Peeking Before X-Mas!

Here's a little sneak peek at the X-Mas Card I'm getting around to doing this year. I really only do them if I have an idea that I like, so they're few and far between (this being the 2nd :P). Again, it's the PPG, darn them, they keep dragging me back... XD I suppose next year I could just do a sexy babe in a Santa suit... :/

The full size of the original art is 11x17, heh almost like doing covers again. My monitor for Photoshop is not calibrated correctly so the reds and some of the other colors aren't coming out as vibrant as when I'm looking at it in PS. Not sure how to correct that or if I'll have problems when it comes to printing them. The inside of the card will be quite wordy and I'm not sure I'll have enough gumption to have a little beaten up Mojo in there... We'll See...

[edit] Weird, now that I look at it online, the colors are closer to what they are in PS... darnit.

A little Inspiration

Farting around a couple weeks ago and inspired a bit by Michael Ryan's Rogue he drew for me at San Diego, I put together this little 9x12 of Ms. Marvel. Also inspired/referenced from my 4chan/Girls folder (putting the pron to good use...finally :P) Must...Do...More...

but that pesky new Blu-Ray Player and Star Trek sets call to me... XD

Tragedy at Fort Hood, TX

My condolences and best wishes to the fallen, wounded, and their families at the recent attack/shooting spree at Fort Hood, in Killeen, TX. Only this summer were my brother Jeff and I were invited there for Animix. Though it was hotter than heck there, the people I met made it one fun convention to be at.

May your grief and mourning be transformed into Justice.

Fallcon 2009

Last convention of the year is done for me, Fallcon in Minneapolis, MN. As usual, the promoters and staff treated us like Kings, did some sketching for them, and gabbed over wine and beer after a great steak dinner that they put on for all the guests and volunteers. Big hardy thanks to them for having us out for another year. Here are some sketches done for the con staff (2nd was actually my only full commission I had for the con)...

The weakened economy had some effect as I didn't have that many commissions to do (guess I might have to rollback prices. :P). But I was able to get some prelim sketches done for an upcoming project, more later if the client wants it known before it's done.

Fantastic Gene Ha and I traded sketches; I drew up one of his friend's RPG characters, and I got another Rogue for my collection. I mentioned to Gene that I like the short hair on Rogue and that for some reason, artists like to put her hood up, covering it. Well, looks like Gene threw in a little joke by having Rogue tauntingly playing with her hood. Good Job, Gene! :)

Since sketch commishs were slow, it opened up the possibilities to sketch some interesting things, this being a quicksketch for a guy who had a stack of Jack Kirby Monsters, and he would get other artists to do their rendition. I like drawing rocks, and have always been fascinated by Easter Island so The Stone Men (of Easter Island) was a natural for me. The girl was no extra charge. :P I also drew up a marker piece for the charity auction, Samurai Jack and Aku of course since it's what I'm currently working on. When I was coloring it I was noticing that something looked odd about Aku, then it dawned on me after a bit that I forgot his beard! Luckily, I wasn't far enough that I couldn't add it in. Back at home I noticed that I left the beard off of Aku again in the approved pages for the SJ story I'm working on. Those were also caught in time. :P

Bewbs!

A little something to put on a T-Shirt for some charity event a friend is helping out with. I assume it's for breast cancer.

Bump! I need more in mah Post Counts. :P

Have some Space Girl. :P

Yay! New Post! More Shameless Plugs!

Yeah, I dropped off the face of the Earth again, wasting more time and procrastinatingly working on an 8-Pager Samurai Jack story that's just waiting for Pencil Approvals now. I am finally on Facebook, but I'm not sure how to make a Fan account to keep my personal friends and friendly fans separate.

I did put up some pics from this year's San Diego Convention there, though I thought I took some better and more pics, but I guess that's all I have. Enjoy what you can. Hopefully you can see them and they're not blocked. :)

LaJolla, CA
San Diego Comic Con
Sketches from SDCC

On Shameless Plug front, A couple of World of Warcraft Trades came out; Book 2 Hardcover which compiles issues #8-14. Book 1 is now in a Softcover TP with a shiny new cover.

Also out is the Cartoon Network Action Pack #41 which has my Samurai Jack "Sanderella" 6-Pager. It was rather wordy with all the narration they had in there, but glad to see they worked it all in around my artwork. ;)

And now, have some more doodles of Lady Scorpia.

Animix 2009: Followup (Non-Gripey)

Alrighty, now that I have SDCC out of the way, time to catch up on some good thing out of Texas from Animix: Costumes! Gotta give ppl credit for sticking to their guns in the heat. Seems like a lot of the fans and con staff in Killeen, TX knew each other beforehand or from last year, so the whole convention feel was rather friendly. Enjoy the Cosplay pics!

But surely one of the weirdest juxtapositions I've seen at a con takes the prize! :)



Wrap up from SDCC next time. Or maybe something of a Travelogue...

AniMix 2009--All Melty! (sorry, griping post)

Well, I guess the pic above says it all for this little posting on AniMix. It was HOT! Yes, yes, Texas is hot, and I shouldn't be griping since I'm in an Air Conditioned hallway for our Artist Alley space. That would be true if the AA was AC'd. Supposedly, the AC crapped out on the convention again like it did last year for AniMix's first run. I think the hotel was just too cheap to turn on the AC in the pubic areas, meeting rooms, and hotel hallways, but the bathroom on the first floor was AC'd, go figure. :/

It didn't help matters that many artists, including myself, were positioned in front of huge windows with the sun beating down on their backs. Fortunately, the ConStaff with experience from last year stapled up some bedsheets to diffuse the magnifying effect of the glass. A giant fan was brought in to help, but that was usurped many a time by the Copic marker guy. It came down to getting a fan from the local Wal-Mart to provide a breeze, mind you, a hot breeze. :P I didn't have a thermometer, but I would have to say it was 90 or above in there. Nice and melty.

This is my complaint post ATM, since I'm in a grumpy mood, seeing as our flight out to Dallas was delayed, and we had to reposition ourselves to make it back to Chicago last night, we had to switch to United. Unfortunately our checked luggage didn't switch and is at the airport. They're supposed to be sending it out, but I'll have to keep on that to make sure they do. Gotta repack for the flight to SDCC tomorrow. :P But yes, this is the Griping Post. Some good did come of it, a good beer and steak Saturday night, some good company, found some figures I was looking for, and some nice looking ppl cosplaying. Thanks goes out to Keita for having us out, and hopefully it was a success enough that they can move to a better hotel for the next time.

BTW, the Yoko pic was done for their Auction, hopefully they'll be setting it up on eBay to sell some point in the future, so be generous. ;-)

Whachu Talkin' Bout Willis?!?

I shall always remember its name as The Sears Tower!!! Nuff Said!
Enjoy an old ad piece I did for college... Ah... Good Times... :)

Back to Back Cons!

Tomorrow Jeff and I will be heading out to the hot town of Killeen, TX for Animix, an anime convention near Fort Hood. It'll be our first time out there so all my stuff will be new to them! :P

San Diego will be the week after and we'll be shopping around on Preview Night, but will be at our Artist Alley spaces the rest of the time. Jeff and I are at spots EE-07 and EE-08, which might be the same spots we had last year. Nice to have some continuity.

We're relegated to 1/2 a table each again, so I'll probably be leaving the comic book back issues at home, but will have my Original Art, same ol' prints, and will do Sketch Commissions (no color cept for CN stuff.) New for this year is a collection of nekkid Faye Valentines out of my sketchbooks, lovingly laid out in a 40 page book appropriately titled "FayeSketches."

I was hoping to work up some new prints, but procrastinated too long and didn't really get anything down. I did finish an idea for my Joker/Harley print, but will probably just sell off the original. Some things don't work for me, and I'll probably do another later on.

Catfight!

San Diego is coming up and I'm trying to catch up on stuff for it. I gots nuthin' ready and I'm getting some color commissions out of the way. This one I just finished up featuring Ivy Valentine (Soul Calibur) and Red Monika (Battle Chasers) fighting. I'd show the rest, but it's NSFW. XD But I really liked how the faces and expressions turned out so I thought I'd share.

Samurai Jack: Sanderella

I finished inking my 4 page Samurai Jack story based on Cinderella. Cept that Jack and The Scotsman are the Stepsisters in the story. I'd post 2 pages, but then that would be Half the story. As it is, the script has tons of narration in it, I hope I left enough room for the letterer to fit it all in. :)

I have a Jack inventory story to do (inventory meaning it's not really scheduled yet, maybe won't even be printed sometimes), but I also got to start gearing up for San Diego. We'll see if I get anything done for that... I hope so, but those pesky video games get in the way... *sigh* sometimes it's just damn inconvenient to have a Quad Core CPU sitting right behind you... ;P

Baby and Babe

Enjoy the baby pic! Made for a friend's Blues Band (Baby Blues, I think). It'll go on a shirt or whatever else he wants to do with it. :P

And once again I have to get into the swing of drawing girls again, so might as well draw em nekkid. Censored for the kiddies, though I bet if you squint really hard you could imagine you see something...

Shameless Plug #13 &14

A couple of titles that I worked on came out in the last few weeks. One is my last issue of World of Warcraft (#19) that I inked another 14 pages on. The other is Cartoon Network Action Pack, which has the long strung out Samurai Jack 8 Pager entitled "The Portal." It may seem longer than it is, maybe only because practically each page is separated by an ad of some sort. But that's the way the biz goes, and I have to thank Sean Ryan, my new editor for using my full name. :) Also, for not covering up my Firefly homage on Page 2 ^_^.

Currently I finished up the pencils for another Samurai Jack 4 pager and waiting for approvals to ink that. I normally don't have any problem with approvals and they rarely have me change things, but maybe they may have some question as to some of Jack's...uh...DRESSES! :3

Time's Flying By! Noooes!!!!1!!

I've been catching up on some stuff lingering around my desk, a commish leftover from Acen that I finally got around to, Utena and Anthy from the anime Utena. Enjoy!

Thinking about my Bunny Sketchbook I wanted to get out for SDCC, but I probably won't be able to pull it off in time, so maybe I'll have to come up with some prints. Since it's PPG's 10th anniversary, I guess I can put together some new ones (the old ones are ooooold. :P) Maybe get a Yoko print done. And maybe a banner, skip bringing comics, cause we only get half a table now. :(

Other than that, still mulling over my pencils for my latest Samurai Jack 4 pager. He's not really in it that much, plus him and The Scotsman are in drag. It'll make sense once you get the context :P

Terminator: Salvation (Return of the Post Apocalyptic Action Flick)

I have to say that out of the first three Summer Blockbuster Films of 2009 I've seen, this one I've come away with as the most satisfying so far.

The problem I had with Wolverine was an overtly convoluted plot for an action flick with huge leaps of logic concerning certain effects when you shoot shoot a guy with adamantium bullets. Yes, Wolverine has a complicated backstory, but that film did nothing to make sense of it, just gave it all to us to, I assume, satisfy every fan who liked a given "origin."

Star Trek, for me, didn't feel like the Star Trek Universe. I accept that ST needed to be rebooted, but essentially to throw away 40 years of continuity, I don't accept. The new ST Movies goes on for a new mainstream audience, but it becomes a shallow bit of digital puffery, the characters shadows of their former selves. The only thing nostalgic for me in this film was Pike's Admiral's uniform remincent of Kirk's from ST:TMP.

So why does Terminator: Salvation work for me? Does it have a perfect story? Hell no! It's an action flick! So why do I let it slide when I rant on ST2009? Because it hits that Nostalgic spot. It's a sort of Prequel, but it feels like it's set in the Terminator Universe. We get a longer look into the post-apocalyptic world that we've only seen glimpses of in the first 2 Terminator films. Growing up with films like The Mad Max series, and other direct-to-video B films like Defcon-4, it tugs at the Nostalgia Strings in my brain. I think McG (the director) was probably paying homage, or maybe ripping off those films, but he did it well and wrapped it up in a pretty package.

So I like the setting, check. What also worked for me? The journey Marcus takes, finding Kyle Reese, and I actually liked the support (literally) role the little girl, Star, played. Adorablely cute in her scenes. There was an obvious hostage plot thread they could have gone down ala Newt(Aliens), but I'm glad they didn't do it with her. It's still in there, and that's probably when you have to turn off your brain. :/

Christian Bale as John Conner? I wonder if Bale's gonna be typecast as the mumbling/gravel voice action guy forever more? I don't remember if he spoke this way in Equilibrium or The Prestige, but I guess he's just stuck in his Batman Groove. I do like that we get to see a bit more of John Connor's history that leads up to the Iconic Leader seen at the beginning of T2. If this is going to be a new Trilogy or if they make another one, I hope they'll expand his character from just relying on his Prophecy/Messiah complex, and actually flesh him out as a brilliant tactician. Because if all that he is, the guy following his mama's advice/knowledge about the future, Humanity's a lost cause.

The action scenes were easier to follow than the ones in ST and Wolverine, and much cooler cause it's got Giant Robot Killing Machines. :) Great Cameo to tie it too it's roots, too.

There are several Silence/Bam! moments to make me jump out of my seat, and they were mostly effective without having me question them; unlike the Stealth Subway Train in Underworld (I still have to finish watching that film). The plot twist when revealed throws everything that happened in the first 2/3s of the movie into a big plot convienence hole, and that'd be my biggest gripe about the film. But what ST2009 couldn't overcome for me, T:S does by giving me some devastated futuristic landscapes and Humanity driven to extinction and surviving like rats ala Road Warrior. Ahh... Good Times... :)

Star Dreck 2009 (Purdy much Spoiler Free but Ranty)

The movie's been bubbling around in my brain since I saw it Monday with Hen Da Ne! guys Andrew and Chris at the Lincolnshire Theater (didn't see it in IMAX due to some unforeseen circumstances), and I gotta say I'm really not angry or rabid at the new film, just kinda Disappointed.

I had some preconceived ideas about what I was going to see, being a JJ Abrams production and all, and it's pretty much what I expected. I know it's getting 99.9% on Rotten Tomatoes, and everyone is getting wet over the movie, but I really don't see how this is a GREAT movie. It's not even a Good movie from a Story/Character standpoint. Yes, it's got great Special Effects (90% of the costs went to extra Lens Flares), but that's really a given in this day and age. Well, Wolverine is an exception with some pretty awful prosetetics on the Blob's neck and some funky de-aging CG on the actor in the end. But since we got nice pretty visuals, can we not expect to have the same for characters and plot?

Without those 2 things, the very foundation of a movie, it's like taking a bite out of a nice juicy apple, only to find a worm in it. Yeah, there may still be good parts that haven't been wormtouched, but the experience as a whole is ruined. Would you take a second bite?

There used to be Summer Blockbusters that had great characters and nice flowing plots: Jaws, Close Encounters, Raiders, OT Star Wars, The Mummy, The Incredibles, The Hulk. But all we get are a bunch of Ultraviolets; a string of action sequences that they try to weave a plot into. If that's all you expect from a film, good for you I guess. But when the filmmakers have characters doing things that wouldn't be in character, or meet other characters just for plot convienence, it's a bad thing. Worse if it rips you out of the movie to think to yourself "WTF?? That's just really crappy writing" And that happened a bunch of times in Star Trek, one really big time on Delta Vega.

I'm not expecting to have a perfect film that has no plot holes, or ties up every loose end, but if there are good memorable characters, and I can quote lines of dialogue, It works for me. (the only bad quote I use is "Meesa" from Jar Jar if I want to play Stupid in chat. :P)

So to sum up, Star Trek 2009 didn't float my boat. Very showy (a given), but filled with lots of plot convienences, really no character, no chance for the hero and audience to breath and reflect (even Die Hard and ST:TWOK did that), and No Disintegrations! (c wut i did thar?) :P

Well, there was one disintegration... I realize I didn't talk about the movie much at all, I'll have to see if this thing can do invisotext...

Decompressing from Anime Central 2009

Yo! Finally getting around to putting up the pics and sketches from Acen in Rosemont this last weekend. Had a blast, got alot of multiple character/color commissions which can take alot of time. That means I can't get to as many ppl who would want one. Fortunately (or unfortunately for me) I didn't have to turn away too many ppl since my list was filled by early Saturday. I still have a couple to finish up at home, but it worked out well. I was planning on getting them done Saturday night in the Guest Green Room, but I got distracted by Rock Band. Yes, yes, woe is me. :P So here we got a couple of CoH characters (always fun to do), a swimwear ad featuring Christy, Etna, and Matoko, lastly a PPG sketch featuring MojoBubbles from Los Dos Mojos (might make a good print...hmm). I did do some other sketches, but they're NSFW.

Speaking of PPG, I was amazed at seeing not one set of PPG cosplayers but at least 4 different groups! And one of them a Him (always creepy ;P ). Maybe it's because PPG is back on Boomerang, CN's premium cartoon channel. Also suprising is that I sold more PPG prints and comics at this show than I have in a long time. Perhaps it's because ppl who used to watch the show now have some disposible income of their own and have a bit of nostalgia tugging at the pursestrings, it's welcome nevertheless. Guess I gotta make some new PPG prints. :p

Of course there were some other nice costumes, Elektra and Jessica Rabbit were some, along with a very sexy Haruhi Bunny, and alot of Gurren Lagaan cosplayers (these 3 just happened to be friends with cousin Stephanie attending her first con, ah start the corruption now. :P) Ryan Zanfei of her very own Tasty Peach Studios showed off her loli side and made a killing in Artist Alley selling all sorts of extremely cute prints and stickers. Nice design sense, she'll go far.

All in all, had alot of fun. Bought more than I should have, guess I'll have to hold off on that dining room table I wanna get. But at least I have another couple figures to decorate my studio and collect tons of dust, and I've increased my book collection by a little bit more. :) I did see Star Trek on Monday, I'll have to blog/gripe about that in another post, I'll just say for now that it isn't my Star Trek.

Freee! (and Shameless Plug #12)

Yay! Finally finished off a Samurai Jack story that I've been putting off for a couple months due to one distraction after another. It was very unprofessional of me, and I should straighten out my priorities. I think it did turn out well enough though and the inks were done in 4 days.

Hopefully I can get more work from DC. More inking work on WoW has dried up though because of a change in art direction, doing the Pencils to Painted Color route. Hope they pull it off though, I'm naturally not a big fan of the style. ;P Russell Lissau, another Chicago Local writing for DC says he's got a couple Batman: Brave and Bold stories in line, one with The Question which peaked my interest. We'll see what goes on with that. I'll most likely hang with him next week at Acen.

What? Acen? Anime Central?? Yes, I finally got word from their Chairperson that Jeff and I do have tables for the Exhibit Hall, so we'll be able to meet peeps and do some sketching. Jeff says though that he'll be dropping down from Madison on Saturday and Sunday. Raven is probably taking them out to see Star Trek.

And for peeps hitting the comic shop, World of Warcraft #18 came out a couple weeks ago. I inked the first 14 pages out of that.