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I did some penciled sketch cards recently and thought I’d add some gray tones and/or color.  I like the ink work and the grays but haven’t figured out a way to color them that I like and is fast.  I plan on doing these at convention and don’t want to go the full painted route in that situation.  If anyone has any ideas, I’d welcome them.  I’m going to try to color my next ones with some Copics as that seems to be all the rage.

I actually really dig the Spider-man!

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’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.

I just finished another commission.  This time it was Odin, the father of Thor,  according to Marvel Comics.  This has turned out to be one of my favorite commissions by far.  More than anything else I tried to focus on my composition and my inking style.  In the past year I’ve found I much prefer inking with a pack of Micron pens to a brush.  I like that flat dead line and thick chunks of black.  This piece is pen and ink, acrylics and colored pencils.

I was going through all my artwork that I’ve been meaning to post and I came across a few photos of commissions I did while at the Heroes comic book convention.  They’re not the best pictures but it’s amazing the corrections Photoshop can make.  I’m incredibly slow at conventions.  Over three days I only did 8 or 9 commissions and I only had the presence of mind to snap pictures of these two.  If anyone out there that received commissions from me in the past please feel free to scan them and email them to me.  I’d love to share them.

Here are a Poison Ivy piece and a Rogue piece.  Both were done on Bristol board with ink, acrylic wash and colored pencils.

I’ve been trying to get into the habit of sketching from life and reference instead of my head all the time.  Over the years I’ve gotten too caught up in drawing strictly from my imagination.  That’s not a bad thing in and of itself but I think doing that exclusively leads to stagnation and a bit of a lull in one’s artistic progress.  Without reference or life studies and putting in new visual information into your brain you start to draw, paint and produce the same things you’ve done before.   The above sketch is from an image I found online.