Quitely/Badower - Superman *faint*

A couple years ago - maybe it was 2 or 3... Mark Millar and Frank Quitely came down to Sydney for the con. Now this was when Frank was talking New X-men and Millar was well into his run on the Ultimates.

These guys are the party hard central, and incredibly cool dudes.

Highlights included:

1. Heading back to Mark Millar's hotel room for post pub drinks til the wee hours in the morning. Him buying the hotel out of overpriced beer to get us all drunk.

2. Rocking up at the hotel room to find Frank Quitely chatting to some nondescript dude in a suit and glasses. The guy had just closed his art folder and was leaving. I remember catching his eye and smiling as he left. Frank (Vincent) welcomed us into Mark's room as this gentleman smiled politely and quietly (no pun intended) left. I decided to pluck up my courage, "Vincent, that guy who just left? Who was he? Some art director?"

"No, aye. That was Brendan McCarthy. Grant (Morrison) said he'd come say hi and we should meet up."

I promptly crapped myself. I am a HUGE fan of Brendan McCarthy. (http://www.brendanmccarthy.co.uk/) Skin. Shade The Changing Man covers. Rogan Josh. To give you a scale of Brendan's talent, Jamie Hewlett (Tank Girl and designer/creator/illustrator of the Gorillaz) is a massive fan of Brendan's work. I politely excused myself and rushed to the elevator to find Brendan had already gone. I returned to the room bewildered but jazzed at my brush with genius. McCarthy, Quitely, Millar. Hot damn!

3. Pulling an excited JAn off a terrified Mark Millar (who is a lovely guy but about 5'9 to JAn's 6'1 of massive polish farm boy genetic stock). It appears Mr. Millar doesn't have the same defence against the JAn arts as Mr. Morrison.

4. This picture. By the end of the weekend I finally gave into my fanboy urges and asked my favourite artist in the world for a sketch of Superman. I asked for a pencilled version so I could ink it myself. He drew a beautiful Superman that even Millar commented looked better than anything he'd done in JLA: Earth 2. I inked and coloured (ie. ruined) this baby and made prints and framed it for a couple of close friends for their last year Xmas presents.

Quitely and Badower. Man, I'd love to see those name in lights again together.

ps. Coloured it during my Luna Brothers phase. Was heavily into ULTRA at the time. http://www.lunabrothers.com/

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.

More old(ish) stuff

A friend of mine tutors in singing and asked me for an illustration piece to advertise her work. She had previously been using a Jo Chen piece (http://www.jo-chen.com/ - who is a genius!) and being a respectful artist in her own right wanted an original piece of art.

She wanted something simple, streetwise and cool that was sexy but not slutty. She also wanted something that kinda looked like her. Something that the Brittney and Hillary kids would dig also.

Again a fun two-toning anime sorta colouring endeavour.

Coming up I have a bunch of character concept sketches I'm doing for an upcoming series of manga graphic novels for Tokyopop. They're all manga so that's kinda interesting.

HATE!

As a card carrying uber nerd there is a certain minimum of nerdly things I have to do to maintain my nerdship.

One of the ways that I keep my nerdship is by playing online computer games. Everquest 2 to be exact. Why not World of Warcraft? Cos I can't be bothered with dealing with armies of 13 year old phat lewt idiots.

So playing Eq2 I've met a group of people who call themselves "Aurora Australis" (the online, ingame term is a "guild"). They welcomed me in, and one of their more powerful members, a guy by the name of HATE who plays a lady monk took a week of his time to watch over my character so that I could progress at a rate far beyond what I could do myself. The week of his help ended with his birthday. I asked him what I could do to repay him. He joked that a picture of HATE in a bikini would do.

I wouldn't do that, but I did say I would do what I could.

In game she normally wears full pants and a top as the clothing design is refreshingly conservative. So I decided that she needed some "creative tearing" of her costume so that HATE could enjoy the feminine wiles of his character.

So thanks for all your help HATE, and happy birthday buddy!

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!).