Busy Bee

So the last few months have been thankfully very busy for me.  I have been working on various odds and ends.   However for this post I wanted to show off some color samples I whipped up for a potential project.

I in a bit of a lurch and was looking for more consistent work. So I thought I would put a portfolio together to try and get comic book coloring work.   The specific opportunity I was trying to chase fell through, and eventually more work came my way and kept me busy.  But I had a lot of fun in during this time by just working on my chops.

During the middle of the summer I didn’t have a lot of projects going on so I focused on my own paintings( which I have been updating when finished to the main site).  It is nice to have to freedom to just play around sometimes, and as I am freelancing it becomes important to stay fresh and practiced.   Also a lot of my coloring recently has a warm nostalgic storybook quality palette.  So it was a good opportunity to try and color outside of my comfort zones.

This first image however is well within my comfort zone.

( A cheap excuse to draw a girl in her underwear)

I painted this on this crazy material called Aquaboard.  It is a hard Masonite board with a gesso type surface on it that can absorb Watercolor.   I saw it in the art store and wanted to experiment with it.  So I pulled out an old ink drawing I did almost two years ago and used that as the starting off point.  It is interesting stuff to work with. The line quality suffers a little, but I was surprised how close this felt to painting on paper. plus it accepts stain effects nicely.

(The Previous drawing used for the recent color test)

It is interesting working on a drawing I did a few years back.  I have grown as an artist since then. So much so that I felt I had to completely redraw certain parts of this, like the face and hands.   The whole time I kept thinking “why did I draw her face that way”.  But back then I thought this was one of the best drawings i had made to date, or at least one of the sexiest.  To make this stand on it’s own I also added other fun bits like the mask which I left out in the original.

Below is a splash page from a comic my Brother Dave and I have been kicking around for a few years.   He got another artist involved to pencil the thing, because I have always been too busy to devote time to it.   But I designed all the characters and since I was setting up stuff for potential comic work i decided to color up on of the pages.

The pencil’s were done by fellow artist Brad Lacke.  I inked this splash page and colored it.  After trying desperately to be poignant throughout the summer it is really cool working on a drawing where a ninja tries to skewer a dinosaur.

Finally I have this western themed color piece.   Done just for the hell of it.

I never draw dead guys, or girls in their underwear.   That should really change…I think I am missing a prime demographic with all my whimsical trees and monsters stuff.

My next series is going to be all dead guys next to cute girls in their underpants.   I will make a million dollars and retire on my own island.

I will post some more color sample in the next few posts, as this blog is getting a little big.

Till then,

Vincent