The Expendables W.I.P.

This is a flick Stallone is making (think The Wild Geese). It features a bunch of 80's action icons as well as some more modern ones. A friend of mine told me about it and said I should take a look at the movie poster for it. He said he 'd love to see my take on it so here I am - in the midst of it...

I still have to draw the tattoo for the muscle-dudes back and of course there's the color....

UPDATED!

This is my final update of the piece originally posted HERE. I knew from the get go that it needed some work and I finally got around to fixing her up.
So the adjustments to the piece are as follows:
*by making the gas giant planet seem less flat
*adding in a little atmospheric glow to the dark side of each planet
* by making the original background photo manipulation a little more crisp and vibrant
I really dug this when I first put her together and I like her even more now with these updates. I feel this piece can now hold it's own against the THIS one.
This piece was done first and as such suffered (suffers) from my lack of positioning on the experience bell curve. But I really like how the updates benefit the work.

The Mirage Nebula with Planets

This is a mix of some line art elements and photo manipulations. The "nebula" started its life as a photograph of some smoldering coals and ashes at a coffee house/hooka bar here in Mid-Town.
The planets are manipulated photographs of textures I took.
The close star in the midst of a coronal mass ejection is the same.
The stars are an actual Hubble shot of star cluster Messier 67.

I just love space shots.

Birthday Card...

...For my bud Julie. I missed her birthday party and I know shes got an outstanding sense of the absurd with a particular love of dinosaurs. So I says to myself, self, what could be better then a space dinosaur fighting off alien ships with a ray gun? What could be better? Nothing! That's what. So I did up this little guy and had it printed.
Pencils and inks took about 2 and a half hours total.

From the Sketchbook

So I really dig old school Scooby-Doo. I was watching a marathon of it on the Cartoon Network a few weeks back and was doodling out some of the villains in my sketchbook as the episodes played.
This guy (The "Spooky Space Kook" minus the little bubble space helmet) was in an episode where a guy was trying to buy up land near an old abandoned military air field because he heard they were going to reopen it and real estate in the area was about to to be at a premium.
Man I loved that show.

Go Team Venture!

So the super kill-guy Brock Samson is one of my favorite characters from The Venture Bros. on Cartoon Networks Adult Swim. The cartoon in general is pretty outstandingly funny but this guy in particular kinda makes the show in my humble opinion.

I really wanted to do a drawing based on the character and set it up in a style like that of the opening credits. It's different of course but the single character splash shot with the venture logo and the characters name along with my color choices make it similar to the shots in the opening credits of the show.

I had originally just draw Brock in my sketchbook (for fun) but I liked how it came out so I decided to use it. I like how the finished product turned out here but I feel like it does need a little something more - maybe a pattern of some sort behind the figure to give it some "umph".

Pencils, inks and color all took about 4 to 4 and a half hours in total.

Batman in the Cemetary

This is a re-work of an older drawing I had done some time ago. I liked the original concept but didnt like how I executed it.

In all honesty I only like this one slightly more.
I think that perhaps with a really top notch colorist it could turn out pretty cool though.

Abominable

"Abominable" was a really bad made for t.v. movie on the sci-fi channel.
It was basically about these folks up in the woods in these neighboring cabins who are being harassed and attacked by monsters. Though as one character pointed out they are not Sasquatch - more like the aggressive Abominable Snowman of the Himalayas. I guess this explained why they were biting peoples faces off.

Anyway this little drawing is not representational of how the monster looked in the movie - it's just what popped into my head when I was sketching in my book after I watched that film.
I was feeling unoriginal and latched onto the "Abominable" part...

GOB DDR Gallery Piece

This is the work I'm submitting to the GOB Magazine/DDR Galleries show.
I arranged these side by side so one could get a feel for the works wall presence.

Framed dimensions are as follows:
Large piece 20x20 (1 inch frame - 4 inch mat - 10 inch image area)

Small piece 13x13 (1 inch frame - 3 inch mat - 5 inch image area)

The work is a bit of social commentary on the auto industry, General Motors and their bankruptcy.

Fill in the blanks...

Prep Work

This is the "key image" for one part of a digital diptych print I am making for the one night only G.O.B./D.D.R. House of Art Show this coming July 3rd. There is lots of work left to do on it yet.
Its a social commentary piece about the auto industry and the bail out/bankruptcy of General Motors.

Handy

As of last week when I drew this it was the first thing I had drawn in about a month.
From pencils to inks and digital color it took about 4 and a half hours to do.

The Show

So this is the promotion for the show I was invited to take part in on July 3rd.
It should be a lot of fun though I must admit I'm scrambling for ideas as far as submittable work goes.
*sigh*

Queensryche - Revolution Calling

This is another piece based on the Queensryche album Operation: mindcrime.

Revolution Calling is the title of one of the songs on the album. I was thinking I may do a piece for every song on the album but I'm not sure yet...

The Universe

This piece is a mix of traditional drawing elements, digital elements and photo manipulation.
The watery redish planet was hand drawn and colored in photoshop while the red gas giant was done entirely digitally. The space / nebula background is my photo manipulation piece The Herbold Nebula .
While I really like how this turned out I think I may change the background to something a little crisper so it matches the sharpness of the planets a little bit better.

Stargate: Anti-Trust

This is just a little cover mock-up for an idea I've had rattling about in my head for a little while now.

As I've stated before I really dig the Stargate franchise and in the series Stargate SG-1 there was a group called "The Trust". Basically they were a shadow group that continually conspired to use the stargate and the technology the SGC procured for their own benefit - and by "benefit" I mean "pocketbook".

Anyway I just wanted to flesh out this idea a little so I thought I'd post it here.

Bugs

I was drawing the other night with no real purpose.
This is what came out.
I may think of something profound to say about it at a later date. If I do you'll be the first - - well, the second to know.
From pencils to inks and digital color it took about four and a half to five hours to get to this point.

Stargate - Sobek

In the Stargate franchise they frequently used ancient Egyptian gods as the villains.

Sobek is an ancient Egyptian god that was never used as a villain in the program. In Egyptian art he was frequently portrayed as a man with a crocodiles head, hence the Jaffa armor on the right.

For those who are unfamiliar with the franchise the Jaffa are basically the slaves of the main villains, the Gou'auld.

Their foot soldiers frequently wore body armor that reflected who it was they served.

Operation: mindcrime

Queensryches album Operation: mindcrime is, in my humble opinion, the single greatest rock/metal album of all time.
I know some would disagree but like I said, IMHO...

This is a work in progress - there is more detail to be added and of course color which I may or may not do myself (depending on whether I can get an acquaintance to work for compliments...)

For those unfamiliar with the album each song tells the story of a guy who's life went from bad to worse as he gets wrapped up in an underground criminal revolutionary movement he can't escape because of his addictions and the fact that Dr. X has him under his control because "Dr. X is the man with the cure".
The three characters portrayed here are (from left to right) Dr. X, Nikki and Mary.

Solomon Grundy

I first heard of Solomon Grundy on an old episode of the Ghostbusters cartoon back in the 80's.

Egon gets possessed by this spirit and goes on a rampage after appearing as a guest on some news/talk show.

I loved that cartoon...

Anyway I always thought it was a nice creepy sounding name and wanted to draw a character and call him "Solomon Grundy".

But I realized I had no idea what the origin of the name was so I did what any industrious young man would do.

I went to wikipedia.

Heres what they had to say about it:

"Solomon Grundy" is a 19th century children's nursery rhyme, and was presented by James Orchard Halliwell-Phillipps in 1842. The poem is essentially a riddle in which the life of Solomon Grundy appears to take place in the process of a single week, the answer being that each day's events represent the seven ages of man.
The rhyme reads:
Solomon Grundy,
Born on a Monday,
Christened on Tuesday,
Married on Wednesday,
Took ill on Thursday,
Grew worse on Friday,
Died on Saturday,
Buried on Sunday.
That was the end of
Solomon Grundy.

Superman

Up, up and away...