Pin-Up: L'Exposition

I was invited to contribute a piece to a gallery exhibit of artwork, curated by the marvelous Maly Siri, celebrating vintage pin-up and burlesque, at La Gallery in Paris and Montreal!  If you are in Paris, you should go check out the exhibit, it's got some really marvelous pieces by some super talented artists.

Here is mine (colour adjusted in Photoshop):

I am told that the piece has sold already!

Rain Dog

A quick portrait of Tom Waits done as a gift...

Zudatanna

This was a page I did a while back as part of a pitch to do original webcomics featuring DC superhero characters on DC's Zuda site. I and a handful of other webcomics creators were approached and given free reign to come up with a short pitch featuring whatever DC character we wanted, continuity-free. After a lot of thought I settled on Zatanna, in a kind of Buffy/Twilight-style story aimed at teen girls.

Sadly, the pitch never gained any traction and Zuda has since been shut down, but maybe this might pop up again somewhere in the future. I think it would have been fun to write.

UPDATE: Ramon Perez has posted his Mr. Miracle and Big Barda pitch page over on his blog.

Nikolai Orelov

Here's Nikolai Orelov, the new Assassin that Karl Kerschl and I have created for our upcoming Assassin's Creed comic series...



More info here and here and here!

Raspberry Beret

Batwoman

Here's a piece I did for fun. I love this costume.

Bat Ballou

A couple of more prep sketches from the Wild West issue of The Return of Bruce Wayne:

The Good, The Bat, and The Ugly

It was formally announced today that I'm one of the artists on board for DC's summer mega-event The Return of Bruce Wayne, which tells the story of how Batman fights his way back through the timestream to the present after being banished to the dawn of time. Each issue is set in a different time period with a "historical" version of Batman. I'm drawing the "Cowboy Batman" issue. The costume was designed by Andy Kubert, but here's an early sketch of mine, working out how to draw the character.

Batman Vs Batman - FIGHT!

Here's the big Bat-on-Bat fight scene from Batman & Robin #8, presented in the original black and white.

When laying out this scene I watched a bunch of vintage martial arts movies to get the choreography to look convincing. Hope it worked...

Batman & Robin #7 - More Layouts

Here's a few more pages of digital layouts from issue 7 of Batman and Robin.







I got a little carried away drawing Batwoman here, this was just the layout stage!



Ah, this is the page with the infamous lettering error which confounded so many people and made them think it was one of Grant's more experimental works. As you can see, the page was laid out with the characters oriented consistently from left to right, but after I'd completed the final artwork I was asked to reverse panel 3 because the dialogue (which is written after the art is completed) required Batwoman to be on the left. I did make the change but somewhere along the way the original art file was used by mistake, and thousands of readers scratched their head in puzzlement.






Note the difference in the final page - this was my first attempt at it and felt that the hand exploding from the pit didn't have the right dramatic effect with the characters standing in the background. However there was dialogue that needed to be on this page, and so the compromise for the final was to split it into two panels. I don't quite think it works as well as I'd wanted but that's how it goes sometimes...

Batman & Robin #7 - Layouts

Hey everyone, here's a few pages of my rough layout drawings from issue 7 of Batman & Robin. As I've shown in previous posts, I draw these digitally using a Wacom Cintiq tablet and Manga Studio, then print them out in blue on the artboard and then draw the finals directly in ink. These are actually some of the tighter layouts, as the deadline looms (and I start to hit my stride) they get very sketchy indeed.




(The Squire has a different bike here, it wasn't until after I'd sketched these out that Grant decided it was to have the horse's head on the front.)




(Note some of the differences between the layouts and the final printed artwork in the traffic scene. This was my first attempt at it, and I did some revisions to punch it up for the final.)





Stay tuned, I'll be posting more soon, and some black-and-white final pages also!

Heads

Some late-night practice drawing while watching a movie, trying to draw interesting character types.

Eurotour 2009 - iPhone Paintings

To avoid weighing myself down with too much stuff I didn't bring a sketchbook along with me on the trip, but I did try to do some quick paintings on my iPhone with the Brushes app. Here are some of the better ones. They're not terribly complicated, mostly they were quick sketches of things I had in front of me when sitting down for an extended period of time, but I like that they immediately conjure up very vivid memories of the exact time and place where I did them.

Eurotour 2009 - Sketches!

I'm back from my big European tour with my friends Karl Kerschl and Ramón Pérez! I'll post some photos from the trip shortly but for now, here are a few of the sketches I did for people at the various festivals and comic shop events:

(Yes, they are all quite similar headshots, but these were free and so I was doing them quickly)