In the Spirit of Giving!

Today's post is partially brought to you by the fabulous Cal Johnston owner of Strange Adventures in Halifax! It's also brought to you by the letter "S". "S is for Spirit", a character I've been inking over the brilliant Darwyn Cooke (who just Google searched his name and found this post :)
If you're ever in Halifax do yourself a favour and stop by Strange Adventures...Cal runs a shop the way I wish more businesses were run let alone comic book stores. Super nice, super helpful and he knows comics! I've done a few signings out at the store and have honestly never seen such a big turn out or encountered such friendly groups of people in my whole comic book career. On the first free comic book day Cal organized the handing out of free comics at the movie theatre which was then showing the very first Spider-Man movie. Is that not awesome?! So, above is the drawing I did for Cal's birthday last year...which honestly doesn't begin to repay him for all the great things he's done for me. And below is a picture Cal sent me...a customer of his works with the UN and on a recent visit to Darfur took along a copy of the Spirit! Apparently the kids loved it so much they insisted on keeping the comic.

Doesn't this picture just make you happy? It makes me happy!

Have a happy day, ever'body!

best,

j.

Reel 'Em In!

When I posted the image for Cancer a buddy of mine mentioned he thought the gal would have freckles. She's a red head and he's right that she probably ought to have 'em. I had that in my brain when I drew Miss Pisces and yet I ended up colouring her as a brunette. She could easily have any colour of hair (God bless Photoshop) and as I come to end of the theme I really start to notice just how many brunettes I've drawn. You could very well guess the colour of my own hair by the appearance of my characters.

And speaking of appearance...it hasn't escaped me that there is a shocking lack of ethnic diversity in my Zodiacs. My day to day gig in illustration has taught me to be more wide ranging in my skin tone colour choices and I actually think it's important that I reflect diversity in my pin-up drawings. My plan is to go back over the drawings once I'm finished and create new heads for each image and recolour them. Photoshop makes that easy, too! :)

Peace out,

j.

Cat-Fish Creek!

I know, I know...it's been ages since I updated. It was bound to happen sooner or later. Mostly I got tied up with work. The other big reason was that I didn't want to post any drawings that weren't related to the Horoscope theme until I was done with the Horoscope theme. Unfortunately the final few Zodiac drawings kept getting pushed to the side as more paying work came in.

Enough kvetching. Here, finally, is Pisces. The earlier fish woman was believed to be Pisces but she is actually Capricorn (the fish/goat or goat/fish depending on your preferrence). I've always known Pisces was going to be gal in hip waders fishing off a riverbank. When I was a kid we used to catch crayfish in cups in a river/creek pretty similar to what you see here.

Because I've been away for so long I felt it only right that I post a second image. I recently got the Art of Shane Glines which I highly recommend checking out if you can afford it. This drawing is more than heavily influenced by the gorgeous linework on display in Shane's book. The "S" curve on the front side of Selina's money bag is my little tribute to Shane's book (actually I've been throwing that line in a lot of my drawings lately).


best,
j.

Sunny Beach!

Boy, what I wouldn't give to be sitting on a beach right now! It would mean, first of all, that I'd be warm and second of all it would mean that all my work is done because I would never go on vacation with jobs left unfinished. Alas tis not to be...

So it's sorta been known for a while now that the latest batch of drawings are Signs of the Zodiac. I started with Virgo, followed by Taurus, Libra, Capricorn (not Pisces as you may have thought), Aries and finally Leo. This one is...Cancer! I'm more than half done but work has kept me from finishing the final few. I hope beyond hope that I can finish the rest soon so as not to interrupt the complete set with posts of work done in the meanwhile.

Have a lovely day!
best,
j.

Queen of the Jungle!

Cue jungle soundtrack...crickets the size of your hand create a pulsing background rhythm...exotic birds cry out...k-k-kaw k-k-kaw...the bass purr of a jungle cat sends a shiver up your spine...the Queen of the Jungle perches, her leonine hair remains remarkably unfrizzy despite the humid jungle air. What product is she using to maintain such body? Does she even own a hair dryer? Or know what a hair dryer is?!?

This one turned out better than I could have wanted! Could be that it's my sign and I really wanted an image that I wouldn't mind having on my wall! :) There is one part that still bugs me...and that is that her bosom looks uneven. I probably shouldn't even point that out because maybe no one would have noticed. But just in case someone does notice I want you all to know that I know.

Incidentally, I looked up some facts on Sheena, the original Queen of the Jungle...and I found out that she was the first female comic character to get her own title. She beat Wonder Woman by three months. I also love the fact that she was co-created by Will Eisner who also created the Spirit...the book on which I am currently working!

best,
j.

Norse Goddess! Or Vi-Queen!

Boy oh boy, this one was tough. I drew a male version of this one first and wanted to use the same stalwart pose for the lady. But how to make a female warrior advancing with her hefty hammer into a sexy pin-up. Forgo the sexy, really. So I focused on making her a bosomy barbarian with shapely gams and sporting just a smidge of lipstick. She kinds reminds me of Sorsha from Willow! Maybe it's the snow.

j.

p.s. I love coincidence and in an example of sheer coincidence I was about to hit "Publish" this post when I heard on the radio an ad for a Dodge RAM! Zowie! I'd better hit post while the stars are still aligned!

Under the Sea!

I suppose something should be said about the strangeness of this fish woman! Her tail is based on one of those old drawings of fish made before the invention of the camera. When sailors would come back with horrible tales of creatures beyond description which populated the seas and oceans of the world. It's the only time I've ever seen a shark drawn with whiskers. In the latin this little mermaid is known as ANTHRO POMORPHOS (or so says the book 1300 Real and Fanciful Animals from Seventeenth-Century Engravings by Matthaus Merian).

This week my good friends Chris and Angela delivered their first baby. I drew this little caricature of Junior Stone (not his real name) sight unseen. I took it upon myself to extrapolate the facial characteristics of the mother and father, merging the more prominent features into the likeness you see before you. In the end he looks nothing like this. More to the point I managed to completely forget that neither Chris nor Angela have brown eyes. Almost all babies have blue eyes at birth (or so I'm told) and only in the coming months will they learn his true eye colour. At any rate congratulations to my friends on their successful procreation.

your friend,

j.

Roller Gal!

When I was a kid my hometown still had a drive-in A&W. I loved getting food served to us in the car! I don't know why that should be so awesome but it totally was. The girls who worked at the A&W weren't on roller skates but back in the 50's it was common...it sped up service in the then new fast food industry. Check out the book CAR HOPS AND CURB SERVICE by Jim Heimann for some fun history, if you're interested in that sort of thing.

This is entry number three in the continuing theme. I badly want to pun on the phrase "working for scale" but can't really figure out what the phrase means...and if it only applies to actors.

best,

j.

Rodeo Gal!

She's an old cow hand from the Rio Grande! Next in line, still continuing last post's theme. This little filly is practical, reliable, patient and affectionate. But she's also a little bit lazy and when pushed you'll find she's one stubborn lass. Seriously jealous she'll lassoe your a** if she catches you making time with another gal!
I always love drawing cow-folk...ever since working on Mutant Texas: Tales of Sheriff Ida Red (written by Mr. Paul Dini). When I look through that book I still think it's some of my best drawing ever.

best,
j.

New Year's Eve!

Shocking! Shameful! Disgraceful? Don't be silly. It's a drawing of the world's first woman, tastefully shielding her more private bits from leering eyes. Over the next few posts I'll be featuring pin-ups I drew as Christmas gifts for my family. This is Eve before the fall...I couldn't hide her nudity with leaves as did the classic painters because she is not yet ashamed. Y'see, she's still virginal here. That's an important key to the theme of this and the next few pin-ups. *wink*

best,
j.

Happy Holidays!

My Christmas card this year! I have many fond memories of waking up Christmas morning and running downstairs to see what Santasquatch left for me under the tree. His pungent odor still hung in the air as I tore into my gifts. It was always my intent to climb up to the roof and make a plaster-of-paris cast of Santasquatch's enormous footprint left in the rooftop snow...but dad wouldn't let me use the ladder. And although my image here shows cookies and milk in the foreground, Santasquatch actually prefers raw meat and birds eggs. *sigh* Oh, memories!

And here's the birth of Santasquatch. As you can see, when I originally drew him he was called Sant-Sasquatch. Drawn for Milo who also got the Puck drawing I did a few comic conventions ago.

hugs all,

j.

Blueline Inking.

Aloha, friends. Who wants some cheesecake? I'm serving up a slice disguised as a quick tutorial on inking over a blueline printout. As with the colouring tutorial this is merely one man's method and there are many ways to work. Here's mine...

The first step is a pencil drawing. After Prismacolor changed their lead to a crappier, gritty formula I switched back to drawing with regular old grade school HBs. I use a Papermate HB #2 (sometimes #3 which is a little harder lead). I draw my roughs on photo-copy paper relatively loosely. Above is a section of my actual rough artwork. I scan the grey line art on the GRAYSCALE setting. My scanning sometimes doesn't pick up really light lines and I found that if there is something solid black on the scanner with my drawing more lines are "read". My solution - a post-it note with "SCAN!" written in thick black marker. I stick it on pencil drawings and they scans perfect every time. Just remember to delete the post-it in Photoshop.

Step two-ish is to convert your grey line to blue. I used to do it in a really complicated way which I won't tell you here (so as not to confuse and also because I can't believe I used to do it any other way). The easiest way to convert your art to blue, or 100%CYAN, is as follows: With your greyscale file open SELECT ALL and COPY your image. DELETE it. That's right. DELETE it. You need a clean background for the next step (you could also have a second window open if you're nervous about losing your artwork for ever). Convert your file to CMYK. Select the CHANNELS pallette (it's in with LAYERS, HISTORY, etc...) and highlight the CYAN CHANNEL.
PASTE your artwork into the CYAN CHANNEL.

Return to your LAYERS palette. Your art probably still looks grey, which is why you now create a DUPLICATE LAYER of the background.

Did it just show up blue? Awesome. Delete the background layer and you've got a perfectly 100% Cyan image that, when inked, won't scan.My next step (step three) is to tighten the pencils. I LOVE pencilling over a blueline that won't erase or disappear no matter how much I abuse my paper. Okay, I can't spill coffee on it or call it degrading names but it's pretty near un-removable. You may not want to print out at 100%...instead you can reduce the opacity of your Cyan layer to 15-30%. It's a little easier to draw over your rough if the blueline isn't overpowering your senses.

I realize that I still erase my pencils after I've inked the image which you might think defeats the purpose of printing the blue. Well, I still have that crutch but the better artists among you can ink right over your blue art with nary an HB coming near the page. I ink all of the Spirit pages like that...Darwyn's pencils converted to blueline at about 30% opacity so I can still make out all the details. It's a beautiful way to work.

When you scan the black and white art for colouring make sure that your scanner is set on LINEART or BLACK AND WHITE (whatever your scanner setting is) and the blue will not scan.

Incidentally, the above image is not ready to be seen in full yet. But you don't need to see the whole thing for a tutorial, do you? :)

Also, I don't foresee doing an inking tutorial at any time. Instead I'm going to recommend getting Gary Martin's book THE ART OF COMIC BOOK INKING. I searched for it at Amazon and apparently only Volume 2 is available. I have never seen Volume 2 and heard it isn't nearly as good or informative as volume 1. If you have used bookstores near you I suggest starting there.

My only other suggestion is to get your hands on as many pages of pencilled comic art (online, from friends, scans from the Kirby collector, etc...) as you can and start there. Hey, you can even print out blue line copies of the art so if you muck it up make another print out and start over. Easy peasy!

Happy drawing!

j.

Wonder Woman Pencils!

This may seem awfully backwards but after last post's detailed description of colouring I thought I was asked to create an equally detailed article on inking. I won't be doing that today! :)
But what I will do is show my roughs and the final pencils.
These were drawn fairly small...about 5.5" by 4" in pencil first and then loosely inked. I had several variations on poses and composition, chose these two as my favourite and scanned them in. Finally choosing the bottom drawing as the better of the two I re-sized the image for 9"x12" paper and printed it out in blue line.
Then I just started pencilling. You can kinda make out some of the blue line under my grey pencil. This method has saved me so much drawing time in that if you make a mistake or don't like something you've done you can erase the pencil and your blue print-out is still underneath. The keen among you might notice that some of the statues changed in the inking stage and a completely new one springs up behind Wonder Woman's sword. Speaking of swords...I embiggened the Gorgon's sword before inking, as well.

Tools - I draw with a regular old HB pencil (Papermate Mirado Classic #3) on Strathmore Bristol Vellum finish.

j.

Colouring Tutorial!

Here in all it's explanatory glory is a colouring tutorial and should, if I do well in my job, give away all of my secrets! I only hope I am up to the task.

Before I begin let's assume you've created a piece of black and white line art and that you are passingly familiar with all that Photoshop has to offer (I'm using Photoshop 7.0) That is, you know how to create layers, choose different brushes, and save your files regularly. I also use a lot of the key-command shortcuts but will do my best to give the menu directions. And, yes, I'm on a PC. Let's not make this a discussion about the marvelousness of Macs, shall we :)

If it lends any credibility to my colouring methodology I learned most of my techniques from the following top talents: Laura Allred (Madman, X-Statix), Darwyn Cooke (New Frontier, Catwoman), and Laura DePuy (Authority).

Step 1 - Scan your black and white lineart. Convert to Greyscale by going to IMAGE - MODE - GRAYSCALE. With default colours set on black (foreground) and white (background) go to SELECT - COLOR RANGE. A pop-up window gives you selection options. Black is automatically selected as the default sampled colour, and your FUZZINESS should be at the far right (which for me is 200).

Click OK and now you've got marching ants around all of your black areas. Without deselecting your art create a new layer by clicking the NEW LAYER icon in your LAYERS PALETTE. Fill your selection with black by going to EDIT - FILL and choosing your foreground colour (PC shortcut is Alt-Delete). Don't deselect just yet. Go back up to SELECT menu and choose MODIFY - CONTRACT. Contract your selection by one pixel, create another new layer and fill that layer selection with a colour you won't likely use in your art. I chose a medium grey. Now you've got three layers; your original background lineart, lineart in grey (or chosen colour) and top layer of black and white lineart.

Why do I create another layer? This is the layer I am going to do most of my colouring on and with lineart one pixel smaller than the black and white lineart I can select areas for easier filling (where lines are closed).

SAVE your file giving it a wonderfully creative name.

Below is a close up of my artwork by layer. The grey lineart and black and white lineart. Remember not to touch your black and white top layer...you can lock it if you're prone to layer hopping. There's a LOCK icon in your LAYER PALETTE, just click it with your lineart layer selected.

Step 2 - Convert your file to CMYK (IMAGE - MODE - CMYK). It's the colour mode you'll need to be in for printing with every printer and it's much easier to convert to RGB for Internet posting than to do a backwards conversion for colour printer output.

Now comes the fun part! COLOUR! I usually start by making my background layer a solid filled colour. I chose brown because I know I want a reddish colour as my background. There's a fire in my background art which is going to make the setting red and also I know I'm going to colour the Gorgon greenish and I want her to stand out from the background.

I coloured the fire next and suggested a few places I might highlight with light from the fire. I colour with brushes, the POLYGONAL LASSO TOOL (allowing me to create selected areas with continous clicks), MAGIC WAND tool and my shortcut fill command. All of this is done on the background layer because I like to save my grey lineart layer for characters. This way I can change my background colour art anytime without having to carefully select around my character colour art. Make sense?

SAVE as you go.

Hot Tip - I highly recommend learning all of the shortcut key commands
for your favourite tools just to save you time.

When colouring I usually try to colour what I know...ie Wonder Woman's skin tone costume. I know that the Gorgon is going to be green-blue so I colour all of her skin. I don't bother with highlights or shadows yet, just flat colour values.

I already have a colour image of Wonder Woman so I actually opened up that file and used the EYEDROP tool to choose her colours.

Hot Tip - I create shadow and highlight colours by altering the COLOR sliders in the COLOR PALETTE. Beside each slider is a number value. I change those values by adding or subtracting 20-30 to my current value. For example: Wonder Woman's skin tone in CMYK is C- 12 M- 46 Y- 62 K- 0 . For a highlight I change the number values to read C- 0 M- 16 Y- 32 K- 0 .

I was always told not to use black in your colour. It's a good rule for painting and equally good for computer colour. Black tends to dull your values and dull colour is not desireable!

Once I've got all my colour areas filled in I start highlighting or shadowing using my light source (the fire) as a guide. Using the MAGIC WAND I'll select a colour area, fill it with a more appropriate colour...say a highlight...then with my brush tool I'll cut in shapes of darker colour. My current technique is to use the solid brush as a circle and increase or decrease its size until it fits exactly the shape I want for my darker colour area.

And that's it! Honest. I usually end up adjusting colours once I'm done. The background of the final image was lightened by using the IMAGE - ADJUSTMENTS - HUE/SATURATION sliders. I use that pretty regularly when I'm not sure of a colour choice. It's a nice quick way to play around with colours without having to hit UNDO after every change.

A final Cool Tip - CTRL H hides the marching ants around a selected area. I use that a lot because I find the "ants" distracting when colouring. And here's the final image. I hope the tutorial was helpful to those of you who asked for it! Feel free to ask questions if anythings not clear or if you want further explanation. This is already a long post so I'll save the halftone screen explanation for another day.

j.

Sweet Cupcake!

Ah, how I am loving to draw Wonder Woman! She is just so perfect and wonderful in her satin tights, fighting for our rights and the old red, white and blue!

This was drawn and printed out for a birthday card! Happy Birthday!

j.

Aquaman!

First of all HAPPY HALLOWEEN everyone! Halloween is actually my favourite out of all the holidays. I love all the monster movies on TV, giving out candy, and especially costumes. I love the dress up!

All of my Halloween loving does nothing to explain todays post. Why am I putting up a picture of Aquaman? Sure, his costume is the colour of a pumpkin but is that any good reason? I say it is. So, in light of the fact that I don't have any other suitable Halloween images I give you Aquaman on monitor duty in glorious orange and green!! Also, here is a picture of my dog and his new favourite chew toy. :)
best,
j.
p.s. Incidentally, I switched my blog to the new beta set up. What that means for bookmarks and such I don't know...we'll find out soon enough.

Savage Sword of Wonder Woman!

Here's a slightly more serious take on last post's cartoony version of Wonder Woman! The costuming here is based on Diana's warrior garb from Darwyn Cooke's New Frontier! Before the book even came out there was much discussion about Wonder Woman's weight...which is (in a roundabout way, no pun intended) where my recent drawings are coming from. I like the thought of Wonder Woman as a husky gal. One who eats and drinks, has some meat on her bones and who loves a good fight!
And I much prefer the beefy gal as opposed to the skinny-minny she's become in recent issues of certain DC comics OR the muscled super-woman she is as drawn by certain artists. Actually I'm really enjoying the recent version of Wonder Woman as drawn by Terry and Rachel Dodson. They're sort of doing a Lynda Carter which is ALWAYS okay with me!

Ever yours,

j.

WOTTA WOMAN!!

I believe I will let this post run without much commentary from me. I could go on for hours about my love of Wonder Woman, how my focus is mostly on the memory of the Lynda Carter tv series and not at all any of the comic books (because I don't care much for how she's been done in comics). I could address the plumpness of my drawing and the heaviness of her bosom. I could say something about the odd little graphic thing beside her. But I won't do any of those things because it's dinner time and I'm hungry.

j.

Universal Horror!

Today's entry is one of my favourite projects from my college years. The assignment was to choose a topic and create four illustrations -- one each in the styles of two illustrators and two fine artists. I think I'd just recently seen a bunch of the Universal films and most definitely was already in love with the Invisible Man and the Creature from the Black Lagoon. So my topic was the Universal Horror monsters. And because I loved comics I opted for two comic book artists as my illustrators.
Mike Mignola, the creator of Hellboy, had just worked on the Dracula movie adaptation (based on the Coppola movie...I own a page of his art from that series). The Invisible Man is my attempt at Mignola's style rendered in goauche. I really wanted to re-create the scene of the Invisible Man standing in front of the window in his rented room. Una O'Connor is fussing around him, procrastinating so she can get a better look at him. At the time I lacked the ability to work out the perspective properly to really do the scene right.
Frankentstein's monster is done through the style of Egon Schiele (the white outline and hand touching himself are two things I took from Schiele). I don't think the face on the monster turned out all that well but even years later I love how the hand looks. Look up Egon Schiele to see some real art!
Bill Sienkiewicz (no, I didn't look up the spelling) illustrated a comic book version of Moby Dick. It has lots of gorgeous water colour painting and underwater ghostly images of the Whale. I wanted my Creature to look like Bill's paintings but lacked the ability to really paint in water colour.

The Bride of the Monster is done in the style (and I think directly ripped off composition) of a Gustav Klimt painting. All that gold and the pose of the Monster are definitely Klimt. In a way this is also another Mike Mignola piece because Mike used the same Klimt painting I based this on in a page of Ironwolf.

Halloween's coming up quick...hope you've all got your costumes worked out. I know I haven't.

best,
j.

Baby Face!

I love Harvey comics especially Hot Stuff the Little Devil and Spooky (Casper's tough cousin...he's the ghost what wears a 'doiby'). Those cute little characters were on my mind as I was working on this drawing...which is why it a)Looks kinda like a comic book cover and 2) has that silly little clown above the price. I figured I couldn't and shouldn't just draw the Harvey clown which was on the covers of Spooky and Hot Stuff so I created this little guy. He's got a hobo beard and hat which started as a derby and ended up more like a sombrero with a pom-pom.

Noah is about 8 months old by now and is the son of a friend visiting from New Zealand. She'd asked me to draw a picture of him. Which I would have done anyway because he's a funny little guy with a giant head of hair. But I was torn...did Noah's mom want a portrait (traditional shading on textured paper)?

I don't really do "portrait" art so I figured comic book inking was the way to go. I think she liked it.

j.