WITCHBOOBS

I thought I wouldn't push my luck too far. You have all been really patient with my colouring attempts (and some of you not so). So I thought I would get back to some Kwokian goodness.

There's no getting around that I got a little carried away with this piece. Back when I drew this, there was the possibility that Renae Geerlings was looking at my work. So I thought I'd send this piece around. Little did I know that Renae (had very smartly) got the Witchblade out of this getup and into a tshirt and jeans with the Witchblade like a gauntlet on her right arm. I of course didn't know this and thought that it was T&A all the way. Given that I couldn't show her "A" I think I went a little overboard on the "T".

A funny comment is that a friend of mine got abused for looking at pornography at work when I emailed him this piece.

My favourite bit is still the little asian kid standing to her right. =)

I guess I should explain the piece. I felt that the Witchblade was such an over-saturated image in the comics community that she could be sitting at a bus-stop and no one would pay her any attention.

Again, Annette has done a stunning job.

More Kwokian Goodness

When I get things like this in my Inbox, they just make my day.

Here's the base artwork for the Mazda ad from Annette and I. Again Annette's done a stunning, stunning job. The way she's matched the lighting from the background on the characters and the car is incredible. If you look closely you will see that she has also put shadows from the characters on the car and the ground - incredible attention to detail.

She's also used the skin-linework softening technique to great effect once again.

Ok, now it's up to me to do some logo and copy placement and you should see the thing as an ad in all Top Cow comics in a month or two. And you can say you saw that being put together.

I could kill me

Ok, so when I do a piece, I compress it in Photoshop, and then email it off for approval. Generally what I do is then uncompress it and resave it at full quality. The word of note here is "generally". Not this time. I compressed it, saved it then closed Photoshop completely losing the hi-res art quality image that Photoshop stores in its memory. I now have to redraw this completely. The most help I'm going to get is that I can trace over the blurry crappy compressed lines of the older image. >sigh<

It was going to be such a nice and quiet weekend.

So I have to redraw this, three character sketches for Lucy (this is the story of stories and perfect for me, but it's decided it's going to be a manga. At least JAn gets to still write it). I have to do these in manga style. Should be interesting... In the Chinese sense.

I will be announcing a huge art drive on Pulp Faction soon. If any of you are or know a skilled manga artist who is professional and reliable, they could have a huge 160 page Tokyopop graphic novel coming out if they can impress me. Details soon.

In the meantime you can have a looksie at the previously finished and now forever lost and approved new clothed Witchblade (she looks so much better in clothes!).

MAZDA preview

There's a book coming out from Top Cow written by David Wohl and drawn by David Nakayama. It's called Revved. It has a clever tie-in with Mazda and specifically their RX-8. It's closest cousin would be the BMW films, both advertising and story in one.

As part of the relationship there's a Mazda RX-8 ad that's going to be featured in every Top Cow comic. The concept is a bunch of Top Cow characters all hanging out and around the Mazda RX-8. David Wohl contacted me about doing the ad, and I was pretty damn excited. Was? Yeah, at 3:07am excitement has been worn away to exhaustion.

But this is the first time I get to officially draw Witchblade and Aphrodite IX!!!

So my idea was to actually use a photo of the car and have the characters interact with it Gorillaz-style. Here's a preview of the artwork. That's Jack from Revved charmingly convincing Sara Pezzini (aka Witchblade) to go for a ride. I have only done the linework for Zoe (another Revved character) and Aphrodite IX who are off to the right. When they are toned I will upload them too. What's interesting is that Witchblade took as much time to draw as the other three. The Witchblade armour is a NIGHTMARE to draw. It looks great, but oh man! I've figured out the armour's secret power. It's a chronological vacuum. It just sucks up the time of whoever is trying to draw the damn thing. Otherwise I'm very happy with her. She looks sexy, mature and unique. And man, what abs!

Yeah, I know there are no shadows on the ground. Why? The entire background has to be redrawn/or redone. So no shadows yet.

Not a bad nights work given that I seemed to spend most of it on Skype chatting to my sister in England (Hi Lin!). Listening to the Dark Tower by Stephen King (Audio books! My new friends!) and really quite enjoying it when they skipped about an hour (at least). Was really hard to follow after that.

Right now I've booked a coma with my bed.