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I’ve got a good friend, Jason McLellan, who works for Marvel on some of their sketch cards.  Check his stuff out here.  (Free plug)  He’s been trying to get me to do them too but two things stop me.  One, the sheer volume of cards you need to do for these sets is pretty high.  For one of the sets he told me the minimum cards to do was over 100.  The second thing holding me back is that it feels weird to draw that small.  I’m just not used to it but it’s all the rage and collectors seem to love the things so with the con season approaching I thought I’d give it a try.

Here are three that I penciled last night whilst watching the telly.  I’ll ink and color them shortly.  I actually kinda really like the Spider-man one.

The Hulk is coming along rather nicely.  After getting most of him blocked in and even a little rendering, I started to work on the background some.  I knew the mushroom cloud was going to be difficult to paint and it has been so far.  I took about 2-3 hours on it last night in Painter.  Half that time was figuring out some techniques in Painter.  I love the program but I’m still fairly new to it.  I filled in the background with some light blue.  I wasn’t really feeling the red and it was affecting how I painted the Hulk.  Then tone was much to dark too as the background needed to separate more from the Hulk.

I’ve started to really look at my tones and my tonal edges in the Hulk’s skin and begin to build that up.  It’s a continuous process of building up, reassessing, painting over lightly and restating my tonal patches.  A tonal patch is any area of tone/color that my eyes see (or I decide) to be separate enough to paint.  It’s all this interlocking tones that creates the image.  The decision of those edges is also really important.  It the difference between something looking choppy when it supposed to be choppy and smooth when it supposed to be smooth.

I also did a bit of rendering on the face but as is my habit I’ve went out and got some reference for it.    My plan now is to block in the lower part of the image and focus on those hands.  I may need to some indication of something in the distance.  A city scape or maybe some canyon like mountain.  Something to break up that blue but not be intrusive.  I’m babbling on now.  My art brain is getting in the way of this post.

I’ve done some more work on the Hulk illustration.

I went over the whole image with some texture brushes with some red to get rid of all the white.  I choose red because it’s green’s compliment so it’ll make the Hulk pop.  After that I began to block in the Hulk.  Block in is simply filling in area as shadow, half tone, and light.  This defines your basic form and is a sound structure for my next layer.  I’ve already done it but what’s the fun if I post everything at one time.

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.