back from the drawing board

another round of potential zartan costumes. they're based on the generic henchman uniform i made yesterday, but with a couple of alterations that let you know he is someone important.



i think i will adapt the real zartan's facepaint (or whatever it is) and hood by giving my version a skin condition that makes him sensitive to sunlight. that would explain the hood, and i can explain the eye makeup as some kind of grease paint that prevents a painful glare when he has to go outside.

general issue

today i thought a little bit about what my cobra soldiers would be wearing. i need to blend the iconic henchmen uniforms from the g.i. joe cartoon with something with a little more basis in the real world. the biggest challenge will be the helmets, as cool-looking helmets and practical ones seem to be mutually exclusive.

i started by photo referencing some SWAT team and military gear from real life, and was happy to see that some troopers really do wear faceplates.


this is the same blue i chose for zartan's pants, thinking that maybe he wouldn't be as different from the other troopers in my version as he was in g.i. joe, aside from the non-regulation hoodie.

this dark red circle was intended to be a stand-in for a cobra-like logo that i would design later, but now i'm thinking it looks pretty good.

$10 hoodie from target

i drew zartan here to practice and to get a feel for what stood out about him so i could translate the character for my own story. this first attempt is clearly not unique or memorable enough. plus, i'd really like to figure out some way to represent the face paint without just copying it.

i'm going to take a second pass at zartan sometime soon, and that version should hopefully be a happy medium between the ludicrous costume with so much personality and the real world equivalent with none.

starting with some fancy boots.

a panel!

this is not an official panel, just a practice run. i made this to test out some things i've never bothered to teach myself about real-life comic book making. most of the comic strips i've made in the past have used tiny little panels with speech bubbles worked right into the inked art, leaving only enough room for a short exclamation. i needed this experiment to figure out how much space i'd need to leave for a little bit of real dialogue.


not bad for my very first digitally lettered panel, i think.

(these characters are-based-on/are hawk and duke.)

can't think of a pun for the title

the friday meeting is dead. long live the monday meeting.

on the docket: fan art for "will power," created by vince white. vince has been getting excited again recently about drawing a will power comic book, and even showed me some page layouts. i'm showing you some doodles:

also pictured: character designs for a comic i want to write, which would be an analogue of "g.i. joe" action figures, an homage to my own childhood imagination as much as the toy or cartoon.

characters i intend to honor with analogues include:
roadblock > except fatter, and with more facial hair.
snake eyes > except he shows his face and talks too much.
hawk > except battle-scarred.


somehow i still haven't mastered army helmets.

clarification

dropped in some flat colors for this old storyboard so you could follow the action a little better. did it work?

serious injury from above

i have an idea in mind for a character with a cool scar, so here i was trying to work out how i could actually lay out the action shot that explains it. harder than it seems.


and to the right just above is how that character would have ended up as a result.

expensive notebooks

i spent some more time drawing at the coffee shop with todd last night. this time i concentrated on a few doodles of a G.I. joe character called "bazooka." maybe i just like him because the red, white and blue jersey doesn't match the green of his helmet and pants at all. throw in a comically oversized mustache... looking good, fella.


i copied this pose from a google image search result for "assault rifle." it's my favorite of the batch, so i went ahead and colored it.


i went ahead and filled this in with some flat colors because i wanted to emphasize which shapes were blood splatter and which were hewn flesh.

things that directly fed into my week long obsession with G.I. joe:
classic G.I. joe, volume 1 (rereleased comics from the 1980s)
G.I. joe: the movie (watchthe whole thing on youtube)
YoJoe.com (archives of every G.I. joe action figure ever)
G.I. joe article on wikipedia

oh, and it is also notable that this page of doodles exists not in a free notepad, but in an approximately 5'x8' tan paperback moleskine that i bought in a set from barnes & noble.

shiny

i doodled iron man this morning so i could test out a coloring idea i had, a way to solve the problem of a character holding or charging a fireball of some kind. i was trying to decide whether i should show the lines behind the hands that are creating the power, whether to color the outlines, whether to shade the surfaces and so on.


my coworker vince also gave me a little tutorial on using inner glows and gradient layers to emphasize the shine of the armor.


after all was said and done, i decided that the motion lines didn't really match then tone, and really they were redundant.

just noticed: this pose could be either flying or crouching.

thin lines

last night, i met my friend todd webb (a prolific local comic book creator & musician) at a coffee shop by my house for a doodlers' support group. i got to see and hear a lot of great stuff related to freelance comics.

we also doodled. i'd left my usual doodling implements at work, so on the way out the door i grabbed a micron pen left over from my days of obsession with drawing in ever-thinner lines, and soon it all came rolling back. it is hard to resist hatching everything to death when provided with the opportunity to draw impossibly small.

along with appearances from notepad staples like iron man and undiscernable ninja turtle #1, i also produced some todd webb fanart in the form of a space captain from the forthcoming "kites" graphic novel. i got to hold the original pages in my hands last night, and i couldn't be more excited for the final product.