Superboy

How do you feel about your old art? Are you embarrassed? Ashamed?  Does it hold up over time?  Sometimes I am very impressed with myself -- seeing artwork from decades ago that still shows skill and technique.  Surprised that the artwork is that good.  I know more now and have additional tool sets to work with, but I am still impressed by that young artist.
Originally drawn in 1994, these were samples that were done at size -- as a kid I didn't know that comicbooks were drawn larger than the print version, so I learned to draw in really fine detail.  When they come out with the Marvel Tryout book, that's when I learned that comics were drawn larger.  I can remember it almost like yesterday.  We used to have a comics and comics on the K street Mall here in Sacramento -- K street was an open air mall in downtown. I would occasionally take a break from my studies and take the bus downtown.  They sold old comicbooks, but they used to stamp them with their store address on the first page -- desecraters!  I couldn't afford the Marvel Try out book, but I learned that the art was drawn at the large size -- I remember thinking "What do they do with all that space?"  So this was a return to my roots sort of thing.  Doing artwork at the original training size for me.  Awesome experience!

Time keeps on slipping into the future: Legion Of Superheroes

I used to look at other's blogs and wonder how they could take so much time between posts.  Eventhough I'm drawing I'm not taking hte time to scan, and post. To be completely honest, I've been asleep at the wheel.  I could have been posting before, but I didn't make time.  I will make a honest effort to update. I've been doing art unrelated to pages, not sure how impressed people would be with that type of process stuff, but I will post several things.  As for now, I'm getting back on the horse --drawing sequential pages.

I tried to post this material before, some of it was very experimental. The storytelling is fairly straight forward, but the experimental part is in the artwork, I tried different textures -- I used funky 70's poster art inspired designs for the spaceship, which I think the comicbook editors I submit sample artwork to didn't understand, sometimes I forget that editors are not all artists so they don't understand that there is a difference between technique and style.  I did a tutorial at my art group on design -- with this work in mind.  In comics in the fifties, every spaceship look like a rocket or a saucer.  Star Trek, changed that so for most of the 70's spaceships were derivative of that, Star Wars changed the dynamic again in the late 70's, so on and so forth.  And I won't talk about Iron Wolf with wooden Galleons in space, actually I will talk about Iron Wolf.  In design, we need to be close to derivative.  In other words, until the cultural dynamic changes, we need to meet the expectation of what a a space ship looks like.  So my spaceship control boards were these funky designs and because they did not fit the cultural dynamic, I think potential employers were not desirous of seeing more.  I based the character on hair bands of the 80's who were rebellious carryovers of the rock bands of the 70's -- Sunboy is Bon Jovi, Cosmicboy is Van Halen, and Tyroc has an afro.