Woo. Yeah woo. APE was awesome.  Thanks to every single person that came by our table and for the awesome reception you all gave Pins N Needles. We’ll definitely be back next year! Here are some pictures from the con:

I started off with a Reptile sketch…

Got my picture taken…

Drew and then sold this Nausicaa piece (SUPER COOL but also super sad cause it turned out nice)…

Said bye bye to APE in the classiest way possible…

And made Lindsey sit next to some cranky old guy on the plane…

When can we go back?!!!

I never got to see Bullitt, though I’d heard all the great reviews and love thrown at it over the years, so I decided to throw it on Wednesday while I doodled for today’s post. That movie is SLOW AS HELL. There are probably 45 good minutes of hanging out in a hospital doing paperwork. Maybe that sort of thing was really exciting in the 60′s.

BUT, even with all the crazy slowness, Steve McQueen manages to be a total badass. For a film with very little actual action, he somehow still manages to be physical and tough. And of course that car chase (below). The shots done from inside the car while he races over the San Francisco hills, the long squealing drifts through crowded city streets, and the final gigantic explosion…freaking awesome.

So here you go, the scan could have been better but I’m running on like no sleep so this is what you get. I’ll do a color piece next week! Hit me up on twitter if you have something you’d like to see!

Work Noise:

It’s come to my attention that some people might not have the superhuman vision I seem to possess and have been having trouble with the font on Vapor Trails, so I’m going to go back and enlargenate it or something to make it more readable. In related news, please take a moment to go over and check out yesterday’s page done by my longtime cohort, Lindsey Lea. It’s neat and should be a treat for you GBM fans.

Finally I want to give a shout out and hearty good luck to everybody at the Long Beach One Day Expo this weekend. Let’s hope they get some crazy attendance! Go buy shit from Lance, Woody, Dan, Ryan, and all the other talented creators out there!

So I came up with this…I hope I can keep it up because it was a ridiculous amount of fun. Wednesday’s I’ll be asking for suggestions for the next fanart piece on my twitter, at which point I may or may not actually take it, and then I’ll be posting the results on Friday. Here’s this week’s!

Don’t ask for a story on this one, you’re just going to have to make it up on your own.

And go read Vapor Trails dammit!

For now, mark your calendars, for this is one of the very few times you will see superheros on my website. Mainly because Lindsey berates me for hours when I draw them.

Kneel before Zod… Zod, kneel before him

I’m sure that scene is a male power fantasy but I still find it attractive

Last night marked the completion of the script for Goodbye Blue Monday‘s first ever Christmas special. We’re hoping to have it up for free download on December 21st. So mark your calendars for extra spiritude.

My good friend Sierra requested a piece of fanart of the cagey cajun, Gambit. So I drew her one last night so she would shut her yap hole. Here it is!

Hey look it’s Gambit! How did he get in here?

To some MF’in FANART! I’ve done a whoole lot of drawing over the last couple of months, but nothing I can post right now. So this weekend I decided to put together some fanart for my favorite new obsession: Muramasa! I decided on Kisuke, since I haven’t finished Momohime’s story yet. I promise I’ll draw pretty ninja girls too.

As an added bonus and an apology for being away so long, I’ll walk you through some process. Since I am, however, entirely into instant gratification, here’s the finished piece first. You can hit the jump below if you want to see how I put things together.

Kisuke from Muramasa, lookin all stabby. Click for big!

Yay now for some self indulgence!

First off, I scanned the pencils since I always forget to do that before I go in with the ink. I keep mine pretty tight to the finished product so that I can remember what it is i was trying to get across when I started drawing. Red Prismacolor Colorerase are way better than those nasty old light blues and that is a fact.

I started with my nib pen and realized that the paper i was using bled when ink so much as got near it. So I switched over to a Prismacolor ink pen and just tried to vary my line weights. The nice thing about the red pencil is that once you’ve got your lineart scanned, you can play with Levels to make the black and white standout, then use Channel Mixer on the Black/White w/ Red Filter setting. It’ll pull the pencils out entirely and leave you with clean art.

After that I flatted in some colors. I actually flatted Kisuke in purple but I guess I merged his skintone layer onto the flat layer before I could save it so you’ll notice his skin actually has some detail on it. I wanted to keep his gi or whatever a single color so it’s all based on the same purple except for the stripe on the front. All his other colors are pretty much just the ones from his original game art. I threw a simple circle gradient in the background.

I did all the shadow in a blue that I made from the snow color and then Hue/Saturated down since it needed to be a little darker. It’s all done with a paintbrush tip with Opacity Jitter control turned on. I set that layer to Multiply and shadows appear! I started with Kisuke because I wanted him to be darker than his surroundings. Then I did a separate layer for the background.

Next I worked on the highlights and ground texture. The colors are pulled directly from the sky, drawn in with the same opacity-jitter paintbrush tip. I then went over with a very low opacity light grey to add some extra ambient light. Finally I stuck in a spotty texture on the ground in its own separate Color Burn layer so it would look a little more icy.

The final act was changing the outline layer to a dark purplish-blue because it looked radical. Throw all that stuff together and you got a ninja! bam.

But yesterday I decided I needed to do some work on perspective and foreshortening and like…badassness. So I got on with the fanart.

Sort of. The first drawing I did was of the world’s original barbarian king, Conan! Then I drew another that started out as Chun Li or something and turned into like…I don’t even know. Let’s call her a really manhandling version of Snow White from Fables. On a zip line because zip lines are made of metal and radical.

Conan and the Flashing Zip Liner – in glorious HellaColor – CLICK FOR BIG

Next up, I wanted to post the first picture of fan art I have ever received. An image that has warmed my hard heart in ways that only otter tummies should be able to.

The greatest piece of fanart a man could ever hope to have bestowed upon him. Thank you Nighthawk

Thanks for stopping by.