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.

doodles assemble!

i've been reading a lot of avengers comics recently, so today i felt like drawing iron man. i've tackled him before, but i feel like i've come a long way since then, so i referenced this on frank cho's work on "mighty avengers." and of course, nobody can stop drawing their favorite characters with skrull chins ever since "secret invasion" starting coming out. i also threw in a dash of wonder man, to taste.


i hadn't realized just how little yellow iron man has in his costume these days.

i wanted to pit iron man against a hulked-out skrull in iron man guise, but i went with purple (classic skrull) so it wouldn't be so boring to color.