Sketch of the Day

Had House of Cards on while working on the first of 4 honey bee illustrations for a children’s book, so today’s Sketch of the Day is Kevin Spacey, and not seen (yet) are the bees I had doodled around him…

Today’s Sketch of the Day comes from a recent assignment for Sarasota Magazine. Read the article about wild animals you’ll see in Southwest Florida Here:
https://www.sarasotamagazine.com/articles/2016/4/5/11-wild-animals-you-ll-find-in-southwest-florida

And this week of Strong Will updates goes out with a bang!

Get it?

Cause there’s an explosion.

…On tonight’s episode of E.R…

Running a little behind this morning so to make up for it, here are a few panels for today’s Sketch of the Day!

Another day, another panel from Strong Will!!!

Since we got a pretty good reaction to the Strong Will updates, and I need to get workin’ on it anyway, I thought we could do some more update posts!

Again random panels (so ya can’t guess the story or anything!) of my inks over Wendell Cavalcanti’s pencils, on a story written by Michael Gordon and Bobby Nash.

Back home from my travels but a bit worse for wear, so here’s a sketch cover I did a li’l while back for today’s Sketch of the Day.

Next week, new content!!!

And here is the color final, done by jumping between MangaStudio and Photoshop. Unlike the previous posts, I don’t really have much to say as far as coloring– I’m not all that good at coloring, so it’s more like dumb luck when I get a decent result. Was pretty happy with the faces on the guys towards the bottom, but most likely I will keep picking away at this until I give up and get a real colorist like my friend Ashley Lanni to take a pass at touching it up.

Day 3- Inks! Heh, I wish it only took 3 days to get to this point. Because this project has no deadline and no timetable for release or anything, I only really get to work on this in between other projects with deadlines. It also helps when I don’t shoot myself in the foot after already having put in a lot of work…

Remember how yesterday I mentioned doing the pencils on a vellum finish board? Well, the vellum finish has its advantages for some things, and disadvantages for others. Pencil, for example, is great on a vellum board, as are pencil effects, like busting out a black color pencil to get some texture to things or a nice gradient with AD Markers (or Copics, the usual marker of choice for comic artists now, but I’ve got a set of AD Markers and by God I’m gonna use them!). Other things, like pen inking, not so much. Brush inking– Oh yeah, all day, every day, but for me pens just don’t work as well on a vellum board.

I came to this realization, which granted, I should have known beforehand, once I started inking and fighting with the paper. At that point I had two choices: Continue to fight with the board and still not get the results I want, or re-pencil the whole thing onto a smooth board.

I chose the latter.

So what you see here are my final inks over my second round of penciling. Mostly done with Microns, but also some brush and my new favorite weapon of choice, the Falcon fountain pen. I’ve known of this pen for quite some time– Brian Stelfreeze uses one, and even created brushes in IllustStudio and MangaStudio to mimic it for digital work, but could never afford one. But, seeing as how Jeff wants all the work on this project to be done on boards, it seemed a good investment.

Until tomorrow, where I share with you the color final!!!