The Shadow & The Phantom

Things are plenty hectic here at home and I am very disappointed I didn’t have an opportunity to post new pictures. I hope readers, if any, will pardon my delay. Here’s two new paintings with commentary to follow.

This painting has a lot of texture built up to cover mistakes. If you don’t notice, great, but it’s really there. I drew the image from my mind. Originally there was a different nose. I prefer this one to what was before, but I am still not satisfied. I found some great Frank Miller pictures online that would have worked great, albeit too late, from when he was awarded on Spike TV. This is an original picture but we had a lot of Jim Steranko reference material around. We love Old Time Radio, after all. Later on I tried to mimic the flesh tone effects Steranko captures with oil paint and I failed miserably. There was a gun in hand to the left where we covered it up with smoke because ours didn’t look so good. Turns out my wife draws guns worse than me; hers are crooked. We could have copied what someone else had done, in fact, I found a neat Two-Face picture from a Batman comic book, but it’d just look like we copied it so we didn’t approach it that way. My wife can take credit for the black paint, red scarf, and gray hat outlines in addition to the light tone of skin and all the marvelous paint I covered up. Everything else I did. Yes, I did the red in the eyes and the purple lips, she hates that. If anyone thinks working with someone else is easy they’re crazy. I know I pissed off my wife when I painted over the face and started over, but really, it looks better now. If it looks funny it’s because she and I have different ideas about how The Shadow ought to look. I kept thickening his eyebrows, messing with his nose, and continued making him ugly. I think she wanted a more handsome representation.

My wife drew the skull and painted the leaves to the right and left of The Phantom. She also did a bang up job painting the purple. I would not have done it so well. She did great and added the pecks and collarbone. I did the face tones, the shrubbery in the background, the mountains and moon, and I did some touch ups on the skull. We both contributed to the lighting effects inside the skull, which still look fake. This didn’t turn out how I expected. My wife was supposed to participate more, which was scary because it’s a wonder I didn’t ruin the painting like I normally do. I’ll cop to drawing the mask wrong. She pointed out, and yes, it does appear The Phantom has a mask that is big enough to cover the side of his face where his eyes are. I was thinking it was more like a Robin or Green Lantern mask that just stuck on, but nope, I guess it’s supposed to tie around his head underneath his purple hood.

Oh well.

Batman Before & After

My wife, recently to her shock and disgust, after all these years got to witness my sense of perfectionism when I kept taking a painting out and making corrections. She feared as I do that I’d ruin an otherwise fine painting. Such was the case for the image below. I was never content with how this image turned out and I kept working on it and as history would prove it could have turned into a statistic and tossed into the trash can. I’ve often told my wife how I’ve thrown out more art than kept. If it was something I colored, you can bet on it.

At any rate, I think Neal Adams draws one of the finest looking Batmans ever. The blue and gray colors and emblem were traditional and, although I’m no authority on Batman, it seemed when Adams came around he drew Batman so he didn’t have the old Adam West mask style. Ok, I still love Superfriends the cartoon, but I’m talking about the black frame in the front of Batman’s cowl that shapes the eyes and nose. It always looked like a mask made into another mask that way. Neal Adams made the mask look convincing and spotted wicked blacks for interesting effect. In trying to keep with Adams’ vision of the character I didn’t want to bring black into the mask and I thought I got what I wanted out of it, but something didn’t seem right.

But after picking up the painting again for perhaps the 4th time I decided to try to add black and see if it finally felt right. Mind you, the painting was dated June of 2006. About mid-way, that is, the second time I took the painting out of the closet, although not pictured above, you’re not seeing the cone shapes I made with a Sharpie marker to pop out the nose.

I feel like it’s done, but am annoyed how the blue in the mask doesn’t look like the same blue color as the cape. It is. But I guess the black makes the blue look darker. So I think I learned Batman must be darker or he won’t look right.

The Phantom Redux

All right, you’ve seen my breakdowns on the prior blog and I thought I’d share how the painting is coming along. My wife and I traded the image back and forth until we were both properly satisfied with how The Phantom looks. As time allows we’ll concentrate on the background. She wants to add lightning in the sky. I do not as the past two paintings already incorporated that effect. But she deserves a chance because she hasn’t yet painted lightning. She has a nifty idea for the forest and I suspect it will turn out lots better than my palm trees and Yucka leafs. I explained to her if she doesn’t want to just have greens in the background we could add a cobblestone cave or something different, yet detailed.

The Ghost Who Walks

Here’s the preliminary work for our next painting. The Sharpie markers tend to bleed through the water-based acrylic paint so I just made some dotted lines in order for my wife to have some shading/highlighting guidelines. I let her will her own magic and try not to interfere any more than that. Since the marker lines will no doubt be tweaked it wouldn’t make sense to add more marker lines than neccesary because often times we cover over our marker lines and it’s quite a task.

My wife is a fan of the character; it’s too bad the movie didn’t do the character justice. I recently, finally, tried a few Moonstone The Phantom TPs and I really enjoyed them. The Douglas Klauba paintings are the best.

Watercolor-loo

I’m not comfortable doing watercolors. It’s even more difficult when I use $2.00 paint brush kits. I just don’t have what it takes with anything hands-on, colorwise, I hope you enjoy these samples from my watercolor sketchbook nonetheless.

Below, is my most recent addition. I painted it this weekend and only did some minor tweaks against the version you’re looking at. I hate it. The pencil and inks weren’t exactly great either. If I remember correctly I think I drew Metal Gear Solid’s Snake from a Todd toy. These images, that is, the blog would have posted ontime but I had sluggish internet the evening before.

Here’s a Batman one representing my second attempt at watercolors in my book. It’s an old painting.

The next one is my first ever watercolor in the book. I made this a few or a couple or several years back. I don’t recall, really. It’s Star Wars based, of a character of my own design, I wanted to stylise my drawing in the way fashion designers draw elegant, yet long limbed people. I dig that sort of stuff.

Lastly, it’s Wolverine. I can draw faces fine, it’s what I like best. I’m kind of hesitant to paint it. I’m sorry it’s difficult to see. I don’t want to ruin this drawing.

Better Later Than Never

Here’s a painting that sat around for a long time. I never sketched the body out to my satisfaction. Initially, this painting was my attempt to try and not outline a figure in black and instead go with a realistic type look that, say, Frazetta does with his oil paintings. It didn’t work out, thus, the painting sat around. So I picked it up and immediately inked out the body work, crossed my fingers, and hoped for the best; I didn’t want to be disgusted by it anymore. After correcting the body shape I tried to envelope the fire around the body and blend it in with what came before. I hope it goes unnoticed.

Disappearing Act

I apologize for being away for so long. Real life is hectic as ever. I start a new job beginning in September. The AC broke inside our house over the weekend and it’s $150 just to have someone dispatched and that’s not even a dianostic fee so we’re waiting for a friend-of-a-friend to help or until the weekdays resume. (Turns out the bill ran $650 for a 1-year maintenance plan upon waiting for the weekdays.) So we’re living inside 90 degree weather with fans and ceiling fans feeling like blow dryers on us. I worked on my vehicle today changing the tranny filter and crankcase filter.

I haven’t drawn much lately except another crayon drawing from when the family went out to eat at La Parilla Suiza a few weeks back. I did a picture of Batman that I may scan and share someday, but for now please be content with the following new paintings.

Below, is a He-man I mostly did. As with most paintings we do it’s a collaborative process. This one is unlike the Barbarian picture I sketched out for my future oil painting project.

Next, is Marmalade Boy. My wife did this one essentially on her own and pretty much all I had a hand in was assisting her in finding some working flesh tones and make colorful suggestions about what worked and what didn’t before the end result.

Lastly, this one is the beautiful She-Ra. I never watched the cartoon as a kid, but I guess my wife did. I did the layout, my wife did all the work, and then I completed the image with lip highlights, planets, and a stippling of stars.

Accept Rejection

Ok, I have no new drawings I wish to share and being that it is Sunday, the day when I get NEW comics that came out LAST Wednesday, I feel it is finally time to share my thoughts on this cool online project I participated in.

So the theme was to relate to a major calamity or bad luck or about a dozen other fill-in-the-blank synonyms. I admit to not being first on the scene with a project offering because I was reading what others submitted while I thought, tweaked, and worked on mine. Plus, I worked manadatory overtime at the time and had little or no free-time.

The fact that one got rejected kind of bothered me a little bit at first. I understand why and frankly I was lucky enough to have even one accepted. In fact, I’m elated one piece got accepted. Bottomline: I didn’t follow directions as well as I should have and neither piece truly fit the theme. Story of my life, not following directions in some cases. Since this was a project for fun and not of dire need, that is, not a source of income and something that puts food on the table, I need to accept rejection if this hobby of mine is ever to become more than that someday. However, I was a tad bit annoyed the deadline got extended well after I submitted mine. Hell, for the piece that got accepted the changes I made, the shortcuts I took, all that was done in order to meet the deadline.
Anyway, I pride myself on offering things that are more than a simple gag cartoon. I like for my creations to have many or multiple layers of interpretations. For the item below, the accepted cartoon, my intention was always to have a major disaster occur within the scene. The hero above wasn’t just supposed to float in the sky, in other words.
Here’s the one that got accepted.

And, below, is the one that got rejected. I agree it’s not a calamity of any kind. There’s no deus ex machina too, but perhaps if you think about the wife and what she will possibly contend with at work, I can think of nothing worse than: bad luck. Still, if you have to explain or analyse a joke to fit the theme then it’s not worth a lick. What do you think?

The Lastest News

In keeping with the goal I made to myself of uploading and sharing my art on the weekends I realize that I am firing this one off later than planned. It’s Midnight, Monday, and I want to read my new comics instead of doing this.

Things just get plain hectic around the house: cleaning up after the kids after every meal, touch up painting on the exterior of the house, yard work weeding, and filling up the pool.

Oh, the scans below are fine, but the images I snapped from out secondary camera won’t have the greatest clarity because I discovered that the kids handled it and got the lens extremely filthy after the fact.

At any rate, see the images and commentary below.

Here’s a Wonder Woman I did in crayon.

This one’s of the family done without pencil, just a ballpoint pen. I don’t know what happened to Batman’s crotch, but mine’s surely not like that.

Oil painting is one medium I’ve never tried. So here’s my warrior that I hope turns out like a beautiful Frank Frazetta Conan. It’ll never look that good, but I can dream. The pencils are difficult to see and it’s not just the cameras fault, in some areas the pencils have smudged.

These next two pictures don’t belong here, but I don’t think my wife has yet got around to sharing them on our fan art website. Here’s two she recently completed. Both are from images she copied, as usual. The Wonder Woman pose was copied from a coloring book and she asked me to draw Themyscira/Paradise Island. I also was the one who used a darker color red paint to give the breasts 3-D form. It’s all hers but for those minute details.

Below, the reason I don’t get to draw! Notice the drafting table is cluttered with toys, books, and so much more. In fact, I’m supposed to give this room up to my youngest daughter.

2 Quick Sketches From My Archive

These were done super fast like Sergio Aragon`es style. I just used a standard ballpoint pen, no penciling. When the ideas hit I was hoping to share on the Jinxworld.com forum, but decided against it more or less because the creators may have taken offense and they’re not especially good for showing off to two of my heroes anyway.

I’m not accustomed to using a non-photo blue pencil so you’re going to see sketches by me in the future with mistake lines and so on. Chances are, though, the ones I do share will look better than these two. At least I hope so.