TRDL News and Reviews » Comic

Third Rail Thrills 38 – Brandy Pin-Up

wrongrobot — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 20:17:23 +0000

This illustration was done for the R3 Jam on TRDL’s R3 Forum. Artists can participate in any open jams by heading here. The subject this time: Frank Cho’s Liberty Meadows.

I always enjoyed Cho’s strip for his busty, curvy rendition of the girls of Liberty Meadows. I admit, the juxtaposition of these comic-style figures and the cartoon-strip characters with which they share the strip never caught on with me personally, but hey, he got a dual following, both cartoon strip readers AND comic fans that followed him to his work on mainstream books thereafter. What struck me, in all of the cool Liberty meadows covers, were the themes. In some ways, he did a pin-up nod on several of them the way I do in this TRDL Pin-Up Series set of pics, so I was inspired by that. I don’t know how I fell into the idea of making it a Slave Leia cosplay pic, but it was kind of a way to hit a few birds with a single stone. Plus, the idea of those little guys in big Stormtrooper helmets cracked me up. Then again, I’m under the weather, so a lot of things have that affect on me right now.

The pic above is the Third Rail Thrills variant. Most of my pin-ups get this treatment now as well, for the collection. Here’s the propaganda poster version, which is described in more detail int he progress notes below:

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 by looking at several of the Liberty Meadows collection covers, trying to get a sense of not only how those animal characters really looked, but the colors. His style on them is very gestural and abstract, in an accomplished cartoon flourish, but man. Hard to figure some of them out. Especially the duck.

I started on the Slave Leia business by looking at stills from Return of the Jedi. I have to admit, I like a Slave Leia as much as the next guy, but I haven’t been to many cons and haven’t apparently done the requisite sweaty Slave Leia ‘research’ because I only had a vague sense of the details. When I needed to verify a few assumptions (what’s going on in the hair buns, for example; what are the boots like, for another) I came across a site dedicated to… well… Slave Leia cosplay, and that was pretty convenient, because you can see how the pieces are comprised, even acknowledging many of them deviate from the film details. I discovered the boot ornamentation, the pattern on the bra, and the existence of the hair bun ornamentation this way.

Here’s the original pencils, again done while a certain bebe was either sleeping or refusing to sleep. You’ll note the face is a lot different here. The concept was to play up the real girl vs cartoon characters vibe from the strip, by trying to normalize the facial features a little more from my usual comic style. But I felt, as I inked, that they were too big on the face, and while some women have wonderful, big features, Brandy was never portrayed that way, so i knew that had to change, among other things…

Here’s the original scanned inks. I could see that I had a problem with her right arm and shoulder, being too close to the head, due to a jacked-up proportion issue. Sounds like a Photoshop solution in the making!

The inks, converted to line art for rendering. I would be doing the boots and some other details digitally, including the choke collar thing. I couldn’t yet decide how I wanted to handle that. I didn’t want her chained to anything, and the concept was a PSA for the National Forestry Service, since Brandy in the strip works on a reserve, so the chained/free thing needed to be in the text and implied in the pic as well, but how, not sure yet…

Here’s the boots, drawn in. I would discover as I looked into the costume refs that the boots were actually more pixie-ish in the front and had lots of gold ornament, so i decided to do that all digitally after coloring the piece.

Here the face has been modified, features smaller, little less eager. Also fixed the hand… which actually wouldn’t last long…

I did the multi-tone skin thing on this one. I know some artists like to blend the tones, but I like them cell-shade style, so here we are.

Here’s the corrected boots, with the doodads.

Corrected hair, with the thingies.

Nice hand! Unfortunately, when I cut and pasted and then modified the hell out of the right arm to make it proportionally correct, the hand was away from the head. But that gave me an idea: have her holding the collar and chain, like you would a piece of undesirable clothing. So that was the slave collar detail, and it played up the text nicely.

This one is kind of funny in that it’s a Liberty Meadows pic, but there’s a lot of Star Wars detail in there. Man, i HATE drawing Stormtrooper helmets.

In the Third Rail Thrills variant, I used a form of Aurebesh, a Star Wars written language. Love the supernet for such things…

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Third Rail Thrills 36 – Cheshire Pin-Up

wrongrobot — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 17:52:13 +0000

This illustration was done for the R3 Jam on TRDL’s R3 Forum. Artists can participate in any open jams by heading here. The subject this time: Cheshire, from DC Comics.

I like the character of Cheshire, though not so much the costume, with all the green on green semi-swashbuckler details and very 80′s headband and one-sleeve action. But She reminds me, in tone, of where Viper could have gone but didn’t: fast-acting poisons, extreme martial arts skills, and most interesting, the babymomma thing. I tried to give her a mixed-ethnicity vibe in her face and skin tone, reflecting the vietnamese-french background. I like how it turned out.

This is also the first piece with the new trade dress for Third Rail Design Lab. More to come!

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:

OK, so here’s the piece that inspired my work, a great Teen Titans cover that captures both Cheshire’s ethnic blend AND funky retro styling. What a great face and Farrah haircut…

Here’s the original pencils. I was drawing at a strange angle and trying to be very quiet, and as is often the case, had proportion issues largely based on the angle of my view. But not to worry…

I often identify the errors as I go, to remind myself, as I often zoom in while working digitally later and lose some of that perspective. Here, I noted the feet were too small for the legs. Now the legs were too long for the torso by a bit, but I knew I’d scale that later. But I wanted to fix the boots right away.

Biggest issue was a problem with this arm. I was looking at a cute pin-up pose in my ref files I’m finally starting to use, but there was a strangeness in how that image was captured that seemed to artificially foreshorten the arm, and I exaggerated the problem further in mine, requiring what i knew would be some serious surgery to repair.

I took a stab at it in the physical work, but it was more of a guideline for the digital correction. I could see that the curve of the forearm was distracting as well.

This was how it stood in inks. Much work left to do.

Told you I was working in difficult conditions.

Starting to make digital edits on the arm here. You’ll see I ghost parts of the drawing, do digital inks on new layers, then bring them back together and do clean up edits to merge it all again.

New arm meant new bust as well.

Getting close, starting to merge…

The figure is mostly complete at this point, so it’s time to work on the scabbard.

I do much of this kind of thing digitally, and then bring in hand-drawn detail and stitch it up… takes a long time to get a fairly simple result.

OK, inks done, ready to get to colors…

Here’s skin, done first, as usual for this sort of illustration. I changed skin tones a bit as I went, to give it a more fusion flavor.

Face and hair, done. Some of my less common eye shadow here.

I LOVE rendering chunky gold detail…

This is a detail some might not like. She’s a seasoned fighter. That means, in my book, she’s been sliced up. I’m not a fan of the superhuman melee combatant that never gets touched. In my book, they just don’t suffer kill strikes, and live to fight another day.

Done, ready for the final composition. As you may have noticed, this is the first pinup using my new refined trade dress. I’m scaling back the familiar TRDL header imagery, making it into more of a eastern chop, and using a crisper, more streamlined presentation. This will be seen in other work and the site itself in updates to come, but for now, just here in the TRDL pin-ups series.

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R3 Jam: Cheshire

wrongrobot — Sun, 22 Aug 2010 18:47:08 +0000

The character for this weeks jam is Cheshire from DC Comics. Let’s see what you can do!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheshire_(comics)

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R3 Jam: the Outsiders

wrongrobot — Sun, 15 Aug 2010 16:50:04 +0000

This week’s randomly-selected jam subject is The Outsiders, formerly of Batman & the Outsiders. Flex your classic DC muscles or do one of the newer iterations of the team. Have fun with this one!

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

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R3 Jam: Manhunter

wrongrobot — Sun, 08 Aug 2010 15:45:35 +0000

This week’s jam selection is Manhunter from DC Comics. You can do any version of the character, or design one of your own. Engage!

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

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R3 Jam: Ghost Rider

wrongrobot — Sun, 01 Aug 2010 23:07:07 +0000

UPDATED: Sorry I reposted a recent jam character yesterday… poor record keeping on my part… anyway, next up is Ghost Rider. I suspect, knowing the contributor, they’d rather see the comics version than the film one, but hey, go nuts!

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

Participants are invited to post their submissions to the TRDL R3 Forum here:
viewforum.php?f=27

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TRDL Tribute – Thor 2010

wrongrobot — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 18:40:41 +0000

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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R3 Jam: Hope Summers [X-Men]

wrongrobot — Sun, 18 Jul 2010 18:33:37 +0000

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

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TRDL Tribute – Ultimate Hawkeye

wrongrobot — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 22:03:00 +0000

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!

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TRDL Tribute – Wonder Woman 2010 [TRDL Redesign]

wrongrobot — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 23:30:08 +0000

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:

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