More inks!

Continuing the series showing the creation of a cover, from sketch to finish, here are the inks for the Athena: Grey Eyed Goddess cover.

We interrupt this regularly scheduled blog...

A nice surprise today, as the good folks at Publishers Weekly had a little blurb about my recent comic at Smithmag.com. It's nice when the little things get noticed.

Inks!

Continuing the sequence of the creation of a cover, from rough sketch to finish, here are the final inks for the cover to Zeus: Father of the Gods.

Olympians covers, finished pencils

As promised, here are the finished pencils for the two cover sketches I posted yesterday. It's worth mentioning that these are a bit more polished than the state I normally bring my own pencils to- I normally save most of the drawing for the inking phase. Covers, of course, are so important to the health of your finished book that I wanted to be extra sure that everything was working nicely on them before inks.





On the day I did these, there was something about the Zeus cover on the right that was bugging me. The general consensus around the studios was that there were few things that could stand tweaking, but mostly it was a good piece. For me, however, that drawing had gone past the tipping point of no salvation, and instead I opted to draw a whole new cover the next day. I rarely do anything like that, but when I do, I almost always feel like I did the right thing later.





The eagle eyed amongst you will notice that the head of Medusa has been amped up a bit since the sketches I posted yesterday. Things like that will change throughout the whole process. I can tell you, for instance, that Athena's head will be a mite bit smaller in the inked piece.

Cover Sketches

So here's something. Above are the newly approved sketches for what will be the covers of the first two books in the Olympians series, Zeus: Father of the Gods and Athena: Grey-Eyed Goddess. I'm hoping to take you readers through the steps involved in creating these covers, from sketch to final finished artwork. Watch this space for finished pencils,inks, colors, etc.

My new comic at Smithmag.com

Click on the link for an explanation of the above illustration. It's from my new comic at Smithmag,com, a part of their Next Door Neighbor series of autobiographical stories, and I promise you, you will never look at me the same way again.

Olympians, the Poster!

So guess what? The series I've been talking on this blog about forever is now just called Olympians. Who needs the the?



Who can name all 14 principle characters?

Nifty Titan

I came across this file the other day-- I don't remember when I scanned it or why, but I will say this-- it's a pretty nifty drawing.

Titans on the rampage

I've had these up on Facebook for a couple of days now and thought that I should post them here as well. A two page spread of the Titans going ape while they scour the earth for the Olympians. These are some of my favorite pages, made more so by the fact that they weren't included in the original dummy for Zeus; I needed to rework some bits and just drew these out, bam, with no sketches or anything. That rarely happens for me.

Better late than never...

Check out the cool article on Seth Kushner and Christopher Irving's blog for their upcoming book project Graphic NYC, all about cartoonists in the NYC.

This particular article's about me, ahem ;)

Kronos, yelling

Spent an enormous amount of time trying to upload this picture, but Blogger is being sucky. When I started, this picture of Kronos was smiling.

Zeus, flying

Detail from a panel of Zeus: Father of the Gods. His leg kinda bothers me, but I dig the shape of the lightning.