Spinning Bird Kick!!

Above is the colour version of my previous post of my sketch of Chun-Li of Street Fighter fame. Once again, done in my 'fake vector' style in Photoshop. I've made a fair few changes from the original sketch, particularly in her face and her outfit, a lot of which I really got wrong in the initial sketch. I had a fair amount of fun doing this one, but I'm not sure how I feel about the final image. I'll have to leave that up to the viewers.

It's been too long since the last time I posted, something I really aim to change in future. 2011 was a pretty turbulent year, so I'm hoping that things will continue on the smoother path in 2012 to facilitate more new work to post.

In the meantime, as always, enjoy!

Chun-Li™ & © 2012 Capcom Entertainment

Chun-Li Sketch

Above is a quick black biro pen sketch of Chun-Li from Street Fighter I did earlier today. I'm pretty pleased with this one and think I'm going to do a colour version of it later.

As always, enjoy!

Chun-Li ™ & © 2011 Capcom Entertainment

At long last... UFTR Page 9!

Above is page 9 of the slowest football comic strip to come out EVER, UNTITLED:FEEL THE ROAR!!! sans lettering. You can read the page, and its earlier installments at its home here.

As LL once said, I pretty much sweat, cried and bled for this page! It took me waaaaay longer than it should have and there are so many things in it I would still change! There's some particularly bad drawing in places, but I'll work to improve on those in the next page and the next page after that and so on.

Of particular annoyance is the poor composition in panel two, where the guy in the blue tracksuit just looks "squashed" with his head being cut off by Rex Sanford's shoulder. The perspective on the stadium is not quite right either. The fans should all be falling onto the pitch, the stands are so steep! Ouch. The referee's head in panel 3 also looks a bit too big and a bit off, his neck looks strange too.

I am relatively pleased with the overall dynamics of the page, and feel that it flows reasonably well, although the sudden appearance in panel 3 of the person who I know is the referee could be jarring for anyone not familiar with the game, as I haven't made it crystal clear who he is. Another thing to work on.

However, I am quite happy with the colours, as I feel they are a distinct improvement on the earlier pages. I worked waaaaaay too hard on them in relation to the amount of time it will take for someone to actually read the page. I'm also really happy with the graphic I created for the "board" that displays the time added on by the referee for injuries, etc at the end of the allotted 90 minutes. As the story is set in the future, I wanted to explore/imagine the technology used for such a purpose and how it could be pushed forward. There will be a lot more of this as the story progresses.

I also conciously omitted the flying ORB cameras that inhabit the world of UFTR that appeared in pages 1, 2 & 5, to aid the clarity of the scenes as there are so many figures on the page, and just felt that all those ORBs might just have been too much. They will re-appear in page 10.

Somoene asked me recently why all the players have on skin-tight shirts. Initially it was because I thought that might make them look more futuristic (smoother, sleeker) and also out of laziness, as initially I did not want to deal with rendering the drapery in each shirt. However, I now have a plausible story-led reason for this that will be revealed as the story goes on.

Below are the pencils, inks and colours (before the "time added on board" graphic) for the page. Now to try and get page 10 out before Christmas!!

As always, enjoy!

The Uncanny X-Men: Old School!

Above is the finished version of an X-Men work in progress I posted a while back. For some reason I had an urge to depict the X-Men, but the classic team(barring the original five), the one I grew up with. I was going to add Kitty and Lockheed, but chickened out, thinking there were going to be too many characters to draw. However, it still took a lot longer than I anticipated, with it being an ensemble piece, as well as the laborious technique I employed to get the effect I wanted.


I began with this small, rough sketch, just to get an idea of where I wanted to place all of the characters and their actions/gestures. I always had the idea in my mind of Colossus holding a Sentinels's head (although it's not obvious from the sketch) above him with Wolverine on top of it, and made that the focal point of the composition.

I then went into Sketchbook Pro to pencil the figures. I enjoy using SBP as it feels more intuitive, closer to real drawing than when I use Photoshop. I drew each character on separate layers so that I could play around with the arrangement of the characters, as well as their scale/proportions in relation to one another.

Originally, I had no intention of putting in a background as I wanted to concentrate on making the characters look good, but it just felt a bit bare and I decided to play around a bit. I didn't want the background to overpower the characters, so I went for a simple silhoutted city ruins effect, with the X-Men standing on a cracked, rocky surface.

I then took the pencils into Photoshop to begin colouring. I started by putting down the basic colour scheme as flat colours, then using the lasso tool to start sculpting the figures, trying to add depth.

I used gradients mainly on the Sentinel's head to give it a shiny, metallic feel. I then added elements to the head that weren't there in the pencils. No real rhyme or reason to it, just making it up as I went along. I was just trying to have fun with it! I really should have had a shadow from the Sentinel falling on Colossus, with reflections from it in his metal skin, but I decided that I wanted people to recognize the character and see him clearly, so I decided against it. Incidentally, I think rendering Colossus' skin was the hardest part, but the most rewarding as it came out a lot better than expected. If you look at the pencils you can see that I changed things a fair bit where his body/skin was concerned.

Once I was happy, I then cropped the image, as I was still paranioid about the background dominating the characters. I then worked up a logo, obviously a version of the classic X-Men logo. Above is a version of the image with the logo behind the Sentinel's head rather than in front of it.

So there you have it! Overall, I'm generally pleased with the piece, and I'm glad I've scratched my X-Men itch. There are things that I would improve, maybe make it more dynamic, more in-your-face, with more extreme foreshortening in the figures. Storm's rain effect is pretty lame, so I would change that too, although I'm feeling her more buff look here a lot! Anyway, on to the next, possibly with something less time-consuming....

As always, enjoy!

The Uncanny... Pt 2

Recently I posted some early digital pencils for an old school X-Men piece I'm doing just for fun. Above are the finished pencils for this piece. I've just added things like the cracked earth and city ruins behind them as I've gone along, trying to add a sense of danger/drama to the drawing.

Now I'll take it into Photoshop and start the colours to complete the piece. There are things I'm not happy with in the drawing, but I'll fix them as I go along in the colouring stages.

As always, enjoy!

The Uncanny X-Men ™ & © 2011 Marvel Characters Inc.

UFTR The Return - Process

After nearly two years I post a new PAGE (!) of my football strip UNTITLED: FEEL THE ROAR!!!™, which you can view here. Yeesh. There are a multitude of reasons as to why I haven't been able to produce this stuff more consistently, but it doesn't really matter now, it's here, and that's the main thing isn't it? Anyway, no promises but I will endeavour to get the following pages out at a more consistent pace in future.

The following images show my process for creating this page:


First, the pencils, done on A3 paper. Here I'm concentrating on making sure all of the composition, gestures and action work as well as possible. As I will be inking and colouring I try not to put in too much detail at this stage.



Next, the inking stage, done on bristol board with Staedtler pigment liners and brush pens. Here I add in the direction/speed lines, crowds (with correction pen) and beef up the details on the characters, trying to vary line weights to make elements advance and recede. Again, I'm not putting in too many shadows/blacks as I want the colours to do some of the heavy lifting.


I then scan the finished artwork and apply colours in Photoshop. I'm trying not too over-render the page as I want it to be clear and bright, rather than dark, plastic-looking and muddy. For some reason, I actually WANT it to look like a comic, which is why there are all the exaggerations of the figures etc. I'm not trying to do a realistic interpretation of the game, I want it to be fantastical(how successful I've been is open to question!).


With that in mind, I want to treat the ball like a force of nature, very much inspired by the way Yoichi Takahashi does so in his long-running football manga Captain Tsubasa. (I wish I could channel that strip's energy and dynamism!) I employed colour holds on the ball trail in the first two panels to make it seem more like a beam of energy, to help the dynamics of the action. I also did the same thing to the white markings on the pitch, just to make things cleaner. I then added some noise to the pitch to give it a bit of texture, as to be honest, I could not come up with a convincing grass texture (yet) that did not jar with the line art.

Once I stopped playing with the colours, I carried the page into Illustrator to letter the strip. I use a free font (where from I can't remember now!) called Digital Strip and various rectangular shapes to create the caption boxes. I'm not a letterer by any stretch, just trying to do the best I can with what I've got.

Once I'm (if ever!) happy with it I merge all the layers, save it as a jpeg and post the page!

Now to get on with pages 9, 10, 11 and so on.....

As always, enjoy!

The Uncanny...

... X-Men that is! The above image is a work in progress of an X-Men piece I'm working up just for kicks. These are unfinished pencils, with possible backgrounds still to be added, then coloured in my fake vector, no-holding-lines style. I chose the roster of my childhood, when there was only ONE X-Men book and things were much more simple. Despite their continued popularity, I don't think they've ever touched that golden era of Claremont/Cockrum/Byrne etc.

Some of the later stuff was really good too, like Paul Smith's run, Romita Jr, the Barry Windsor-Smith Issues, Arthur Adams annuals and so on. Once X-Factor and all of the other books came along, it watered down the unique nature of the X-Men. I still feel that having Wolverine in his own book (and everywhere else) has stretched him waaaaaaay too thin, reducing his 'cool' factor a fair bit. However, I'm sure many of the people who have gobbled up those books, plus Marvel editorial, would tell me otherwise!

The real truth is, I was 12/13/14 a looooooong time ago now, and the adventures of men with adamantium claws who say "bub" a lot is probably somewhat less "cool" now than it was back then.

These "pencils" are all digital, done in SketchBook Pro, a program I'm really in love with for this kind of thing. It feels very intuitive and responds well to different types of pen pressure. I now prefer to start any digital pencil work in SBP rather than in Photoshop, as it just feels better. Also cmd+z on the mac is a LOT more forgiving than an eraser on paper.

Anyway, I'll post the colour version as soon as it is done. As always, Enjoy!

The Uncanny X-Men™ & © 2011 Marvel Characters Inc.