behind the subject, but in this case, the walls of the bathroom were creating some bad compositional lines, so I needed to shift where the walls sat. I added the towel (after several experiments) to fill the large open area and balance the negative space around my head. A fun fact: the towel is a ancient Dungeons & Dragons beach towel from the early 1980's.
The manner in which I painted this was a departure from my normal dry-brushing. Also, I didn't blend as much, leaving some paint stoke visibility, to get away from an overly smoothed effect. Golden's glazing medium is definitely the way to go to allow wet-on-wet blending (it as retarder in it), which is normally difficult with acrylics unless you use fluid acrylics or a lot of water. The glazing medium also facilitated visual blending, by using translucent layers of paint over dry areas and made it much easier to intensify areas of color, without having to repaint.
Queen Bee Sketch
This was a quick sketch for the heroine of what will eventually be a series of paintings. The paintings will be a series of narrative still lives about bees, life, death, and war. I've been collecting objects over the last year: new, antique, natural, and handmade...to be assembled into compositions for the narrative to play out against. The queen (in the above sketch) is represented as a human, with her head and neck covered in a white-porcelain shell. The tentative title of the series is "Tangle: The We That Wage."
Butterbroda Pig Roast
This is a new piece from my Butterbroda series.
Titled: "The Feast We Made of Us"
Size: 30"x20"
I introduced a couple of new colors, beyond the additions, which I had used on the Alice in Wonderland piece. I tried a green for the apple and lettuce, but decided to stick with the blue and red, green somehow felt too far outside the color space. While adding more colors frees me up a bit in the way shapes can overlap, it also requires some use of outlines, which I rarely used for colored shapes.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer cover - season 10 issue 13
This cover was the first time I had illustrated Wonderland and Aluwyn and I went with a full-on high fantasy enviornment, surrounding the characters with a glowing fairytale. The environment is a contrast to the tension between the characters, their faces pinched in displeasure: Aluwyn scowls at Willow and Willow turns from Aluwyn with a knitted brown.
Painting on the floor
This is a 12+ years old self portrait, that needed a some finishing and fixing...at this point the main part that needs to be cleaned up is the shirt. I'm using the foil to protect the painting surface from hand oils.
I've always painted on the floor, mainly because I like to spread out, but also because I want quick access to all my paint tubes, due to the fast drying acrylics on the pallet. I decided to crack open my unused liquid acrylics along with my tubes. I've never used fluid acrylics for painting, but they definitely make life easier in some cases...they do dry-up really fast though, in comparison to the Winsor & Newton tubes, which have some retarder mixed in with them.
Page 3
This is the third page to my personal project, it's the last one I'll have time to work on for a while. I've also started reworking parts of the script, so I don't want to draw anymore pages until I can be sure the scenes are cemented.
Page two
This is page two from my personal project. I'm still getting used to inking with heavy blacks and using this style in general. Some of these panels went though a number of revision to the rendering of shadows, but I've moved onto page three and it's going more smoothly.
New sequential art
So this happened over the weekend...
This is for a story I wrote in 2006. I wanted to use a new style, and had experimented some but never got past that stage. Recently, I started working on the story again and came to the conclusion that I would be better off partnering with an artist (other than myself). I came to this conclusion mainly because I thought it was better time management...but in the last week the control freak in me began surfacing so I start to experiment again with the newish style. Once I had done a few pieces, I made an impromptu dive into the art for page one. Part of me would prefer the style to be more exaggerated, a little less real, but this direction seems to be working so any alterations will likely be small. I also have a page two which is almost done.
Finished "Wonderland" piece
Final Butterbroda piece featuring Alice and the White Rabbit.
Title: "Following the Path of Least Assistance"
Buffy the Vampire Slayer, season 10 issue 10
Cover for Buffy the Vampire Slayer, season 10 issue 10
Alice in Wonderland
New Alice in Wonderland piece, for my "Butterbroda" series.
Angel & Faith variant cover at WonderCon 2014
I did an Angel & Faith variant for season 10 which will be available at WonderCon this month, info here ». Since there were already variants for this first issue of the new season, I took the chance to go especially gonzo.
Cover for Buffy the Vampire Slayer season 10 issue 2
I originally pitched this cover as a more simple version, with the Scoobies standing in a mall parking lot and looking into a sunrise. DH wanted a little more bang to it, mentioning the ending scene of The Avengers. So this is my version of that scene, with the battle worn gang, taking a quick donut break, while menace encroaches.
Dawn started with wilder eyes, but DH felt she looked too "donut crazy," which was the angle I was going for, but I altered them for a less sugar crazed look.
I'm still getting used to drawing young Giles, I made his hair a little too moppy...he developed an unintentional Eric Forman thing, between the clothing and the hair.
Spike Graphic Novel
My cover for an upcoming “Spike” graphic novel, written by James Marsters, and published by Dark Horse. There’s an interview with James on i09 here.