Short Stack #5

I've been super busy with projects lately, but I just wanted to take a minute to plug a comic that just came out. It's an anthology series called "Short Stack", written by Shawn Gabborin and put out by his own Angry Gnome Comics. It has 13 two page stories, all horror and written by Shawn. I pencilled, inked and lettered "THe Duel". You can order it through Indy Planet's website here. And here is a link to a blog post I did breaking down the process of one of the pages.

TVOT page 2

Pencils and inks from the new project I'm working on . Inked mostly with the Hunt 102 nib with a little help from the old Windsor and Newton brush. The writer, Magnus asked that the expression in the last panel be toned down a bit. You can see the difference in the inks. All the monitor screens were created in Abode Illustrator and pasted in using Photoshop.

I’ve been hard at work lately, penciling, inking and lettering a new project. It’s written by Norwegian writer Magnus Aspli and is being colored by a very talented fella named Hugo Froes. So far, I’ve been really knocked out by Hugo’s work on this series as well his past work. I first became aware of him on a project we did together for Ronin Studios. It was a charity book for HOPE: the Hero Initiative. I only lettered one of the short stories, “Rose”. I got to see all stages of the artwork and Hugo’s colors brought the art to another level.

The writer of “Rose” was Alex De-gruchy, who I’ve worked with mostly as a letterer, but most recently I illustrated a short story he wrote called “Trick”. Alex is working as the editor for this new project, which is how Hugo and I became involved.

The story is sort of a Lovecraftian suspense story with quite a large cast of characters. The main story takes place on a boat but it also has a subplot that takes place in 14^th Century Norway. That means lots a research. But so far it’s been very exciting. The only downside is waiting so long to get the pencils approved. With Alex in Wales, Magnus in Norway, and Hugo, I think, in Portugal, the time zones don’t match up. I usually email them at night, so a reply awaits me in the morning.

I’ll start posting some pages soon.

Monster Party

Monster Party

Here is art for a Wolfbait poster promoting our show at Smalls on Halloween night. The concept is of course, classic movie monsters having party but doing very modern stuff like playing Guitar Hero and bonging beers (and how did a skeleton get a cell contract? Is it pay as you go?).
First, the pencils. Obviously inspired by Jack Davis and “Mad Monster Party”.




Next the inks, for which I used Pigma Micron Markers. Not a lot of cross-hatching as I decided early on that I wanted to use gray markers and ink wash. You can see that I didn’t even ink the laboratory background. I left it t=in pencil to give it a distanced effect.




I’ve been very inspired by Eric Powell and J.H. Williams’ use of greys and I wanted to give it a shot. I used anything I could find; Prismacolor markers, Faber-Castell brush pens, ink wash and graphite.

Gordon "Gordo" Cooper

This is drawing of Gordon "Gordo" Cooper, last of the original Mercury 7 astronauts to go into space. He is also the last American to go into outer space solo, as the Gemini program sent guys up in teams. During his orbit, the computer went on the fritz and he had to hit the booster rockets manually to make it back to earth. Bad timing or the wrong angle would make him bounce off the earth's atmosphere and shoot out into space. He used his time in orbit to make the calculations himself, writing formula's in the condensation on the window (which the Mercury 7's pilot's wisely insisted NASA's engineers put in).

I inked this with Micron Pigma markers. I king of like the results.

Wolfbait Poster with Color