DOOM!

At play with T-Shirts

Did you know that I have a store on TeePublic?

It's nothing huge, I haven't even created a profile avatar or a cover image yet. I've had one on Red Bubble for what seems like a thousand years, too, though I do have a profile image on there... I might use the same one for TeePublic or make a new one for both... I don't know yet.

Here's some of what's on there at the moment...

... plus more!

-Leigh

I don't know why I didn't post this first!

I did a cover for Fabulize Magazine's My Superheroes are Black! Special edition Mixtape issue. Here's the art without all the cover-ness.

If you don't remember, here's the other cover I did for Fabulize (gasp!) 3 years ago!

-Leigh

Hunt of the Wolf

I did a comic story for someone. It took me a while to do (especially for only 6 pages) and after spending so much time working on it, I've grown to both love it and hate it. Because I'm not completely sure this work will ever see the light of day, I'm publishing it here without dialogue because I'm not a monster.

-Leigh

My Adventures with Sketch Lottery Part 3

I've been submitting to the website www.sketchlottery.com.

This was the third drawing, MUNK from Green Lantern.

I'm not a huge GL fan so I've bever heard of the character. I drew him a couple times, one I finshed, one I didn't...

I'm posting a larger version of the one they posted on Sketch Lottery, plus the one I noodled with for a couple of weeks after....

ENJOY!

-L

My Adventures with Sketch Lottery Part 1

I've been submitting to the website www.sketchlottery.com.

This was the first one, SCUD - The Disposable Assassin.

I'm posting a larger version on my site after they post it on Sketch Lottery.

ENJOY!

-L

Another Venom

Did I post a Venom before?

I'm pretty sure I have. Well, here's another...

I love drawing this guy..

I need more of him in my life.

-Me

Dawn of Justice Dark Knight in the Rain

I guess I need to do a Superman one as well.

Hulk

Spidey-MAN, Spidey-MAN...!

It's been a bit.

Here's the finished Spider-Man poster I did with colorist extraordinaire, Justin Wood.

Good things!

I was told by Marvel directly on Facebook that I can't sell it as a print at cons, but I want to see if I can GIVE it away.

We'll see.

- Leigh

Revisiting friendly friends from the neighborhood

I did this a number of years ago.


I was planning on doing this huge Spider-Man poster with an buttload of Spidey villains and supporting cast in the background.  I think what derailed me was The Iron Spider and Civil War because these were seemingly the four most important/recognizable Spidey changes then... BOOM!... Ci-vil WAAAAAR!

It's been sitting in a drive in my studio and then in a folder on my computer. It's also been floating around the net in some places as pencils; the original is long gone. I decided that I wanted to do something with it so I started flatting it with the intention of printing some for the kids I work with.  Now it's talking to me.  Saying sweet things in my ear....

... finish me...

... finish me...

... finish me...


We'll see where I take it. It will be finshed somehow.  Another image incorporating the ideas of this one (I have an idea I'm already toying with) or maybe just inking it, coloring it proper proper and selling it at cons...

... things to think about...


-L

Terra Kaiju! for Joe Badon's Kickstarter

First and foremost, go here and give money:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1857321894/terra-kaiju

Then, look at these!

I started with a layout.  Basically a large thumbnail that I would later blow up and lightbox onto comic board. We chose to do the one on the left.

I penciled it.  I googled the faces of some Japanese peasants from the movie the Seven Samurai.

I inked the bastard!

Color and type all came about from the help of some magic elves. Just kidding... that $@#% took a long time.

I'm going to try selling these on my Etsy page.  Message me for details.  Probably something like $10 plus shipping.  Let me know.

La'ers!

-L

BLOODY PULP MAGAZINE!!!

BLOODY PULP MAGAZINE is returning!

I've been planning this for a while (at least since May, when I purchased the URL from my friend, Jeremy Jusay) and from what I've been working on this is coming together pretty nicely.

A little back story:

BLOODY PULP MAGAZINE was a comic book magazine that was put together by me, Jeremy Jusay and Glenn Urieta back in 2007.  We set out to do a comic that hearkened back to the Golden Age/Silver Age EC Comics which usually dealt in sci-fi, crime, western, horror, romance and war.  We made 1 issue and had plans for others but nothing would gel for any of us so we just sort of started doing our own things.  Jeremy published "Jusay Pulp" and his feature Ghosts of New Wave, Glenn went on to work on his Paper Cut kids property and I went to work on Guardian Knight Presents with my Bugman superhero story.

Now it's a little short of 6 years and I'm trying to get the book together again.  This time I'm working as the Editor-in-Chief with 2 entries and a cover.  Also included will be works by Phillip Lee McCall (he's also writing one of the entries I'm drawing, Shani the Wanderer) and James Groeling (who's webstrip JDGAF is so damn cool).  It's going to be a 60-page black and white monster that I'm planning on selling through Amazon.

I'm really excited about it and I hope you like what's coming up.

Stay Tuned, I'll have some Shani stuff up here or on BloodyPulpMag.com.

laters,

Leigh

The Art of the Sketch!.. or how I learned to to stop worrying and love penciling.

Hiya,

I've been drawing a long time and when I find ways to make it more interesting to do so, I try to stick with it.  Usually, that comes in the form of inking or how I ink or what I ink with.  The W&N series 7 #3 is one of those times I found a tool that really likes me and I stuck with it.

When it comes to penciling, I can't stand it.  I hate the amount of thought and struggle when trying to get the right angle or the right action... it's maddening.  Also, I make the pages dirty with my sinister, left-handedness...

ANY-WAY, I've gone through a dozen or so different techniques to make the actual DRAWING of the page less of a hassle.  The favorite up to this point is the half-page (as I call it).  It's a full comic book page, drawn at half the size of an original and then blown up and light-boxed to create an original.

This was meant to alleviate the amount of time it took to draw a page because all the thinking was done smaller so all the heavy lifting was done in the initial, smaller stage making it, for one, easier to see the whole page as well as the speed in which one can draw a page that measured 5 x 7.5 inches.  It was great.  Also, I believe if you can see what's going on that small then you will be able to see it when it's blown up.. or printed.  That's what counts.

The down side of doing it like this is that there's a bit of time between doing the sketches and doing the finish where you're doing something else.  Whether it's scanning the pages to be blown up or going somewhere to get the pages blown up.  That time, for me, is enough to cool the inspirational fire and even though I can get the page finished, it takes me a bit to get back in the swing of things.

So, because my printer is low on ink, I decided to go back to doing something I used to do in college, that's draw my pages, full-sized, on tracing paper and then transfer those sketches to the board.

It came out, okay.  I used marker to refine what I was thinking in the sketch and it turned into a bit of a mess, but I could see what I was doing so it wasn't that big a deal.  I finally transferred the image to board and inked and... Voila!

It worked.... and what's best was I rode that drawing buzz all the way through the end of the piece.  AMAZING!  I'd forgotten how much fun it was.  I did one, so I decided to do another...

This time, it was comics shaped; 10 x 15 live area border on a 14 x 17 piece of tracing paper with intentions on putting it on a same sized piece of Bristol with a slight kid finish.

I did the sketch on the tracing paper (made a few mistakes, erased the whole image and redrew it on the same piece of paper without missing a beat, I was rolling) and tightened up some of the looser bits with a brush pen.

I liked it. Time to transfer.

Not bad.  I started inking, one thing led to another...

I feel like this step being more immediately followed by the transfer led me to wanting to try and experiment.  I used to do a lot of experimenting with my pages when I was in school and I think it was because I went straight from layout to page without the in-between time of looking for a photocopier.  It makes for a much tougher job when traveling (I'm thinking in those instances it's going to be computer or back to the half page) but while I'm in the studio, this is going to be my mode of travel for the foreseeable future...

... also, it gives me more possible things to sell.  ;)

-Leigh

Hulk commission-inks and color

Pencils: James Stone inks and color: me

Arms, a leg, a couple of faces, boobs and The Savage Dragon

It's over, Prime!

So I finished Megatron.

This was a really tricky drawing.  I haven't really drawn robots since I was a kid watching Voltron on channel 11 after school. Activate Inter-locks, indeed!

I approached it digitally, at first.  Then when I became dissatisfied with how it was coming out, I did a "real world" version that came out kinda fun.  On scanning the drawing, I found out that the marker I used to sketch it in showed up in the scans... I mean BIG time.  So back to the drawing board and back to Photoshop.  I inked him in and... well, not baaad.  I wasn't completely happy with his pose but to make me happy, I would have to redraw the whole sumnabitch so I just let it go (that's what you gotta learn kids, how to "let it go!")

Okay, Inking's done... I crop off the feet because I didn't develop them all that much so, poof, they're gone. I start doing flats which I always do in Photoshop and give a simple light source using the PS brushes with grey on a multiply layer.  Then I put the drawing away and work on something else.

I come BACK and looking at the piece, decide I want to finish it in Painter.  The brushes in Painter do some funky things and give me more options with how to mix colors or texture the picture, so I pick a custom brush I made from a pen and start scribblin' away at Meggy until he looks like something and voila!

It came out pretty okay. There are things I think I would still do different but, I let it go.  I'll probably revisit drawing Meggy when I finally do an Optimus Prime drawing a friend of mine asked for... cough (two years ago) cough!  Sorry...

So I hope y'all likes.  I'll seeya again soon.

Bah-weep-gra-nah-weep-nitty-bong!

So I'm working on a quick Megatron drawing for THWP (The Hourly Web Planet)as well as trying to finish Trey issue 2. This is what I sketched but I might do some changes based on the idea that I am not injecting enough of myself into the illustration. Hell, if Michael Bay can do it...

Eddie Campbell's Graphic Novel Manifesto

I found this while reading Eddie Campbell's blog.

What? You don't know who Eddie Campbell is? He's a Scottish cartoonist/illustrator/comic booker who I first came to know when I bought an issue of a comic called Bacchus. He's also known for being co-creator/creator on such titles as From Hell and Alec and a bunch of other stuff I have yet to read but, I'll get to it.

Anyway, in his blog entry, he mentioned a manifesto he wrote about the Graphic Novel. Apparently, the term is met with a bit of disdain in comic creator circles (which I didn't know, for shame!) and in trying to avoid argument over what is meant by "graphic novel" he set out to write this manifesto. It's quite good. I plan to print it on nice paper and hang it on my wall.

I swiped it from donmcdonald.com, by the way. He posted it with a much better introduction to Mr. Campbell and the publication history of the manifesto than I did, so give it a look when you have a minute.

Here goes nothing:

There is so much disagreement (among ourselves) and misunderstanding (on the part of the public) around the subject of the graphic novel that it’s high time a set of principles were laid down.

1. Graphic novel is a disagreeable term, but we will use it anyway on the understanding that ‘graphic’ has nothing to do with graphics and that ‘novel’ does not mean anything to do with ‘novel’. (in the same way that ‘Impressionism’ is not really an applicable term, in fact it was first used as an insult and then adopted in a spirit of defiance.)

2. Since we are not referring to the traditional literary novel, we do not hold that the graphic novel should be of the supposed same dimensions or physical weight. Thus subsidiary terms such as ‘novella’ and ‘novelette’ are of no use here and will only serve to confuse onlookers as to our goal (see below), causing them to think we are creating an illustrated version of standard literature when in fact we have bigger fish to fry, that is, we are forging a whole new art which will not be a slave to the arbitrary rules of an old one.

3. Graphic novel signifies a movement rather than a form. Thus we may refer to ‘antecedents’ of the graphic novel, such as Lynd Ward’s woodcut novels but we are not interested in applying the name retroactively.

4. While the graphic novelist regards his various antecedents as geniuses and prophets without whose work he could not have envisioned his own, he does not want to be obliged to stand in line behind William Hogarth’s Rake’s Progress every time he obtains a piece of publicity for himself or the art in general.

5. Since the term signifies a movement, or an ongoing event, rather than a form, there is nothing to be gained by defining it or ‘measuring’ it. It is approximately thirty years old, though the concept and name had been bandied about for at least ten years earlier. As it is still growing it will in all probability have changed its nature by this time next year.

6. The goal of the graphic novelist is to take the form of the comic book, which has become an embarrassment, and raise it to a more ambitious and meaningful level. This normally involves expanding its size, but we should avoid getting into arguments about permissible size. If an artist offers a set of short stories as his new graphic novel, (as Eisner did withContract with God) we should not descend to quibbling. We should only ask whether his new graphic novel is a good or bad set of short stories. If he or she uses characters that appear in another place, such as Jimmy Corrigan’s various appearances outside of the core book, or Gilbert Hernadez’ etc. or even characters that we do not want to allow into our imaginary ‘secret society’, we shall not dismiss them on this account. If their book no longer looks anything like comic books we should not quibble as to that either. We should only ask whether it increases the sum total of human wisdom.

7. The term graphic novel shall not be taken to indicate a trade format (such as ‘tradepaperback’ or ‘hardcover’ or ‘prestige format’). It can be in unpublished manuscript, in partbooks or other serialisation. The important thing is the intent, even if the intent arrives after the original publication.

8. The graphic novelists’ subject is all of existence, including their own life. He or she disdains the cliches of ‘genre fiction’, though they try to keep an open mind. They are particulary resentful of the notion, still prevalent in many places, and not without reason, that the comic book is a sub-genre of science fiction or heroic fantasy.

9. Graphic novelists would never think of using the term graphic novel when speaking among their fellows. They would normally just refer to their ‘latest book’ or their ‘work in progress’ or ‘that old potboiler’ or even ‘comic’ etc. The term is to be used as an emblem or an old flag that is brought out for the call to battle or when mumbling an enquiry as to the location of a certain section in an unfamiliar bookstore. Publishers may use the term over and over until it means even less than the nothing it means already. Furthermore, graphic novelists are well aware that the next wave of cartoonists will choose to work in the smallest possible forms and will ridicule us all for our pomposity.

10. the graphic novelist reserves the right to deny any or all of the above if it means a quick sale.

Sketch Cards and NEXT!

I remember when I got my new driver's licence, I saw the expiration date was in 2010. I remember thinking how close to the end of the world that is. It seemed like forever away.

So when 2010 passed, I then thought, "Shit! I forgot to renew my license!"

*ahem*

My point is I just finished 50 sketch cards I promised to the Treasure Chest of Art Charity Project. The deadline is Tuesday, March 15 and it felt like those cards were sitting on my dining room table for 18 hundred years. They're done and they're brilliant! I'm so happy with them and I'm happy it's for charity. Anyway... here they be:

Also, I did a Ninja Turtles puzzle with sketch cards that came out much better than expected. Here:

So what's next?

After I finish this painting...

... I'm going to jump onto some comics projects that have been collecting dust in the military warehouse of my brain next to the Ark of the Covenant. One of them is very dear to my heart. I think it's because I believe that there are not enough general audience comic books out there that this is something I am REALLY interested in pulling off.

And, of course, when it's ready, I'll start posting art from it on here.

laterz