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…

Follow this topic in the R3 Forum here!

Related posts:

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

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 was done as a commission for an international client, the subject being Ultimate Hawkeye. She had seen a previous work, my illustration of Cannonball, on Comic Art Fans, and wanted something similar, in terms of pose, general look, etc. We went back and forth a bit talking about the specifics of the piece, which was pretty awesome because she was very clear on what she wanted, down to the stubble. Some tweaks along the way included upswept hair vs the way Pacheco draws it (down), more stubble and a head positioning change. Otherwise, it was a smooth and fairly fast process. I quite like the result. It’s hard, if you haven’t tried, drawing a fit but not roided out hero just standing with calm repose, rather than punching or hulking out or whatever.

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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:

To start with, I went for a design somewhere between Joe Mad’s overwrought version and Pacheco’s simplified version.

Joe Mad’s version…

Pacheco’s version (TRDL preferred!)

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On to my illustration…

This was the first loose pencil sketch. You can see the Pacheco style downswept hair here.

This was the revision, with new hair and more details sketched in so she could see where I was going with the outfit and face and the like.

Here’s inks. As is often the case, I found some things to correct as I went, and did. And after this scan, I decided the legs needed to be longer, as did the left arm, so I made digital adjustments, thanks to some feedback from Wifebot.

Skin done! Medium white-guy skin tone.

Here’s that hair. As my skintones lean to the browns rather than the pinks, I have to be judicious when selecting the range of yellows and tans and such i use in blond hair, especially when it’s sandy or darker blond like his…

Flats are down at this point. I love monochrome costumes, you know this.

Shades are down. For the costume, I used a black reduced opacity layer for shade. This differs for how I do warm colors, where the shade is hand mixed and applied. So to speak. I mean, per color.

This is the piece fully rendered, and I stopped to pan out and look at it with fresh eyes. I determined the legs needed to be even longer than I initially modified, so I went to town in Potoshop.

Here’s the corrected limbs in proper proportion, awaiting clean up.

Here’s the cleaned up piece, with digital fill in work done in the rendering.

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The client requested one minor change before completion: raising the head.

Here’s the original, slightly down-tilted face.

Here’s the revision. Subtle, but I think it worked!

Cut/print!

Follow this topic in the R3 Forum here!

Related posts:

1. TRDL Tribute: Ultimate Carol Danvers and Captain Mar-Vell
2. TRDL Tribute: Moon Knight [TRDL Client Redesigns]
3. TRDL Tribute: Cherie

This was done for the R3 Illustration jam on Third Rail Design Lab’s R3 Forum, the subject being a Redesign Challenge: design a contemporary upgrade to DC’s iconic Wonder Woman.

Well, you know I loves me some redesigning. This jam was created as a special response to the now infamous Jim Lee redesign for Wonder Woman that has a vocal majority outraged and a minority willing to wait and see. I didn’t hate the redesign, but it triggered some great discussion with my wifebot(tm) over the nature of ‘contemporary’ when it comes to redesigning iconic imagery: how much change is too much change? What’s the objective?

I really like a lot of the themes of the Wonder Woman look of recent years: thick black hair, less stern face but not too young or too old, the colors, if not the unexplained American iconography… I wanted to keep enough of her look that someone who didn’t know what was going on could look at the drawing and say: ‘that’s Wonder Woman’… in terms of brand strategy there’s two schools: if the brand has totally failed, starting fresh with something radical can reinvent the brand and give it energy; on the other hand, a well known brand that needs a little freshness needs to retain the identity on which it has traded as legacy. I went this latter direction. I don’t need giant boobies falling out or crotchal attacks in my Wonder Woman. And in fact, I actually dislike the hard-muscled, older, angry WW I see too often these days. At the same time, I wanted to get away from familiar American iconography, but keep the bird form, changing from a stylized W-shape evoking wings in the modern look and going with an actual exotic bird motif, suggesting her elswhereneess. I love the red and white boots, and bare, athletic legs, so kept those, but added some bird bling to the edges. The wristbands, belt and headband are all detailed with carved imagery, the former using the bird again, the belt using a peace-wreath cipher, and the headband incorporating one classic star, but embellishing it. I wanted the hair to be flowy and sensual without being overdone. The lasso is hooked in the back, not the side, for ambidextrous reach. And as for the white briefs and neck/chest wrap, I just like the look.

Here’s what was pretty cool about the piece: I did two versions: the classic gold, and a cool silver which had been knocking around in my cortex. I preferred the latter, but wondered if it strayed too far from classic WW… would it stand up to the ‘recognizable brand’ test? Well, as I was considering this, and getting feedback from my buds in PT!VS, my regular UPS guy came into the office and saw my monitor and said: "hey, awesome Wonder Woman!"

Well, then!

I don’t know if this would be judged more or less harshly than Jim Lee’s biker jacket version, but it was my sensibility.

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.

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Process Notes:

To start with, here’s Jim Lee’s controversial design:

In my original pencils, I had some problems with the arms and the lasso, but I knew I’d solve em in inks…

However, I didn’t. So, more editing and tweaking to get her where I needed to be to start rendering.

OK, moving into rendering:

I went with a darker skintone than you usually see int he comics. I know her ‘Amazonian’ ethnicity is undefined but loosely Greek inspired in the modern era, so I went with a nice tanned, olive complexion. I like her raven black hair but I actually lightened it to give us something to look at. Sometimes I like the black hair opaque, but here I wanted to study the flow of the sculptural massing of the hair.

Heres the silver version…

…and here you can see my gold treatment for the outfit.

I gave the bodice some ribbing to evoke the flag imagery we lost in the stripping of American iconography from the design.

Effing glowing golden lasso! Here you can see that it hitches from behind. So to speak.

Lastly, the white. I know that might look weird to some, but it ties to the white in the boots, gives her a centurion/ ambassador feel to my eye, and balances the intensity of the red. I gave her a neck and chest sheathing because I think it looks rad!

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And here’s that variant version:

Follow this topic in the R3 Forum here!

Related posts:

1. TRDL Tribute: Wonder Woman Golden Age Revisited
2. R3 Jam: Re-Re-Redesign Wonder Woman
3. TRDL Tribute: Old Timey X-Men [Cryptohistorical Redesign]

This was done for the R3 Illustration jam on Third Rail Design Lab’s R3 Forum, the subject being Mister Miracle, from jack Kirby’s 4th World/ New Gods work.

I’ve had the image of Barda in my ref queue folder for a long time, actually dating back to a piece I was working on as a collaboration with Vlad that never manifested. So, I dug that out to use as inspiration for Barda’s look, and drew Miracle in his old classic duds. I’m playing up his escapist thing, obviously, but also a bit of the tie me up/tie me down aspect of superhero fantasy back in the day.

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.

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Process Notes:

OK, so as far as resources go, I used the following:

I went with the classic Jack version of Scott Free, trying to keep the costume as simple as possible.

For Barda, I used the costume referenced in this bust. Man, I love this look for her.

My original pencils/inks clearly went crazy on the Barda side of things. I was filling up void withher in the foreground (I’ll show YOU filling up void) but I knew that the arm location and size would need to be smaller or there’d be no room for Scott to be seen beyond her, so I drew the arm closer in scale to what would appear in the final version, and figured I’d scale down Barda’s torso digitally. Which is what i did.

I was coloring this one in a Starbucks, and met a guy who was a self-proclaimed comics dork. He thought I was working on Martian manhunter from his vantage point, which i totally get, primary colors and the cape and all. I was zoomed in pretty close.

I honestly have a tough time with a lot of these older designs, but that’s half the fun of drawing them, I’d wager.

Follow this topic in the R3 Forum here!

Related posts:

1. TRDL Tribute – Mister Miracle
2. TRDL Tribute: Big Barda
3. TRDL Tribute: Mister Sinister

We haven’t had Thor as a new jam since 2006 so let’s take a fresh look at the Odinson…

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thor_(Marvel_Comics)

Follow this topic in the R3 Forum here!

Related posts:

1. R3 Jam: Mockingbird
2. R3 Jam: Black Widow
3. TRDL Tribute – Thor 2010

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

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

This was done for the R3 Illustration jam on Third Rail Design Lab’s R3 Forum, the subject being Cloak and Dagger, from Marvel Comics.

Joao used the costume designs from Alphona’s Runaways run for this pic, reminding me both of how brilliant and sophisticated Alphona’s design work is, and how amazing Joao’s lines are. I was delighted by the diagonal struck by Dagger here, and how Cloak makes up the background in a way that doesn’t actually make you think about his volume, really capturing that ‘Bag of Holding’ nature of his powers.

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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. R3 Jam: Cloak and Dagger
2. TRDL Tribute: Dagger
3. TRDL Tribute: Dazzler (Joao)

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

Joao went for the classic 70s disco Dazzler, which is already cool to begin with, but he really hit it out of the park with the way he presented the sheen to her glittery pantsuit. I love it! What a standout piece, and an interesting compositional companion to his Cloak and Dagger piece as well.

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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: Dazzler
2. TRDL Tribute: Cloak and Dagger (Joao)
3. R3 Jam: Dazzler

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