I Wanna Ride a Cowboy

The Fort Worth Weekly in Fort Worth, Texas, is one of my favorite clients. They give me such fun things to draw, and really let me cut loose with styles and experimentation. This time, they asked if I could draw a cover illustrating the conflict between the approaches of gay communities in Fort Worth and nearby Dallas. Click

I won't attempt to explain the story any more than that, since I'm sure it's far more complicated than my little one-line description. You can read all about it here. And, of course, you can click and embiggen the image.

I think there are similarities between this and my last cowboy illo that I did for them, but really, in my head I was inspired by the character designs for Per Degaton on last week's Batman: Brave and the Bold. Such an interesting face shape, and a great vocal turn by Clancy Brown.

The Coolest Thing Since Cool

New Love and Capes news. Click here to see what!

NYCC2009 - Day One

Today was the first full day of the show. There's a pro part that started at 10:00am and then the regular portion began at 1:00pm or so and went until 7:00. Whew! That's a long day. But it was a good day, too.

I met a couple of TV and film production companies. You never know what's going to pan out, but it's never bad to make those contacts. I met the lovely and talented Whitney Matheson from USA Today and we spoke of comics and conventions and Love and Capes. I did Douglas Wolk's character design panel, which was a lot of fun I met some friends, chatted, maybe even lined up some work.

One thing I didn't do, though: Twitter. Now, I'm sure you think it's because I was so busy and important that I wasn't able to get to my iPhone to document the day. You'd only be partially right. The big thing is that the iPhone is so frellin' popular that the 3G network is overtaxed at the show. I had a spotty connection at best, which is okay for some light e-mail, but is Of The Bad for Twittering.

I suspect tomorrow will be even worse. Well, better with the crowds and the selling and the awesome, but less good for the communicating and the writing. Sorry.

Guess y'all will just have to come here next year to experience it.

Cover Round-Up

Now it can be told, the cover I did was for the Ft. Worth Weekly. It's one of those indy alt-papers that I've done so much work for over the years. Here's the cover, complete with text and headlines and masthead and all of that stuff.

For those of you techies in the audience, drawn by hand, inked by hand, colored and composited in Photoshop. I handled most of the illustration elements separately, which allowed me to get in some nice detail in the Cowboy. The story is about how the big Stock Show (which is a Rodeo, for those of us in the North) that brings in tons of revenue to the city, but the city only gets a tiny fraction. So they wanted a cowboy roping a pile of money.

I changed it a little bit, making the money more of a sandworm (Dune, anyone?) so that there was a little more motion and resistance to the money. I think it worked pretty well.

Weekend Warrior

A few years back, shortly after going full freelance, I decided I shouldn't have to work weekends anymore. It was one thing when I was working for The Man, and nights and weekends were the only time I had to myself. I don't mind doing my own stuff on my own time, like Love and Capes, but I didn't want to have to work on weekends anymore.

It's a great theory, and it works more than it doesn't. This weekend was one of those "doesn't" times. That's okay, since both projects were for people I like who don't ask for too much. I'm willing to make a diving catch in the end zone a couple of times, but if it happens every time, then that's just poor planning.

So, I finished up that coloring project and moved over to this cover illustration. I still can't show the whole thing, but will be able to soon since it runs this week.

I had a really good Sunday. I went over to my Grandma's for "dinner" (well, it's lunch, but it looks like dinner) and hung out with the family, and visited with a couple of friends later in the afternoon, and even watched The Simpsons with my parents and brother. All great things. But, for some reason, I was beat when I finally got to the drawing board to ink and color this cover.

There have been plenty of times that I've been up until 1:30 in the morning working on Love and Capes and it's an effort to make myself go to bed. Maybe it's the last two months of that and LNC taking its toll, but I just had no power. I could hear my couch calling to me: "Look, Bourne Identity is on. And you've got lots of Supernatural on DVD yet." I'm not really a lay-on-the-couch guy, more of a do-something-while-the-TV's-on guy, but man, yesterday I really wanted to just veg out.

I managed to ink the drawing and lay it out in Photoshop so that I could wake up (shudder) early to finish it this morning. I did manage to get up a quarter after six to start coloring.

Have I mentioned the glories of coffee, by the way?

I got it done, and I think it looks really good. It's one of the rare jobs that actually turned out a little better than I envisioned in my head. So I guess it was worth it.

Slappin' Some Color Down

I've got a coloring project running right now, too. It's kind of amazing, to me, that I get coloring work. When I was in art school, color was my big weakness. Of course, sitting next to the absurdly talented Sean Tiffany didn't help. The guy's got crazy color sense.

But, a bunch of artists I know online took me to the woodshed to teach me how to color. I was battered and bloody for a few months, but now I'm far more confident in my coloring skills right now. And, apparently I'm okay at it too, since I'm landing work as a colorist here and there.

Here's a little glimmer of the page I just finished. I won't post a larger link yet until I get an okay from the client. But this slice should be okay to share.

A Cloud of Dust

From out of relative nowhere came a job to draw a cover for a client down South. Since I'm showing part of the drawing before it prints, I'm not going to mention the name, not yet at least.

The important thing here is that, man, I hate drawing horses. I haven't figured out the anatomy. And, they're so graceful that any blip on a line looks completely wrong. So, in this cover where I have to draw a cowboy on a horse, I have to say I'm pretty proud of how this one came out. The art and style actually look a little better than I had in my head, so I'm happy with it so far.

It's on proof to La Clienta, so once she signs off on it, I'll finish it up and then link to it when the cover goes live.

Single Digits, Baby!

Nine left!

Page fifteen is done. There's a lot of cool stuff to it, I think, unfortunately nothing that I can post without spoiling too much. So, you get this establishing shot. Well, there are some sound effects. I'll let you figure out what's going on inside the First Colonial Bank.

And yeah, it's First Colonial Bank since Battlestar Galactica is on my mind. It's coming back you know, and it's gonna be awesome!

Page Fourteen

I think this marks the first gunfire in Love and Capes. There's a weapon fired in #9, but you haven't seen that yet. (It should be soon, I think they're done printing it, so it'll be in stores soon.) But that's more a sci-fi thing.

I've always wondered why people shoot at Superman. I mean, you have to know he's invulnerable, right? Maybe it's just tradition. Afriend told me the next scene should be someone throwing the empty gun at Abby, too, in full Adventures of Superman tradition.

I made sure to draw all the bullets bouncing downward, and Mark catching the one stray. There's no crowd behind him, but still, you can't have stray bullets flying around a city. Mark's nothing if not responsible.

I'm down to ten pages now. It'll be a couple of days before I can get to the next one and down into single digits. Still, this one is going pretty quickly, and that's a good thing.

What Says "Christmas" More Than Decapitated Elves?

I've been working with The Institute for Justice, a civil rights organization, for over five years now. The saw an illustration I did for Scene Magazine and they wanted to buy the art for republiciation. Because of that, I wound up doing other illustrations for them including two different Christmas cards. Three, now.

This was a cool job for more than just the normal reasons. This time I got to try out a new process. At the recommendation of some fellow artists, I purchased a Brother MFC-6490CW scanner/printer/fax combo. The new machine solved the problems I had with my Apple USB modem receiving faxes. Apple makes a great product, but the modem/fax combo is one of the places they've completely dropped the ball. I loved going to digital faxes, so I could only print out the ones I wanted, but the fax kept glitching.

But the scanner aspect was the big draw. The Holy Grail of scanners for comic book artists is an 11x17 scanner. On that, you can scan a complete comics page without stitching it at all. Every page of my three Raider graphic novels were scanned in two pieces and digitally combined to form the 11x17 final image. Most 11x17 scanners are scary expensive, but this one was under $300! Under $200 after the rebate that was being offered at the time. (Amazon now has it at $279.99.)

It can even print on 11x17 bristol board. You're probably wondering why that's so cool. That'll take even more explaining.

Most issues of Love and Capes are drawn on tracing paper, then lightboxed onto Layout Paper (also called Vellum). That's a very translucent paper that takes ink much better than tracing paper. Then, I'd cut it up into pieces and scan it, and put together evey page in Photoshop, one panel at a time.

But now, I could print onto bristol, which is a paper with a very ink-friendly surface and one on which I can get more effects than I can on vellum. So, I can print my pencils in non-reproducable light blue onto a piece of bristol, and then ink right on the bristol without having to erase, since the light blue lines disappear when scanned, or with exceedingly little tweaking.

That was a godsend on the IJ job. They needed 60 elves or so holding a giant piece of parchment, upon which they'd put their Christmas poem. I could work at a manageable size, scan in the pencils, and then print out a final piece on bristol where I could ink with no issues, and then rescan it at full size and not have to try to line up two sides, which is usually problematic at best.

Then I colored my headless elves in Photoshop. Headless because the Institute was going to put photos of their employees on those elves. And then I sent the final file to IJ, where they composited the heads and had it printed.

The cards just came out this week, and they look great! It was a fun and challenging job, especially trying to make 60 distinct elves, all doing something individual. It kind of reminded me of my famous Where's Slider job. And it came out just as well.