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I often wonder what types of things I should include on my blog.  Should it always be just about my artwork?  More stuff on technique or maybe an article on my favorite artist.  I’m never sure, so I’m just going to start posting everything.  More general comments, sketches, dabs of paint, etc.  More in process shots of stuff I’m working on (that I’m allowed to share).

Right now, I’ve been updating my portfolio to target Wizards of the Coast and Marvel Comics.  With the Incredible Hulk being so incredible (and my favorite character) I thought a nice trading card type illustration would be a groovy thing.  Yes, I still like the word groovy even though it’s popularity was well before my time.

To begin an illustration I usually do some thumbnails or if there’s a minimal background, I just start sketching to see what grabs me.  I ended up with this to start with.

Looks OK.  I like the pose and the expression on his face.  It’s time to refine it a bit and add some spot blacks.  I’ve also decided that it needs somewhat of a proper background.  What could be better for the Hulk than a big mushroom cloud?  Fun to paint and that will allow me to add some abstract qualities to it that I like when painting.  I also changed the size to 10×16 over all just because.    Here’s where we are now.

Now, in general I’m pretty good at just drawing out of my head but good reference will always take your work to a higher quality.  You don’t know what you don’t know and reference will give you the information that you don’t know.  Man, that was a sentence and a half.  I think my brain just started smoking.

Here is my reference.  I’ll probably take some photography later for specific parts like the face and anything that looks off after I get going that needs some attention.

Here is my latest finished piece.  It’s for my portfolio.  I plan to do a number of very similar ones.  Different character classes from Dungeons and Dragons.  It’s a combination of Photoshop and Painter.

I love Orcs.  Even before Lord of the Rings (the movies) I thought Orcs were an awesome creature.  I already see quite a few things  on this one I’d like to fix but I don’t have any work that after being away from it for 24 hours I don’t want to tweak something.  I’ve heard stores of how even the great Frank Frazetta was banned from his own museum by his wife because he would go rework old paintings.  Hopefully, that’s a sign that I’m always getting better and not that I just don’t know how to finish a piece.

I do a number of sketches of different faces in my sketchbook.  It’s always good practice.  I need to do a lot more of them.  Here’s a batch of recent ones.  My favorite one is the middle one because I liked how I pulled off the rendering.  I also really like the top middle one because I’d just seen a commercial for a movie starring Zoey Deschanel and used that for some inspiration.

I should take more time to come up with catchy titles to my paintings.  As some may know I working on some stuff to send to Marvel and here is an additional piece to that end.  Cyclops has always been one of my favorite characters and the image of his optic blast is a striking visual.

I’ve uploaded a few new pictures to my sketchbook and of course I wanted to post them here on the blog because on a blog you can never have enough content.  I’ve always been a fan of doing more tonal rendering in my drawings even though it takes more time.  I just love the way it looks.  All those beautiful gray scale tones.

People labor on to no end about the beautiful world of color and there are plenty of those follows of black and white line work but the tone people seem to be a forgotten lot.  I would say that tone is more important than all of them.  Color is dependent on tone and really, when you get down to it, black and white line drawing are just shorthand for tone.  Tone is king I say.  King.