Kunoichi, part 2

Welcome back everyone. Hope you all are having a good Tuesday.

It's beautiful and sunny here, and I'm looking forward to my drive home. Windows down, music blasting. Absolutely my favorite summer activity.

Anyway, today's sketch is the continuation of the Kunoichi piece. I have added cleaner lines over top of the image, and have started some rough coloring. Her skin, hakama, shin and arm covers, as well as her chest wrapping have received their basic coloring. I wanted to get more done for today's update, but them's the breaks.

See you all back here for the next installment in the sketch-by-steps.

Kunoichi, part 1

Hi everyone.

Hope you all had a great weekend. I'm completely spent after my daughter's 1st birthday on Sunday, but it was a lot of fun. Lots of smiles and laughs, not just from her. What an amazing event, that I really never thought I'd be a part of.

Anyway, enough parental gushing. Today's piece was going to be more finalized, but I thought that doing a progression of a piece might be fun. So today is the rough sketch of a kunoichi character.

Tomorrow I will refine her and work on the finished lines.

Hope to see you all back here for Kunoichi, part 2.

Have a great evening.

Friday's Sketch, a day late and a dollar short

Hi everyone. Due to the fact that I was unable to finish Friday's sketch on time, and the fact that my girl and daughter are still sleeping, I decided to finish the sketch this morning.

How I landed on a Kratos sketch was simply due to the fact that every sketch of a woman I was trying to do before hand was looking like crap. I had a few good ideas, but way more bad ones. But even the good ideas ended up being executed poorly. So, after my 20th or so screen clear I just let the pen do the work and ended up with an action pose. After working on it for a little while, I decided that it really should be of Kratos - the BADASS from the God of War video game series.

I think I might start another theme for the sketches next week and draw some of my favorite game characters. That could be fun.

Anyway, I hope you all have a good weekend. And please forgive this lowly 'artist' another late posting.

PS: I've included one of the bad sketches I did, and saved. Just to prove how poorly things were going before this sketch.

Deadly little Miho

Hi everyone. I have to make this quick as I'm running late to get home.

Today's picture is of everyone's favorite hooker-assassin from Old Town, Sin City. Miho. She's probably one of my favorite 'bad girl' characters. Even though she doesn't say a word, she's one of the most vibrant and alive characters in the book series.

Gotta love her.

And to make up for the missing post yesterday, another random sketch from yor.

See ya all back here tomorrow.

Dragged to the abyss

You know what's awesome? Missing a posting due to a hectic day. Oh well, I had a great father's day weekend.

Today's sketch was inspired by browsing through Bruce Timm drawings. I really wish I had a fraction of his ability to use markers. Seriously, he has to be my favorite character designer of all time. You all have seen his work on the Batman and Superman animated series. But he also drew some of the comics that came inside He-Man toys back in the day. The guy is a drawing powerhouse, and one of my artistic heroes.

I hope you all enjoy today's sketch. It was done very quickly, but I think its pretty fun.

See you all back here tomorrow for another installment of ninjaboy's sketch-a-day.

Weapon X

Sometimes inspiration appears without any real triggers, or warning. Such is the case with today's drawing.

Originally I was trying to sketch out a jedi woman entering combat in a dramatic way (there hasn't been many actual action shots in this blog) but nothing was working the way I had it in my mind. And after the 5th screen clear I just decided to start sketching.

The results of this freeform doodle is a sketch of Weapon X.

Cool comic. Awesome art. Great character origin (I call it an origin as it explains how Logan became Wolverine, not because of his Origins comic from a few years ago).

As Logan was a man with few words in that story I'll keep this brief. Hope you all like it, and I'll try to do something more exciting tomorrow.

See you next time.

Jesse and Tulip

Welcome back everyone.

Today's piece is a fan sketch of the two main characters from Vertigo's book Preacher.

It's been quite some time since I've read the entire story (probably since '98 or '99) but I have read the first two trades within the last 2 years. And one of my coworkers brought in the first issue today. It made me miss the book. This was one of those series that really shook up my comic book reading. Preacher is a kick in the 'junk', and while you're down it buys you a new house.

Garth Ennis planted an elbow in between my eyes and I still haven't recovered from the blow. It was such a visceral experience, following Jesse on his quest to find god (literally, not figuratively) and he did some things that really made me mad. And laugh. Hard. And cheer. And groan.

It was everything a graphic novel experience should be.

I really feel like Preacher set the bar for all of his future work, and everything I've read since then has really been a continuation of what he accomplished with this book. Only more over the top.

Anyway, I felt like I had to do a sketch of Jesse and Tulip. So I hope you all enjoy it.

See ya back here tomorrow for more sketchy fun.

Revisiting the Ranger

Hi everyone.

I had a really busy day yesterday, so I have to apologize for another missed posting. I'll try to make up for it by doing a 2nd piece tonight if I have time. I'm going to have the house to myself for the evening, so if I don't get caught up in cleaning I'll try and get another piece done.

I managed to find a few moments here and there today to put together this quick sketch. I ended up revisiting the Ranger I sketched Friday. This is a little bit of a different look for the character, but I'm having fun with him. Hopefully I'll come upon a design I like a lot.

I'm also playing around with a new style of Photoshop drawing, where I'm doing a loose layout on one layer to get a pose I like, then I'm adding details to a layer above it.

Anyway, hope you all had a great weekend and I'll see you all back here tomorrow.

That Moment (Friday Bonus)

I know what you're thinking. Woah dude, this sure is a departure from your usual fare of daily sketches. Indeed, it is.

I always have been, a hopeless romantic. One of my dream projects is to illustrate and write/cowrite a story about the romance between Peter Parker/Spiderman and Mary Jane. They've been my favorite comic book 'couple' for as long as I can remember (hear that Quesada, an old fan of Spiderman LIKED them together!!!), and I've always enjoyed reading about their relationship trials. Especially while married. It's always struck me how powerful their love must have been for them to stay together through all of the chaos and torment that the life Spiderman brings home.

Anyway, I was listening to some Prince while I was sketching and before I knew it I had drawn a pair of young lovers. Of course they're both over 18. Get your mind out of the gutter. :P

This was actually started yesterday, but I didn't decide to finish it until today. I'm actually rather partial to it. I think it turned out pretty cute.

Anyway, I just got some good news that I won't be working this weekend, so on that note I bid you all a fantastic weekend.

The Murky Wood

Happy Friday everyone. I downloaded the free version of Puzzle Quest on the iPhone yesterday, and even though I have only played a few minutes of the game, I was already inspired to draw a ranger. Perhaps I'll refine the character and make it 'my' ranger from the game. But we'll see what happens.

Once again, this was done in CS3 on my MacBook using my Bamboo tablet.

Hope you all have a great weekend. I'm not exactly sure what my will bring, but I'm hoping to see some good music late this evening.

Have fun and I'll see you all back here on Monday.