This illustration was done for the TRDL R3 Illustration Jam, the subject being Marvel’s Thor…

This was somewhat topical, given all the recent stuff released about next summer’s Thor film. I never LIKED Thor as a solo book all that much as a kid. I liked him in the Avengers, I liked his anachronistic exclamations… I even own about 30 issues of the title from the Simonson days. But the Asgardian stuff was often, much like Marvel’s spacey business, a little beyond my interest level growing up. To me, Asgard and all the Asgardians and their foes were merely characters in the Marvel Super Heroes RPG for me to destroy.

But boy, do I love the relaunch, thanks to Coipiel’s art. Man oh man. Makes me actually WANT to read the stuff.

The original concept of this piece was to have Thor standing over the fallen torso of the Destroyer sentient armor. Then I saw this occur in the comics recently and felt swiped, so I planned a different direction (him standing on Surtur’s giant face)… but then I said to hell with it, and drew the Destroyer helmet anyway, and eliminated the full figure. It was the helmet I wanted to show anyway, more than the largely uninteresting armor itself. I wanted to show it empty. Anyway, there we are. Current Thor costume, etc.

Please enjoy!

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You can find a larger version here.

You can see this illustration herein the TRDL Tribute Gallery.

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Process Notes:

I started with the current costume, which I adore actually…

SInce the original concept was to have him standing over the body, one leg up, I drew this roughly, focused on Thor, and decided I’d do Destroyer digitally, as I was working late at night and didn’t have reference for Destroyer’s business at hand.

Pencils

Once I got wind of a recent scene in the comics where Thor had ass-kicked the Destroyer armor, I lost my enthusiasm for the piece. I didn’t want to cover recent material, you know? I settled on the giant face of Surtur. But still, waited until Thor was done before deciding.

Inks

Now I started refining the inks, changing things about the legs… and decided I was getting a naggling, niggling deja vu about this piece I wasn’t enjoying. So I separated his leg stance and changed the concept.

With Thor complete, I was ready to move on to his foe.

But before I get to that, a few details:

As usual, face was fully rendered before I proceeded with the costume.

Also, I swapped out his torso plates with digitally rendered ones. Much better than my freehand squiggles.

OK, so in the end, I realized what I wanted to do in the first place was the classic Medusa Vanquished pose, with Destroyer’s helmet being held up… specifically showing it being empty, as the armor is sentient. So I just went with it. As you can see in the finished piece, it was done digitally. Since I had changed the stance, and with the deja vu solved (described in a sec) I decided against the torso. It would have been easy enough to do, but I just wanted to focus on the figure. Also, I used this opportunity to try a thicker primary contour on Thor than I have in the past. It seemed to fit his stature. Hopefully.

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So the deja vu? It was my Thor sketch from the last Thor Jam, which occurred during the Civil War thing. I had drawn the sketch, but wasn’t too happy about it. Then Joao came up with basically the same concept, and OWNED it, so I aborted mine. I’ll dig it up later, for the records…

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Related posts:

1. TRDL Tribute – Thor [Civil War Spoiler]
2. TRDL Tribute – Thor [Joao]
3. TRDL Tribute – Loki 01 [New Thor]

This illustration was done for the TRDL R3 Illustration Jam, the subject being Hope Summers, from the X-Men ‘Second Coming’ storyline.

I’m not totally up to date on the status of this character, as I’m about a month behind in the reading, but in general, she’s been the first new mutant birth after M-Day, and was sent into the future with Cable (Nathan Summers) to protect her from getting assassinated by any number of anti-mutant folks, parallels obviously occurring here with what happened to Nathan himself some twenty years ago or so. Anyway, the big tease has been: is she a reincarnated Jean Grey? I don’t know the answer, and I don’t want to be informed. However, I LOVE the costume design. Less so when they added the Akira-swiped tattered cloak and big gun, but as a bodysuit, it’s top-notch. It appeals to me on a personal level because of how similar it is to the design language of my TRDL Universe characters, where bodysuits with simple patterns and exposed faces are the norm. Anyway, here’s another TRDL Pin-Up, this time an advertisement for Summers Brand Redheads all-weather matches.

Please enjoy!

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You can find a larger version here.

You can see this illustration herein the TRDL Tribute Gallery.

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Process Notes:

So these Cable covers were my inspiration. Great shots of the costume, though depending on the colorway in the art it veers from green to blue. I chose green. For science!

On to my stuff:

Often, when I’m going to do a pin-up, I’m not sure at the outset if it’s going to be nose art bomber girl stuff or a propaganda piece. In this case, I had the idea for the matchbook company right from the start, and drew the framework for the ad in the pencils…

Here’s pencils. In some ways I like this face better, but it changed as I went. I made some modification in inks, as here the hip-cock isn’t working visually for me as much as I wanted. I wanted the posture, but not a saucy pose…

Here we have inks as scanned (greyscale) and then again after processing for rendering. You can see that I was finding another case of my patented over-chinning problem, which required some correction in digital inking in Photoshop. You’ll also note I draw little arrows or dots as I eff up the inks to remind me to correct them digitally. Other than the costume and face issues, I also corrected some of the whips of hair, and enlarged her feet to be more proportional.

As usual, I start with face and hair first, and fully render them before proceeding. It grounds the figure for me.

With costumes, armor, etc I have a few approaches, depending on finish and complexity. In this case, the bodysuit is largely monochromatic with an accent color, so I chose to fully render the suit first, then add the gold afterword and match the shade/shadow lines manually.

Here’s the suit fully rendered in the green. I wanted to add some lushness so I gave it more value steps in the color than I usually do.

The gold has been added. I wanted a really deep, luscious gold color, rather than a sharp, bright gold. The gold used here influenced the background and many other tints and hues in the finished ad.

Here’s a blurry close-up of the ad material. The final piece remained close to this original sketch, though I used the stormcloud with lightning instead of a raindrop in the Triangle of Promises…

This ad was an example of the challenges in preparing an advertisement around a pin-up girl. The figure was long vertically, which hampers the usual, more modern means of laying out copy and reinforcing the brand and product name. The older ads from the 20s and 30s often had asymmetrical copy positioning, and the earlier stuff often just had the girl in some abstract pin-up situation, and a brand at the bottom, and that was it. I’m trying to be a little more creative…

Follow this topic in the R3 Forum here!

Related posts:

1. R3 Jam: Hope Summers [X-Men]
2. TRDL Tribute: Dagger
3. TRDL Tribute: Pirates [Three-Pin Maria]

This week’s jam character was a new entry into the pot from one of our newer members. It’s Hope Summers, of the X-Books of recent months. You can read about her below, and then draw furiously!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hope_Summers_%28comics%29

Follow this topic in the R3 Forum here!

Related posts:

1. TRDL Tribute – Hope Summers
2. R3 Jam: Magdalena
3. R3 Jam: Sage

This illustration was done for the TRDL R3 Illustration Jam, the subject being ‘Bubblegum Crisis’, the seminal cyberpunk anime from the 80s…

I never actually SAW the anime back then, but I was a fan. I mean, I loved anime and manga, and I liked this genre, which is to say, girls in lingerie wearing powered armor riding motorcycles transforming into more powered armor. Actually, what appealed to me more was the flavor of cyberpunk trappings the show had, at least from all the stills and things I gobbled up. Obviously they were trading heavily on Bladerunner, down to the character names, but more so it was one of several projects that influenced my preferred gaming environment: post-future, corporate-domain techy, dark, urgent and slim on the junky, trashy post-apocalyptic side of things. Also, I totally stole the Boomers for use in my campaigns.

Anyway, I’ve never drawn any of the Bubblegum Crisis characters. Actually, I take that back, I think I sketched some in high school but they are gone to the ravages of time. Anyway, I wanted to focus on the signature details of these Hardsuits, namely curves, glossy paint and the crazy helmets. I’ve prepared this one a contribution to my TRDL Pinup Series as some nose art bomber girl stuff.

Please enjoy!

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You can find a larger version here.

You can see this illustration herein the TRDL Tribute Gallery.

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Process Notes:

I worked from two sources on this piece: a line art prototype sheet for the suit, and a fanpage compilation of color models for Priss. There are a ton of variants, both for the original and the later updated series, and lots of great model kits photographed but overall, not a ton of material on BC out there, which surprised me. This was the suit I wanted to do. It’s not my favorite design of the series, but I thought the colors would be an interesting challenge.

On to the illustration:

Here’s original pencils. I was going for a pose that focused on the curves of the legs, butt and the long forearms, as these were the main design features I liked. That crazy bulbous helmet with no forward optics is happnin’ here too. Priss used a rail gun and a laser in this suit.

These are inks and then flattened, prepped inks. I scan to grayscale first, do some cleanup and press to black for rendering.

What I actually found difficult is allowing for that sexy curve in the rear. It’s pretty classic anime. But man, it’s METAL. No joints here? But anyway, I rolled with it, for science.

My usual color process goes one of two directions: If there’s flesh involved, I tend to color the flesh through shades and highlights FIRST. It grounds the character in my mind. But when no flesh is visible, I often flat the whole thing at a zoomed out scale, then come in, clean it up, get it ready for lighting. Here, the latter.

My shading on this one was a combination of low-opacity blacks and fresh-mixed pink. The black was about 43% or so. You may note I tweaked the colors of the blue and pink to punch more.

Here’s a detail shot of her helmet. I was going for a high luster to the shine on this armor, which I don’t often do.

Here’s the finished piece, ready for background and such. Came out pretty nicely all in all…

Metal sample credit: 7E55E-BRN via Flickr!

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Related posts:

1. R3 Jam: Bubblegum Crisis
2. TRDL Tribute: Kasumi
3. TRDL Tribute: Black Orchid

This was done for the R3 Illustration jam on Third Rail Design Lab’s R3 Forum, the subject being DC’s Animal Man.

I will admit: I never liked Animal Man: the character design, the character concept, or Morrison’s crazy scripts for the title. I was too young for the metal, too drug-free to dig it, and frankly, I wasn’t into DC much at the time. ReGARTless, an orange and two-blues costume with an 80s leather jacket and crazy goggles? Nay nay nay.

That said, I gave it the ole’ TRDL try. Here we have a propaganda poster advocating observational diligence around bike rack loiterers.

I couldn’t do those spacey, triangle goggle lenses so I kind of modernized that aspect of the look, but otherwise tried to keep him reasonably on model…

Please enjoy, hell yes!

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You can find a larger version here.

You can see this illustration herein the TRDL Tribute Gallery.

Follow this topic in the R3 Forum here!

Related posts:

1. TRDL Tribute: Blackhawk
2. TRDL Special Project: Team Lope AIDS Fundraiser 2010
3. TRDL Tribute: Dazzler

This was done for the R3 Illustration jam on Third Rail Design Lab’s R3 Forum, the subject being the X-Men, from Marvel Comics, but as a design challenge: Old-Timey!

Oooooh, this is my kind of jam. I love redesign challenges. And I love cryptohistory and the like. But also, beyond that, this was an opportunity to do something I wanted to try ever since I got caught up in the blogs of Jorge Garcia and Beth Shady. See, Jorge, best knows as Hurley on Lost, is a 100% minimum awesome guy. His personal blog, which he’s run since the show’s inception, almost killed it due to producer pressure regarding spoiler risk management, then carried on to not only be Lostian, but a great snapshot of Hawaii and the idiosyncrasies of living there as a guest, has been an addictive read for me. He has always been personal, random, funny and sincere in his posts and subject matter. He’s also from my home town of Westwood, apropos of nothing, other than it’s amusing to think of us roaming similar haunts, slightly time-shunted. He and his girlfriend Beth have struck me, over time, as incredibly rad people. She is a talented writer and creative person the likes of which remind me of my wife and some of our friends here in the Bay Area, and we have joked about how Jorge and Beth have been added to our virtual friend group, which sounds creepier than it is. ANYWAY, as the final season of Lost was wrapping up, I was inspired to send Jorge and Beth some art. He frequents the cons and seems to appreciate fan art and other random stuff people send him, and so I thought what the hell, they struck me in a personal way, so I’ll draw something for them.

I was inspired by this jam selection to do an old-timey X-Men portrait, with Jorge as Colossus and Beth as Ariel/Sprite/Kitty Pryde. My original concept included their beloved pup, who unfortunately passed right as I was drawing this. LITERALLY. So after consulting my wifebot(tm), I decided not to include him out of respect for their grieving process. My goal here was to portray something of each of them while maintaining a close tether to the concept of the X-Men characters involved, all wrapped up in a neo-victorian Carnivale style. I wanted to portray Jorge’s mass and presence in an interesting way, and the lightness and quirkiness of Beth’s personality as well (read her blog for more of that, she’s really something). I think it came outpretty well, and it’s another addition to my slowly growing collection of cryptohistorical redesigns.

I’m not one to be fannish over celebrities. I grew up, as mentioned, in Westwood, among child actors and famous folks, and they’re just regular folk, hyper-familiar. But in my adult life, I enjoy being enthused at my favorite actors and their work, and pay my respects when I see someone that does stuff I dig. So, anyhow, I sent the original art off to them, and we’ll see if they like it. I hope they do!

Anyway, please enjoy!

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You can find a larger version here.

You can see this illustration herein the TRDL Tribute Gallery.

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Process Notes:

The challenge with Colossus as a character is the expression of hair on a ‘living metal’ form. In the comics, it’s usually cheated away with him having black hair and thus abstracted. Occasionally you see other metallic humanoids in comics, with regular hair, and they tend to look as expected: metal with human hair, like something out of a late 80s music video. Anyway, I tried to express this design’s facial hair and, well, hair-hair, without it looking too creepy.

I’m no caricaturist. I tried to capture the essence of Jorge’s vibe without trying to draw Jorge per se, and in fusing that with the massive bodybuilder/strongman imagery for the carnivale version of Colossus, I wanted to show bulk and muscle without tone, like classic big-build strongmen of old.

Here’s Beth as ‘Sprite’ in the original inks. I had some tweaks to do with her face ink-wise, and decided to broaden her smile in final rendering.

Here’s Jorge completed, with some X-Men referencing but in general, pushing more towards the carnivale thing than the comic reference, as I tend to do on these redesigns.

Beth, now with phasing happening.

The skeletal birds holding the banner up, and the mysterious vaudevillian soke on the perimeter are clearly references to the final beats of the show, but I otherwise tried to keep the Lost thing out of the way, as this was about Jorge and Beth, not his famous role (or hers, either, being an Ajira passenger, ha)

Follow this topic in the R3 Forum here!

Related posts:

1. TRDL Tribute: Dr. Strange [TRDL Redesign]
2. TRDL Tribute – Wonder Woman 2010 [TRDL Redesign]
3. TRDL Tribute – Colossus vs. TRDL’s Bellicaust

This was done for the R3 Illustration jam on Third Rail Design Lab’s R3 Forum, the subject being Supergirl, from DC Comics.

I haven’t drawn this character much. I wasn’t into Silver Age DC as a kid, so Supergirl registered for me only as a girl in a poofy miniskirt who could fly, which is in and of itself a good thing, but beyond that… nothing. Over the last decade we’ve seen some new approaches to the character, new designs for the mainstream version as well as all the multiverse and other media iterations. And while I do want to do the classic Supergirl again at some point, since my original stab at it suffers from facial profile illness, I saw an opportunity to do a homage piece I’ve had on the back burner for awhile. Tulio posted this cool redesign of her, sort of an amalgamation of Supergirl and Power Girl, his interpretation of a minifig design by artshare list member Barbarossa Rotbart. I loved the ribbing of the torso and the heavy beltline. So, this piece is my take on his design. The only thing I changed, other than the bangs, is the capeline coming up in front to form a collar. I love his original and hope I did it justice…

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You can find a larger version here.

You can see this illustration herein the TRDL Tribute Gallery.

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Process Notes:

Here is Tulio’s original Supergirl redesign, which inspired me and lay in my queue for a future homage. Until now!

Here’s the original loose pencils. I drew it late at night, shortly after returning from Aids Lifecycle.

The original inks. In color rendering, I made some adjustments, including cleaning up her lips, minor ink corrections, and reducing her head to be in proportion with her body. Also, well, there’s that foot…

Follow this topic in the R3 Forum here!

Related posts:

1. R3 Jam: Supergirl 2010
2. TRDL Tribute – Wonder Woman 2010 [TRDL Redesign]
3. TRDL Tribute: Classic Rogue

Sorry for the delay between jams. I was on a bike for a week and recovering thereafter. Time for a new selection!

So the next jam is supergirl. We had this character some years back but its popped up twice in the last year of random selections as submitted by newer members so I figure time to make it happen again in 2010. You think you guys can handle another lithe powerhouse blonde girl in spandex?

This jam will run through this upcoming week, so you should be able to squeeze it in in between all the world cup hoopla and oil spills.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supergirl

Follow this topic in the R3 Forum here!

Related posts:

1. TRDL Tribute: Supergirl 2010 [Tulio Design]
2. R3 Jam: Elastigirl
3. Announcing the 2010 Friends of TRDL Gallery Project!

This illustration was done for the TRDL R3 Illustration Jam, the character concept being ‘pirates!’ this week.

Now, first off, I could draw pirates all week long, and had I the time to do so, I probably WOULD have. But wee Z’s first birthday, and Aids Lifecycle prep, limited my options. However, this was a good opportunity to follow up on a piece I started last month, and finish it for this jam.

The bike I’m riding on Lifecycle is named ‘Crook’, and my ‘ride name’ on my jersey is ‘three-pin’, a play on a weapon (the theme for all of our jersey name iconography across the Team Lope stable) and my love of a certain brand-aware numeral. The three pin (actually the Smith and Wesson Tip-Up Revolver) is a mid-1800s revolver that I quite like the look of, aesthetically. So, I designed a pin-up girl, sort of like bomber girl nose art, for the front of the bike frame, hoping to incorporate the three-pin revolver into the design. The rough for this girl was shown to my lovely wifebot(tm) but she expressed a strong preference for the version of TRDL’s Shanghai Kellie as appeared in our 2009 holiday card series, so I ended up going with that for the bike. But I wanted to keep working on this one, and filed it for later use. And here we are!

I envision this piece of ‘bomber girl’ art to actually be on the side of an iron naval ship. Ole Three-Pin Maria. Can’t trust her! She’ll steal yer goollllllllle!

Please enjoy!

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You can find a larger version here.

You can see this illustration herein the TRDL Tribute Gallery.

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Process Notes:

Here’s the original rough for three-pin maria, shown on three sacks of stolen bills, which was the concept for the Crook nose art. The sacks remain in that illustration’s final version, but aren’t used in this one hereafter.

This is the original inks on the piece. I messed up her lips and also something with the head posture started reminding me of Niecy Nash on Dancing with the Toles, so I knew some Photoshop work was ahead of me, as usual.

Final inks, prepared for color. On this one, I left the eyes a smokey black and would be filling them in digitally during final render.

I wanted Maria to have a dark complexion, ethnically so but tanned beyond that. I wanted her to have an exotic appearance that didn’t rely on her clothing.

Finishing up the skin render and working on hair and flower…

Here I built up the eyes digitally as I mentioned before, and also worked on her choker, which I imagined having a carved ivory portrait on it. Clearly stolen.

While rendering I noticed an error I don’t know that I’ve made before. Her revolver’s trigger is floating up in the spinner. Whoops. Some digital correction here, removing and redrawing the finger and trigger in the proper location.

These opaque linen leggings were an interesting design problem. I wanted them to look opaque, not sheer, but I didn’t want to add holes and tears as my instinct initially suggested, because while she IS a pirate, I’ve avoided tattering her clothes throughout the piece so I wanted to be consistent.

Final color renders for Maria.

From here, I brought her into the container for the final composite. The cool part of doing these ‘nose art’ bomber girl type pieces is that I get to source metal samples and use them for the ship’s hull. In this case, I wanted it to be iron, rusty and old. Some of my pieces have a new appearance, as if freshly painted on, though in those cases I generally don’t show rivets or metal surfacing under the illustration as it can distract from how the image reads, which is a compromise I sometimes choose to avoid. But when rendering an older graphic, like this one, it’s fun to play around with texture and paint fades. This has been on the hull a long time, as seen in the rust on the metal itself, but in the condition of the art as well.
Metal sample credit: Ed Ed via Flickr!

Follow this topic in the R3 Forum here!

Related posts:

1. TRDL Tribute: Maria Hill
2. TRDL Tribute: Lashina
3. TRDL Tribute: Dagger

This illustration kicked off another round of character designs for a longtime client who maintains an original superhero universe for his gaming group. The concept of these two characters is that they are sort of like the children of his world’s evil despot, a cross between Mandarin and Doctor Doom. They are different in personality and approach, but operate together as a team. I went with styling loosely inspired by the previous design he had had done for their father, which is below in the process notes, then from there went on to rationalize a design concept for the armor and clothing. I wanted exotic, Asiatic but not literal… more than anything, I was thinking Mongolian in tone, but post-Chinese Empire-dominance. I liked the juxtaposition of robes and soft cloth with the detailed, gilded armor. Many of the details were described by the client and I just had to visualize a cohesive element. Overall I like how they turned out…

Please enjoy!

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You can find a larger version here.

You can see this illustration herein the TRDL Tribute Gallery.

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Process Notes:

This is the pic of Emperor Dang as done by artist Storn Cook

This was the pencil sketch the started the piece, loosely establishing the relationship of armor to robes and the basic concept for each character’s look. I gave Jia a set of swords, imagining her as the more melee-combat focused of the two, while Dang Jr is more armored.

As the ethnic origin of the Dang Shui region in the client’s world was not fully defined, we explored both a lighter skin and darker complexion, representing northern vs southern influence in the dynasty. We settled on darker, which actually ties into the Mongolian influence in the armor.

This study was blocking out the armor and the robes in a little better clarity with flat color. The final colors were not yet selected, but I wanted to see the relationships.

This was a series of diagrammatic color blocks intended to convey to the client the separate factors to the design: skin, robe and armor. The relationship of robes and armor was a specific design challenge I gave myself. Usually you have a scenario where the armor is under the robes… but I wanted to integrate a system of swept-back folds of fabric to allow them to coexist.

Follow this topic in the R3 Forum here!

Related posts:

1. TRDL Tribute: Silver Samurai
2. TRDL Tribute – Xartherian Org Battle Carapace
3. TRDL Tribute – Ultimate Hawkeye

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