Posts from — January 2009

For anyone who has made it out to the New York City Comic Con, a Wizard World show, the New York Anime Festival, or any of the number of conventions I’ve been a chalk artist at and met me in person, you’ve probably received one of my business cards. For those who actually read it, they often laugh and ask me one question: What on earth is Troll Fighting? You see, my card lists me as an Illustrator, a Cartoonist, and a Graphic Artist… but it is that fourth item of Troll Fighting that people find the most interesting. In truth it is a simple story that doesn’t involve knightly heroics or internet invasions.

If you look at my blogroll to the right of the page, you will see a link to one of my favorite forums ever. conceptart.org! This is a site for professional and non-professional artists alike to gather, show their work, critique the works of others, and take part in community events that will help improve your artistic abilities! The feedback you can get here is alone some of the best around, and were talking for people who have been working in the industry for a long time.

Since a number of people have asked me what my drawing process is like, I thought I might make a short post on what goes into making a digital drawing. In the example below you will see the first stage of my art which is crafting a rough gesture sketch. I almost always start this sketch on paper, and it is usually quite small.

The point of this is not to think about details or even shading, but to capture a quick sense of movement that will carry over into the final image. This is the gesture sketch for a tee shirt artwork I was asked to illustrate called “Renegade Runners.” The image they had in mind was not your typical runner, but someone muscular in line with Rambo and wearing a camo headband.

One of my favorite shows to go to is the NY Comic Con. Run by the awesome folks over at Reed Exhibitions, the show has grown larger and larger each year to become one of the premiere pop culture events on the east coast. With NY Comic Con 2009 coming up on February 6-8, I thought this would be a good time to post about LAST years show and the chalk art mural that I made.

I was asked to recreate an Alex Ross painting for the NY Comic Con in 2008 as he was to be one of the guests of honor. I have loved Mr. Ross’ art ever since I first saw his work with Marvels back in 1994. His painterly style really lends itself to these chalk art drawings because the blended colors can be recreated with the chalk medium quite accurately.

The Fantasy Greeting Card series I completed contained a total of 5 images. Shown here are the original cartoon drawings for the remaining 3 cards as well as the finished products in their full-color glory. Amongst these three cards are my least favorite, and most favorite in the series. Again, digital coloring was done in Photoshop.

In the spring of 2008, I was asked to make a chalk art mural at a science museum that was hosting the official “Earth Fest” celebration for Earth Day. This presented an interesting situation, as up to this point I had mostly created comic book character murals for public appearances. I tried briefly to figure out how I could force a comic character into an Earth Fest mural project. The DC Comics character Poison Ivy came to mind, but two details made me reject that idea pretty quick.

I’ve loved the work of painter Marko Djurdjevic even before I knew who he actually was. I’d seen Marvel Comics characters painted with incredible style and power, but never caught the name of the artist. It was later that I not only learned who he was, but that I had been seeing his stuff for a long time on one of the art forums I am a member of, conceptart.org (I even have this in my blogroll.) The guy is absolutely amazing and puts pretty much the rest of us to shame. I met Marko at the Wizard World convention in Dallas in 2007, he’s also a really nice guy to boot!

Here is another in the series of fantasy themed greeting cards that I made years ago. When I first approached this project I knew there were some more traditional images that I wanted to hit on. The fireside Christmas Eve family gathering is a well known, if not somewhat overused, holiday image. I wanted to take that and give it a twist by inhabiting the scene with fantasy characters. But what types of characters should I use? There were a number of options, and some (like a family of Orcs) were easy to shoot down… but it still took a little while to decide.

Continuing with my “archives” posts, here is another image from a number of years ago. I met a gentleman who was trying to start his own greeting card company. His idea; to create a line of fantasy themed greeting cards for non-christian holiday worshipers. He was a practicing Pagan and wanted to create cards with more of a seasonal “Yule” theme. Since I have always enjoyed fantasy art I was excited to take up this challenge.

There are two basic forms of chalk art. The first is called Madonnari, this is the traditional form of street painting that began in Italy probably in the 16th century. This is a non-distorted form of art where you attempt to recreate a painting, often one of the renaissance masters and usually with religious themes, as accurately as possible. The other is 3D Street Painting which is a more recent form of the art and uses forced perspective to create the illusion of a 3D object or landscape on the flat pavement (when viewed from a specific angle).