Rockin Robin

So here is the next in my series of teen titans. Two versions of boy wonder, cause the fist out in front didn't really work for me without something in it. I rushed through this drawing because my schedule is crazy busy the next few days. Maybe I'll find time to draw the incredima hulk at some point. Probably not a lot of posting between now and monday.

hope you guys are well.

jwalk

Man you just beasted on him.

Being A school teacher, I get hit with new teenage slang just about everyday. I've mananged to assimilate some of it into my vocabulary while selectively avoiding other examples. I've also managed to take a few things back from the slang of previous Generations. For example, I use JIVE and DIG much the same way they were used in the generations before me and for the most part I've seen some of my students begin to use them as well over the last three years. That being said two of the more recent examples that my tennis players are using include Coke or Cokeing (Both of which are used as verbs) and Beast beasted, or beasting the first of the three being used both as a verb and a noun while the last two up to this point are strictly verbs, but anything is possible. To coke someone is to rule them, to outdo them so severly that those around them who witness the "coking" feel sorry for them or pity them. An example would be to win a service game in a tennis match with just your serve. Another example would be to tackle a player in a football game so hard that his helmet flies off. You got coked if this has happened to you. If you are the one who does the "coking" then you could be referred to as a "Beast" in that you "beasted" on the guy you served the aces to. The act of doing this is referred to as "Beasting." It can also be used like the following sentance. "Man, you were beasting on that kid!"

Some other gems I've heard lately from my studio mate include the mantra for the rising generation of american students "I ain't did nuttin" and "ooh can had dat" and my favorite piece of jargain that refers to a person who needs a haircut "Man, you ain't got no edges."

Whatever....here is beastboy. I need a coke. Save your money, tomorrow looks bleak.

jwalk

Teen titans go

It's amazing how much Japanese Animation has saturated our artistic culture. Characters like the Titans really have never held their own until they took them and put big googly eyes on them and put them on Cartoon Network. When I showed this to one of my students earlier today, he freaked out and really couldn't believe I'd draw a character like Cyborg. I was digging this character way back when the Kenner Super Powers Toyline and Cartoon were on TV and in Stores. I lost my affinity for him over the years and not I see green when I'm drawing him. Hoping that the Titans Print I have in mind will garner me enough Dough to pay for a steak or two this summer at the cons. I did the initial sketch of him in practically no time but the inks took a little longer once I'd actually gotten him scanned.

Hope you guys dig. I'll probably get all the titans I plan to include in this illo done before I color them so I can keep the colors and lighting consistant. Next up, probably Beast Boy or Changeling as they called him back in the day when kids were smart enough to understand what that meant.

Hope you are well.

best

JWalk

Having a blast

I love the Primary Colors. They are just beautiful, and they always look good together in my opinion if they are used correctly. So I jump at a chance to use them with a character whose costume can be manipulated to use them with. I think these turned out well. I did a little more rendering than I have in recent posts. I'm not sure if I'm digging it or not. I've been toying around with adding a third value in to my colorings. Not sure if i want to go that root or not. Anyway, this was a blast to color, no pun intended and I'm still excited about what is coming. Not sure which character is in the pipeline. last time I said something about Captain Marvel and the Black Adam and you guys got the Creeper and Adam Strange. I won't speculate this time, but Instead I'll start sketching and see what happens. Hope you guys are well. Looking forward to seeing more art from those of you that make art soon.

Incidentally, The reversed colors come as a result of posting CMYK mode jpegs to the web. I figured out that they need to be posted in RGB.....Duh!. Still looks cool in a happy accident sort of way.

Best
JWALK

Strange Days

Here is another one of those goofy seventies characters that I love. I had this pose for Adam Strange in my head for a few years now and if you were to look back through my old sketchbooks you'd find a lot of failed attempts at putting it down on paper. Not sure this attempt is much better but I'm working through my anal retentiveness to just let somethings go with my art and try to produce more material instead of fretting over the small stuff. This guy was fun and I'm looking forward to the coloring phase. Should make a nice entry for the summer sketchbook.

Hope you guys are well.

best

JWalk

Creeper Colors

Two versions of this one. The lighter reds were the first draft, but I had some contrast issues with the Creeper's hair and his fur whatever you call that thing. So I did some darker reds. What do you think?

Beware the Creeper

I've always liked the design of the Creeper. I'm not sure who first developed him, but he has that definitive 70's design aesthetic that I love and I always enjoy seeing characters that havn't been modernized by armor and tech stuff. He's just cool and he has a cool color scheme that I'm looking forward to working with. This should be fun.

I've concluded that original and unique poses are a thing of the past. There is nothing extraordinary about this pose. So after about 45 attempts at coming up with something original, I went with this. I'm anxious to do more work with this character so I'll probably work a little more on him before I move on to my next sketch. Hopefully I'll have colors to post for him soon.

Hope you guys are all well.

best

jWalk

Wolverine Colors

Since you guys seemed to like this sketch a lot more than I expected I came back to it this morning and threw some colors in. I think he turned out ok. Its something for the sketchbook this summer if nothing else. Thinking about busting out a Captain Marvel or a Black Adam next. Maybe both. We'll see what happens. I'm off to my sketchbook.

later

jwalk

Just playing around.

So I drew this guy today just to draw something. I'm a little burned on the Odyssey designs so I'm going to put them down for a few days and come back to them to probably revamp each character according to suggestions from friends over the last few weeks. In the meantime, I'm gonna bang out a few characters that I feel like drawing. Maybe they'll end up in a print, maybe not. We'll see what comes out. I like this pose, and I think with some tweaking and probably some reference I could make something out of it. In the meantime, try not to hold the flaws in this against me.

Saw Watchmen this weekend. I was pretty disappointed. For a novel that was ahead of it's time, this movie surely wasn't. I think they did a good job telling the story , especially considering it was such a monumental story, but in the grand scheme of things, the story was not something to be translated into a movie. It fell short of really creating any tension at all. The world was supposedly about to end and I could have cared less. The rorschach scenes were fun, but the rest I could have lived without. On top of this, a lot of the Violence and Sex were gratuitous and unnecessary. In fact, the scene between NiteOwl and Spectre was probably the most gratuitous scene I've seen in a movie in a while. It hinted at pornography and that's something we don't really need to start accepting in our films. A little here, a little there and eventually, it will escalate like the gore and violence in Slasher films has in recent years. The two films I've seen by this director were both weakened by the sex scenes.

Just cut the crap and make a better film. It the action is there and the story is compelling, it doesn't need this extra stuff to entice the viewer.

Enjoy Wolverine...or not

Tesla Lines

A first draft of Tesla, the Mad Scientist/Inventor Guy from Odyssey. I don't know where this guy is going but I doubt this will be the last draft. We'll see.

Been watching some trailers on Apple.com today. Tarentino's Inglorious Basterds is on there. I don't know if this movie will be entertaining or not. I'll be seeing it, but I'm afraid it will devolve into a sadistic mess where each consecutive scene trys to top the previous with gore, and sadism.

We'll see.

Watchmen tomorrow.

Can't wait.

jwalk

Beware the Scarab???

So here are a few versions of the scarab with the face being what is different. This guys is supposed to be a cross between the shadow and the spider and I threw some Jonah Hex in as well. The Gun will probably change as soon as Matt sends me a scan or a discription of what the hell a "hell" pistol is. Until then, he's sporting a Flash Gordon ray gun.

Watchmen is this weekend. I'm looking forward to seeing this and more than that, just hanging out with my buds at a movie. Seems like we don't do this nearly enough anymore. I'll see you guys soon enough.

Who watches the watchmen..... Well, most of America probably will this weekend.

hope you guys are well.
jwalk

Hulk Smash

So I loved the Hulk movie last summer. Amazing considering Ihavn't hated a movie as much as I hated the first hulk since that Casper Van Dien movie "Modern Vampires." But the 2008 Relaunch was fantastic and outside of a few phoned in performances one being by Mr. Tim "I might be Overated" Roth, I really enjoyed this flick. So I did this hulk as part of a larger print last summer and I'll have the finished one for sale again at Heroes this year. Since I missed megacon, I'll really be ready to cut loose in Charlotte. Anywayz, this one is a little dated and I think my style and just my ability to draw has improved since I did this one but I wanted to post something new today and I'm not feeling the character designs I have left for Odyssey right now. Hope you guys are well.

Get Carter

So I couldn't wait to color this guy. I think the color definitely helps in the case of this design. He'll be fun to draw when we actually get to the sequentials.

Hope you guys are well.

best

JWalk

Carter

I decided to take a break from the pencil, ink and color routine to get back to just penciling and inking for a day or so. Sometimes I find myself away from the drawing board and unable to actually pencil or scan so. I still want to be productive during these times and as I always take my laptop with me, I decided to build up a little cache of drawing that need some color added. I don't want the build up too much color work for myself but I doesn't hurt to have a couple drawings in the can for those days when I can't really draw.

So I busted out this Carter. Carter is based on Edgar Rice Burroughs John Carter, the uberwarrior that battles on mars with lots of naked women hanging around. While I certainly respect the awesome illustrative talents of the artists like Frazetta that have depicted Carter before, they alway drew him in these leather briefs with some kind of X-strap going across his chest etc. It's a little....well, I just didn't want to draw a mostly naked man all the time when I was working and the Carter depictions felt a little more homo-erotic than the tarzan stuff. So I tried to take elements from what I'd seen of John Carter and incorporate them into a design that is more children friendly. The blade he holds is called the shift blade and while I could have gone Manga Crazy with it, and made it 10 feet long with 18 different blades emerging from the single blade, I decided to be a little more subtle and hint at it's shifting ability.

Not much new going on. Trying to work things out with the Wife's Car. I also recently watched Hercules and Atlantis from Disney again. Beautiful and influential movies. I havn't really paid much attention to the disney stuff, but as I've pursued a more economical and animated style, I've begun to be really influenced by them.

Hope you guys are well.

Spread the word about the blog. I need more criticism.

best

Jwalk

Dent

So this is Dent. He's kind of the guy who chronicles the exploits of oddysey and his companions. He was fun to draw and pretty easy. I was told to draw Teddy Roosevelt. Voila. Looking forward to busting out some colors on this guy. Hope you are all well. Those of you that draw, It'd be nice to see some new art one of these days.

take her easy. As always, constructive criticism is appreciated.

best

jwalk

Bearded Grimshaw

So a beard was suggested.... what do you guys think.

Thanksgiving Doc Oc.

Guess he wanted the drumstick.

This guy is part of a much larger spiderman print I'll have forsale at heroes this summer. The print also features spiderman, betty brant, Robbie, J Jonah Jameson, and the annoying nerdy guy that shows up in the spiderman movies

Putting it in perspective

So I've had one heck of a week. It started with a simple conflict of scheduling between what I really wanted to do and what I wanted to do. MegaCon and my tennis teams Jekylly Island tournament were scheduled on the same weekend. Bummer, no megacon cause I'm contractually obligated to be at my Teams tournament. I resolved myself to the fact that I would miss what has traditionally been one of the highlights of my year for the last decade. Cut to Valentines day when my wife's grandmother had a series of sever strokes which would culminate in her passing away this tuesday while I was at yet another tennis match. The funeral was scheduled for friday which meant I couldn't travel with the team to Jekyll until after said funeral. My sister's father also passed thursday evening which meant I had two funerals to attend within a few days.

After Mrs. Gladys's funeral friday I left Wrightsville wich is almost in the center of the state to travel to Jekyll Island which is in the southeast corner of the state. My boys lost their first round match due to a handycapping situation that prohibited our #2 singles player from playing until the Basketball teams season ended. That being said, the boys sucked it up and rained pain down upon the next two teams they played saturday. I traveled back Saturday night and arrived home, my wife still in Wrightsville at her parents. With my sister's funeral scheduled for sunday, I went to bed without really taking time to catch up with my wife or talk with her about all that she's been through this week.

Sunday morning will waiting for her to get home so we could go to the second funeral, I received a phone call from her in which she was gasping for breath and crying uncontrollably. She finally choked out that she'd had a wreck. I my mind, the gasping and crying meant she was injured and I thought I was listening to the love of my life's last few moments on earth. God blessed me, as Crystal emerged from this accident relatively unscathed but he also reminded me that my life could be so much worse and of how very important this woman is to me. It's all a matter of perspective. I was focusing on how frustrating and crazy things were, and I was quickly reminded how bad they could be. Go home and kiss and hug the people you love. Life is fragile.

Here's colors for Lord Grimshaw.