I’ve spent a lot of time working on commissions these past few weeks which doesn’t leave me a lot of time to work on my personal stuff (which is all I want to do in my life really) but I’ve managed to squeeze in a few hours over many days to knock this baby out.

I blurred the city in the background too much and past a point of no return but I completed my two goals which were to do a big tech piece and to play around with lens flares. I don’t know how I’ll feel about all the lighting stuff three months from now but hey, I wanted to give it a shot.

Back to commissions!

Oftentimes, I’ll start working on something and then I’ll force myself to change my original concept to suit the guidelines of, I dunno, whatever the hell. Case in point, I started doing this Morrigan piece and then I heard of a contest where you had to zombify a fighting game character and I used the Morrigan I had started to enter. What I ended up with was a shitty Morrigan and a shitty zombie. I’ve gotten better at not doing that sort of thing thankfully.

Fast forward to now. I just finished part of a week long, personal project (will post stuff soon enough) and needed something mindless to work on before I tackled some pending commissions. I remembered this piece and my desire to make it justice. I’ve also been wanting to experiment with the cuts and grads style of shading that is so prevalent in Western comics in an effort to add another move to my coloring repertoire. I hate to revisit old work but I decided to make an exception for this.

Also, I have a much more ambitious Darkstalkers piece in mind but it’ll be a while before I start working on it. Got some other projects to tackle first.

So I was gonna do Mario vs. Jack Cayman (from Mad World) before I worked on Mario vs. Crono. I was gonna do it digitally but the crappy composition I had and the crappy line art that I started forced me to pause and rethink. I scrapped what I had done, chose to work on it with pencil and ink (as I usually do), but I was exhausted with it so I decided to shelve it for a later time.

Around that time, a commenter suggested Slender Man. I was vaguely familiar with the character and, coincidentally, Giant Bomb was doing a Quick Look (which I watch pretty consistently) that day about Slender: The Arrival. Soon after I started watching it, I was sold on Mario vs. Slender Man and quickly came up with a composition to work with. These fights are usually very colorful so I wanted to have a lot of black this time, just as the game does. Once I started getting into it, I became worried that I had a layout that was too similar to Mario vs. The Spy (and Mario vs. The Pyro as well but less so). I tried to change the angle a bit and the mood is obviously different but I still think it’s perhaps too close for comfort to those pieces.

I have a couple of unwritten rules for these fights: 1) no Nintendo characters (which I’m actually breaking soon enough) and 2) original video games character only. Slender Man originated as a meme so I guess I’ve broken rule number 2 here. I’m OK with that I guess, just don’t expect to do it again anytime soon.

It feels so pointless and futile at times to write these posts when a creator I admire passes away but it’s the only way I can think of for me to commemorate and pay tribute to their work.

Carmine Infantino was a true legend and an unquestionable pillar of the Silver Age. His contributions to comics are known far and wide but it was his work on The Flash that is dearest and most enduring to me. It was the seeds that he, along with Robert Kanigher and editor Julie Schwartz, planted in Showcase #4 that led to The Flash being, unquestionably, my favorite superhero. I have a soft, warm and fuzzy spot for every single one of the colorful Rogues he created and Barry’s suit is, to this day, absolutely flawless. No more proof is needed of this other than the fact that it’s remained largely unchanged even to this day.

In a time when superheroes where no longer “in,” Barry Allen came like a bullet and reignited the genre for decades to come. Showcase #4 didn’t just bring back The Flash, it brought back superhero comics. I never got to meet Carmine Infantino but, if I did, I would’ve only said “thank you.”

His work will live on forever in the hearts of countless fans, old and new.

I’ve been tweaking bits and pieces of this super awesome website some more. I added a new plugin to the gallery which, though it loads everything in bulk, makes it much easier to browse through images. The image views don’t count as single hits on the site which will dramatically decrease the daily views count but hey, I’ll gladly trade that in favor of a better user experience.

Sketchbook-wise, things are coming along well. I’m still months behind relative to how long I’ve taken to finish my earlier sketchbooks but I also noticed that the pages in this particular sketchbook are much more loaded. I’m really going out of my way to fill in as much of the page as I can. That’s a good thing, I think, and a decent excuse for my lateness.

In other news, it’s comic con time here in Barcelona soon and I have some stuff to prep before then. I never really have as much time as I want.

Go here for all the scans (in the super improved gallery view) so far.

I drew something similar to this in my sketchbook a few days back and I kinda wanted to give the idea more room. That didn’t happen and this basically turned into an excuse to try out a bunch of different, and not necessarily good looking, stuff. Can’t say I love it but there it is.

Have a couple more ambitious things planned for later.

I’ve wanted to do something like this (woman in skimpy outfit with some kind of demon nearby) for a while and, a couple of months back, I actually got as far as clean line art for a similar piece but it just wasn’t working for me and I scrapped it. Fast forward to a couple of days ago and, in my indecisiveness when it comes to what to draw next, I decided to revisit the concept and give it another shot.

The end result is what you see above which is completely different on nearly every level (monster design, lady design, layout, style, etc.) to that initial drawing from a few months back but, obviously, this time I liked it enough to take it to completion.

Kratos is easily one of my most requested characters so I’m glad to finally get him off the table. Just in time for Ascension too.

This took a while, not just because the background needed the time but also because there was a lot going on with the characters themselves and I needed to be careful not to color/shade something incorrectly. I’ve only played the first and third God of War games and, out of the two, the most memorable moment was probably the fight with Cronos so that was my starting point. I fidgeted a ton with adjustment layers to give a better impression of depth and scale and I’m still not sure if I should have gone further. I think that, all things considered, this is one of my better ones.

Finally, I’d like to thank nathradas from deviantART for his great blood splatter brushes that were used in this piece.

Look at all the Mario fights here.

I redesigned Wonder Woman a long time ago (not my favorite piece honestly) so when Project: Rooftop asked for Fan-Art Friday submissions of the warrior Amazon, I wasn’t sure whether to go for the classic costume or to try my hand once again at a completely new one. Obviously, I went with the latter.

I’m a big fan of warrior Diana, of Gail Simone’s Wonder Woman, the one that takes down armies without breaking a sweat and that’s what I wanted to portray. I tried to have a lot of the elements of the original costume present in one way or another (the “W” bra is a must) while adding a good amount of protection. It’s not a super original costume but I think it’s definitely a proper Wonder Woman costume which is what I was going for. The design came together pretty quickly, as did the actual piece.

Also, I’m on vacation so I’ll be drawing a fuckton.

Good times.

I usually take about a year to fill out one of my sketchbooks. My current sketchbook was started in December of 2011 and, as of right now, there are still some 20 pages that need to be filled. At first I thought that I was drawing less (which was worrying) but I think it’s actually because I’m drawing a lot more directly on my tablet now compared to previous years. Which is good I suppose, because I’m trying out loads of different things in Photoshop and stuff.

Still, I don’t think I’ll ever leave the good ol’ pencil.

Go here for all the scans so far.