WOW! What an great week for comics!  Not a ton of stuff came out, but what did was pretty outstanding.  It was a big week again for indy/creator owned books.  Over half of my stack were books from Image or Dark Horse. Not to diminish what came out from Marvel this week.  All around, it was a good week to be a nerd.







NONPLAYER  #1

B.P.R.D.: THE DEAD REMEMBERED  #1

AVENGERS: THE CHILDREN'S CRUSADE  #5

MARVEL SUPERHERO SQUAD ONLINE: HERO UP!  #1  (for the boy)

WITCHFINDER: LOST AND GONE FOREVER  #3

ULTIMATE CAPTAIN AMERICA  #4

BLUE ESTATE  #1

SOLOMON KANE  #1

OZMA OF OZ  #5

GREEN WAKE  #1

FEAR ITSELF  #1







 

I haven't had the chance to read much from this week's stack, but I really wanted to make mention of two books that I have read and absolutely loved-- NONPLAYER and FEAR ITSELF.

Sometime last year I  began to hear murmurings about this new book that was in the works called Nonplayer by a guy called Nate Simpson.  A few preview images and process pieces showed up on the net and suddenly everyone was talking about it.  They were beautiful.  Simpsons work, and I really hate to even diminish it with this sort of thing, feels kind of like this beautiful hybrid of Moebius, Josh Middleton, Seth Fisher, and Geoff Darrow.  His work is absolutely gorgeous and insanely detailed.  It's the sort of thing you want to go back to again and again.  I loved the first issue. My ONLY concern with Nonplayer is just that I hope Simpson can keep the book coming out fairly regularly.  I'm torn because I really don't want him to compromise such amazing artistic vision, but I also don't want to have to wait overly long for the next issue.  As much as I love having this out in single issue form, I would have gladly waited three years for the graphic novel.  That said, I really don't want to come off as pessimistic.  I'm sure there's a plan for the book.  And no matter what I'll be eagerly awaiting the next issue.

I'm not an event guy.  They just happen too damned often and the quickest way for me to start culling books is to make it a part of some crazy event.  There are exceptions.  Yes, I'm fully aware that I'm currently drawing an event book.  I really feel like Artifacts is an exception to the event rule.  Based on the first issue, I'm really thinking Fear Itself might be another.  I went in to it with my reservations.  But that's just because of my silly little event phobia.  The book is in good hands.  Great ones, in fact.  Matt Fraction, who I met back in his Kansas City livin' days, is just a damned good writer.  I've loved just about everything the guy has written-- The Last of the Independents, Casanova (good god how I love Casanova), into his Marvel stuff like Iron Man and Thor.  In fact, with the exception of Warren Ellis, Fraction is one of the only guys that can keep me buying Iron Man and really loving the book.  Tony Stark is EXACTLY the kind of character Matt was made to write-- smart, charming, and a bit of a shit.  And then there's Stuart Immonen, who's been one of my top five favorite artists for the past decade.  He's just brilliant.  I could go on and on about Immonen, but I'm rambling and need to get to the book.  I absolutely loved the first issue of Fear Itself from start to finish.  It has everything the first issue of a big event needs.  I'd buy the book again for the art alone, but there is a scene between Thor and Odin that might easily be one of the best moments those two characters have ever had.  So yeah, in spite of my event hatred, I'm totally down for Fear Itself. I'm fully ready for it to all fall apart so that I can rage at the skies, but until then I'm on for the long haul.  ...and I think I'm going to like it.

So once again I've rambled on a lot more than I really wanted to.  I can already tell that I'm going to have to pull back on these things a bit.  I'll keep it up for as long as possible, but when I have to just put the list out there with out much color commentary, don't hold it against me.

I'd better get some more penciling done on Artifacts, now.   And then sleep.  Sweet sweet sleep.

 

Thanks!

-Jeremy @ 3:27 AM No Comments »

Well, I'm still playing catch up. I'm going to end up doing back to back New Comics Wednesday's this week to get things back on track.

The week of March 30th was a pretty big week comics wise.  A lot of stuff came out and a lot of it was REALLY damned good.  This was one of those weeks where I was proud to buy comics.  There were a lot of titles, both from the big two and independent/creator owned that were perfect examples of why I love comics.

I've recently had a few people ask for a little more commentary on what I bought and liked.  I'm going to try and do a bit more, but I really have to stress that I'm not a critic.  I have a WIDE variety of books that I enjoy reading, yes, some more than others, but basically if it's on this list it's something that I dig and am willing to support.  So I'll go ahead and post the list as usual and do a bit more talking about the highlights below.  If it helps lead another reader to supporting a book, I'm more than happy to do it.



-







THE WALKING DEAD  #83

KICK-ASS 2  #2

ULTIMATE X  #4

ECHOES  #4

CAPTAIN AMERICA  #616

SCARLET  #5

AGE OF X UNIVERSE  #1

THE AVENGERS  #11

CAPTAIN AMERICA AND THE SECRET AVENGERS  #1

PUNISHER  #5

SECRET AVENGERS  #11

THOR  #621

WOLVERINE  #7

BUTCHER BAKER  #1

INCOGNITO:  BAD INFLUENCES  #5

THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN  #657

AMERICAN VAMPIRE  #13

BLACK PANTHER  #516

BATMAN DETECTIVE COMICS  #875

UNDYING LOVE  #1

YOUR HIGHNESS:  KNIGHT AND DAZED

MORNING GLORIES:  VOL 1  TPB











 

I almost don't know where to begin about this week's batch of books.  I really loved most of them.

Every month, on the week that Walking Dead comes out, it's the first book I read.  It's kind of a ritual.  It's been such an excellent episodic comic book from the get go.  It's been a book that's had some bleak dark times.  It's definitely been hard to keep reading more than once.  I don't want to spoil anything, but Kirkman pretty much pushed me to my limit with this issue.  As much as I love the book I don't know if I can do it anymore.  If you like dark extremely well written and drawn books, the Walking dead is for you.

I've said it time and time again, I LOVE Scott Snyder.  The guy is easily one of the best writers working in comics.  I'm pretty sure if I keep this up he's going to run screaming from me at the next con because of my full blown creator crush.  This week was a double dose of awesomeness with American Vampire and Detective Comics.  They're both such varied, yet excellent books.  Thank god for a vampire story with a set of balls.  This new arc of American Vampire started off with such a bang.  I really thing it's going to be the best one yet. ...yes...I realize I say that with every arc.  That's just a testament to how great the book is.  Oh, and let's not forget Raphael Albuquerque.  As great as the art has been while he was away, I'm so glad to have him back for this arc. He brings so much life to the book.  And then there's Detective.  I've said it before and I'll say it again, this is everything that I want Batman to be.  Snyder really get's Gotham-- both Batman himself, as well as the other citizens, like Commissioner Gordon. I'm so happy to see my good friend Francesco Francavilla take on the feature story.  He's such a talent and one of the sweetest guys in comics.

Finally, and I'm rambling WAY more than I wanted to...such a fanboy... I need to mention the wonderful stuff coming out from Image this week.  Butcher Baker- The Righteous Maker from Joe Casey and Mike Huddleston was a hell of a lot of no bullshit grown up fun.  I love Casey like this.  His Image work lately has been so much fun.  I've followed Huddleston from the beginning of his career and Butcher Baker is some next level stuff.  He's obviously having a lot of deviant fun on the book.  In a COMPLETELY different vein (I swear that wasn't intended to be a bad vampire pun...) there's Undying Love from Tom Coker and Daniel Freedman. I've loved Coker's stuff for years.  He's such an amazing craftsman.  Undying Love is a beautifully crafted story.  I was so excited about the book and the first issue was everything I wanted it to be and more.  I also picked up the Morning Glories trade, collecting the first arc of the series.  It was just announced that Nick Spencer and co. were nominated for MULTIPLE Eisners for the series.  It is well deserved.  I'm not sure where this crazy book is going, but I'm on for the ride.  Hell, I liked it enough to not only buy the singles, but pick it up again in the trade.  Both the interior art and covers are so well done.  Great book.  Image needs more books like these!  They seem to be adding more every month.  I like it!

Okay, seriously, I've talked on a lot longer than I planned to.  This is how it goes.  I ramble.  I hope some of you like this.  :)

On that note, I'm going to bed.  I've got a ton of work to do tomorrow.  ARTIFACTS needs me!

Check back tomorrow for this week's New Comics Wednesday.  That should get me caught up for a couple of days.  Oh, and don't forget, please purchase your comics from your local shop or online LEGALLY.  It only helps support creators and shops you love (and trust me we always appreciate and need the support).  Also, stealing is just shitty.

 

Thanks!

-Jeremy @ 3:12 AM 2 Comments »

Due to my busy schedule, I don't get to take many commissions. I love doing them, but given the number of books I do a year it's not easy for me to get to.  For over a year a gentleman from Belgium had been politely checking in every once in a while to see if I'd be available to do a commission piece for him.  He'd patiently email every few months and ask if I had the time.  I found myself having to say that I didn't currently but to check back.  He did. A few months ago I saw that I was going to have a break in my schedule and Dominique and I set up an Avengers commission.  It was going to be an ambitious project, having multiple characters with their varied costumes and color schemes done in watercolor.  I have to admit I was equal parts intimidated as hell and excited to take a stab at something like this.  Also, after Dom's patience with me, I really wanted to do something that he'd absolutely love.

It's been a while since I've done a full process piece, so I thought this would be a perfect time to give you all another peek at a piece start to finish.  I hope you dig it.



I started out penciling on a nice piece of Strathmore 400 series watercolor paper. After my return to watercolor with the Batman piece I did a while back, I  was careful to not lay down too much graphite on the page.  I worked, as I almost always do, with 2H lead in a .05 mechanical pencil.  It's a pretty hard lead, so the graphite doesn't move and smudge much.  With such a hard lead I have to be careful not to dig into the paper very much, but over time I've learned not to have such a heavy hand.  Just comes with practice. It took quite a while to get everything down the way I wanted. These characters are so iconic and I wanted to play up both their individual characters and make them work together in a single image. As always, there kind of came a point where I had to let it go and move on to the next phase.



After I finished my drawing, I jumped right in to the painting.  I've been using a combination of tube and pan watercolor sets. I'm pretty fond of Windsor & Newton watercolors.  They're easy to get at just about any art supply store in the country and have a nice color quality.  I'm slowly building my tube watercolors. In the tubes I have some of my favorite colors: Alizarin Crimson, Payne's Gray, Yellow Ochre, and Lamp Black.  Everything else comes from this really wonderful pan set from Windsor & Newton.  I know a brush can make all of the difference in the world. I'm still learning a lot of this as I go, so almost everything I do is done with a decent 12 round brush.  Eventually I plan on turning into a full fledged brush snob, but that's a bit down the road.

I really like loose, flowing backgrounds for most pieces.  Especially on paintings like this, that have so much going on with the characters in the foreground.  I wanted to pick a color that wouldn't clash with any of their costumes.  Not really easy.  For the most part, though all of these characters follow the typical superhero triadic color scheme of red, yellow, and blue.  Since most of the characters on the page had a lot of blue in their costumes, I opted to go for the easy complimentary scheme and went with an orange tone.  Most of what you see here is a mixture of Burnt Sienna and a bit of Cadmium Red.

I built the background up in layers.  There are probably three passes in what you see there.



Once the background was good and dry, it was time to move on to the underpainting for the foreground figures. I started, building light to dark.  I laid in my very lightest layer for the skin tones (which you almost can't even see in this shot) and then went in with an almost invisible layer of Yellow Ochre.



From there I moved on to a light layer of Paynes Grey, which reads as a nice understated blue when it's watered down.  After that I finally started in on the reds.  Alizarin Crimson is a beautiful color.  I've learned the hard way, that it's VERY easy to go in too hard with reds.  The first layer I laid down here was basically a pink, light rose color.  This was all underpainting.  Just a starting point.





With the underpainting done I could see some of the areas that I was going to really need to watch. Namely Captain America's glove where it overlapped Thor's red cape.  It was an easy enough fix, but it was better for me to notice early on than to run into problems later.



From there I worked on just slowly building up layers of color.  I admire the hell out of watercolor painters that can go in and finish a piece in three passes.  I can't.  ...well at least at this point.  Maybe someday.





Here is a close up where you can see that I started to add depth and build shape with the color.  Blonde hair is tricky.  The last thing I wanted to do was have Ms. Marvel's hair look muddy.  I probably went back to her hair a dozen times during the painting.



Building up more of the reds.  Even though most of these characters have a nice strong red as a major element of their costume, I wanted to try and give each one a different feel.



With the characters starting to really take shape I went back in to the background again to punch it up so that it played against the foreground figures.  I used more of the wet on wet technique and added in some pretty strong oranges and just a bit of Paynes grey to pull help lead the eye around the piece.





I wanted to have the team standing in kind of a fog. Again, something that wasn't going to detract from the figures themselves.  I knew that I wanted to go with more of a blue at the bottom of the page so, I needed to find that transition point between the oranges into the blues.  Mixing the two colors makes kind of a muddy neutral.  I went in and slowly built up the texture at the middle point where the two colors met.  It was a tricky area.  After a few passes, I was happy with it, though.





Finishing up the background, I went in again with the wet on wet technique, loaded up my  brush with a ton of Paynes Gray, threw it on the bottom of the page, and let it move and bleed around.  That heavier, dark color really gave the "fog" a nice depth.  I especially like how it ended up looking around Spider Woman's legs in the finished image.





From that point, I went back in and started to really focus on textures, adding as much depth as possible.  Building things up from light to dark I already had a lot of highlights and textures built in.  Adding these darker textures, like to Cap's chainmail, really started to make things pop.



Finishing up the actual painting I went in again with Alizarin Crimson and added in a lot of depth to the reds. At this point I think everything came together.  Watercolor is such an interesting and tricky medium.  It's something that you build and build and HOPEFULLY at some point it all comes together.  It's easy to get nice, soft light colors, but then building them into bold tones takes some work.



After I felt like everything was in place and the image was fully dried, I wanted to give the painting some bold outlines.  I'd gone in before with inks, both in pens and using the crowquill, but this time around I experimented with loading my crowquill with watercolors.  For the warm areas I used a nice, dark Burnt Umber and Paynes Gray for the cool areas.  Yes, again, I'm sure purists would crucify me for this, but I think it's a nice happy medium.  It gives me the graphic look I want, while still being a little softer than going with a straight black ink.









With everything finished I loaded my crowquill with a bit more Paynes Gray and signed the piece.



I stripped off the tape and was finished with the Avengers piece.  All in all it probably took about 16-18 hours, going back to it an hour here and an hour there. There were a lot of long breaks in there where I had to hit some deadlines and such.  That was kind of nice though.  A couple of times it gave me the time and distance from the piece, so that I could come back to it and fix something I otherwise probably would have messed up.

I'm really happy with the way this piece came out.  It was a big undertaking, but I think it was pretty successful.  Dominique was really happy with it, which makes me really happy...and a little relieved.

Anyway, that about wraps up this painting process blog.  I've got a couple other pieces that I'm finishing up.  I should have another one of these things within the next month or so.  I'm messing with more fun techniques.  I can't wait to show them to everyone.

Thanks for checking out my posts and listening to me blather on.  I appreciate it!

 

-Jeremy @ 1:14 PM 4 Comments »

Over the past few months, I've been pretty obsessed with an iphone app called Instagram. It's one of those silly "hip" apps that is part of the retro trend in photography and adds in an element of fun social networking.  Sort of twitter with cooler looking pics.  Anyway, like I said, obsessed.  I've always been a big photography fan, so Instagram had me at hello.

I'm going to be posting a few shots from my ever growing Instagram collection every week or so for a while.  They're not comics, but they're a hell of a lot of fun and I like the idea of putting them up in one place.  Hopefully a few of you enjoy them!

 



View from my bed.  Just woke up to a bright sunshiny day.



Heading out to the studio to do some work. On a day like this, I might work outside.



Owen



My desk shelf.



At Chloe's birthday-skate party with E.



Me...just me.



Chloe's 9th birthday dinner!



Ethan and his best pal Chloe, on her birthday.



L-n-Em...O P.



Central Park- October 2010- NYCC



HAT!



Cold wet day...



Gray skies.



Two hours in to the snowpocalypse.



Four hours in to the snowpocalypse. Easily a couple inches of snow on the ground.



Woke up to about fourteen inches of snow on the ground.



Shoveled a path to the studio.



Dada dada dada dada dada dada dada!



Picking up Hurley in the craziness.



What does a grown man who got his ass kicked by a 9yr old girl look like? Meet Tom.

 

Well there you go, the first batch of my Instagram collection. Check back soon for a few more!

Thanks!

 

-Jeremy @ 1:37 PM No Comments »

It's been a while since I've had the chance to do a desk shot.  This is partially due to my con schedule, but probably a bit more to the pretty epic, spoiler laden stuff I've been drawing on Artifacts.  I'm REALLY proud of the work I'm doing on the book, but it's page after page of big stuff that Filip (my editor) would shoot me for sharing. I just finished penciling a tiny bit that I can share without spoiling anything.  It's a shot of Sara from a BIG scene in Artifacts #9. It's cropped a lot, but I'm really happy with the way it turned out.  I think I captured the emotion of the moment pretty well.

I should be able to post a few more desk shots here and there over the next few weeks.  I'll try and sneak in a couple of fun action bits, where I can.  In the meantime I hope you dig this.  I'll do another shot of it as soon as I get the pencils approved and ink it.  For now, though, it's back to work for me!

 

 

Thanks

-Jeremy @ 2:08 PM 2 Comments »