T-U-R-T-L-E Power REDUX (Now 100% Joshmo Powered)

A few months ago, my friend Josh and I collaborated on a Turtles drawing that saw him giving me pencils to ink and eventually finish in color.

The original collaboration progressed something like this...

Josh's Pencils

My Inks over his pencils

My colors over my inks and his pencils

Josh has gone back into the original drawing recently and done his own coloring and as you can see, the results are very inspired.

WAYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY back in the day when the turtles were having color injected into their comics for the first time, they didn't have the four different colored headbands that we all associate with them today.

Originally, their head bands were all red.

Josh decided to flip the script a little bit coloring their bodies the color of their headbands and having all of the latter be green.

There's a lot to like here, a green April O'Neil is just... kind of... AWESOME and Raph foaming at the mouth (whether it be because he's rabid or just REALLY hungry for some pizza I'm not sure) is equally great.

Also, Josh just launched his website recently and you should DEFINITELY go check it out!!!

Flipping the Script

I had to do up this comic page for something that hopefully I'll be able to talk about more in the near future and it was quite the experience.

Working in the style was HARD. It's nowhere NEAR my area of expertise but I think the resulting piece turned out pretty well and I'm excited to hopefully continue to work in this vein.

The pencils came together pretty quickly for this but as I sat down to ink it, I realized that the way I draw naturally is not really what's up for this particular story. As this is so, I threw myself into the deep end of the pool that Jose Munoz and Sean Phillips like to swim in and tried my best to stay afloat.

This kind of inking is... Bliss. I can't even begin to talk about it, it's like carving light into your page or something. Either way, had a blast and hopefully I'll have more to share soon!

Back For the Very First Time...

The first friend that I made at MCAD, Adina Weinand, is about to embark on an AWESOME journey that will see her work on a farm in Hawaii for two months and then teach children for a year in Korea.

Over the course of the five some odd years that I've know her, Adina has been a very good friend and I felt inclined to make some art for her as a way of sending her off.

Creating this piece, I was thinking that I'd do my usual ligne-claire routine with a brush and then throw in some crazy texture on her dog before adding lighting/color in Photoshop. Instead, I decided to ante up FOR REAL and address the lighting in pure black and white.

I'm sometimes intimidated of doing the above mentioned thing because to be able to do so and to do so WELL can be very difficult.

However, I trusted myself, and things turned out very nicely.

I haven't posted up extensive process on a given piece for awhile so I'll go into that below...

Above is the first thumb-nail that I did...

This was the second thumb-nail that I did. I enlarged my original thumb-nail about 150% and drew over it and then enlarged it again and did the pencils which you see below...

These are my "ligne-claire inks". As you can see, things aren't QUITE working in a black and white sense yet. This is where I usually jump into Photoshop and start coloring.

The finished piece. Probably my most successful attempt at addressing light with just black and white yet.

Waiting Man...

Mood Music?

Alright, something more sinister is probably in order considering the artwork but JEE-ZUS! Can Bill Bruford rock a goofy time signature or what!?

Inactivity on the blog...

Hey folks!

Just popping in to apologize for the lack of new material. I'm currently enrolled in Frank Santoro's Correspondence Course and I can't show any of the work that I'm doing in there (not YET at least).

I've got one or two things un-related to the course that I hope to get up this month but it might not happen.

I'll be back to daily-ish updates in December or January though so stay tuned!!!

If you Give a kid a Pencil...

Alright, be real now folks... how many of you DIDN'T read "If you give a Moose a Muffin" or "If you give a Mouse a Cookie" when you were a kid?!

Moving right along, I've decided to post up some drawing done by the kids who I've been teaching for the last few weeks.

The above mentioned class is one in which I a group of 4th- 7th graders very basic cartooning fundamentals so they can hopefully grow up to take the world by storm!

The class has been a lot of fun so far, I've got seven girls and three boys who are all bursting with creativity.

It's really a joy to watch children work because they lack a filter. As people get older, they become more self-aware and fall into traps like trying too hard or trying to make their art look like someone else's (the latter of which I still struggle with from time to time).

With kids though, they just DRAW. They do what comes NATURALLY and what they come up with can be a lot of fun.

As yesterday was Halloween, I thought it would be appropriate to spend half of the class playing the game "Exquisite Corpse". For those who don't know, the game involves folding a piece of paper into three and passing it around so that everyone draws on part of the paper without seeing what came before. You unfold it at the end and usually have a drawing that's pretty awesome.

I've posted all of the kid's drawings below... Have at!!!