Secret Invasion

Here's a secret: this Secret Invasion Sketch Cover is on eBay right now. If you're interested, go have a look here.

Birthday Girl

Unbelievably, my daughter turns six years old today. The painting above was done when she was four, and I never got around to finshing it. I doubt I'll do any more work on it though, since I would rather do a new one if I can ever find the time.

Today also sees the release of Captain America #38, but there will be no cake involved-

Iron Man 2

Another piece of Iron Man liscencing art from 2004 (again, I only supplied the pencils) that was painted by Scott Johnson -







The Iron Man figure and the cityscape background were done separately so that the background could possibly be used many times with different characters.

Iron Man

In honor of Iron Man's success at the box office this weekend (and yes, I saw it and enjoyed it), I'm posting some Iron Man art I worked on for Marvel's Creative Services Department back in 2004. I should point out up front that I only supplied the pencils for these projects, and the lion's share of the work was done by the incredibly talented Scott Johnson.

First up is an image of Iron Man surrounded by his various armors. I was supplied with an image of Iron Man that was done by Adi Granov with a mockup background pasted in:



I was also given this image by Paulo Rivera of a similar scene:



What they wanted was a background with the same look of the Paulo Rivera piece to paste in behind the Adi Granov figure. After fighting endlessly with the perspective and the various armor designs, I finally managed to get a pencilled piece finished. I wasn't too happy with it at the time and I still see a lot of obvious problems that I should have fixed:



This was sent to the aforementioned Scott Johnson, who despite the flaws in the pencils used it as the basis for this incredible digital painting:



And here's the final result, with the Granov figure in place:



As you can see, Scott did a great job of painting the background and integrating it with the previously existing art.

More Iron Man tomorrow!

Post Convention Hangover

I had honestly intended to update the blog (complete with pictures and everything) while on the road to Toronto and New York over the past two weeks, but I just never found the time. We had a great time at both shows and everything went off without a hitch (if you don't count the delay leaving NY Sunday night to keep the skies clear for the Pope).

I won't be giving a blow by blow account of our trip, but I do want to thank everyone who came by my table at both shows - and I want to especially thank the following people - Spencer Beck, Jay Williams, Aman Gupta, Tiziano De Santis, Ty Buttars, Kevin Boyd, and of course Matt Mezick for the awesome backstage tour of Phantom of the Opera.

Here's a few of the sketches that were done at one show or the other.

Red Skull

One From The Vault

Back in the latter half of the 90s, I found myself working on various mini series, annuals, and one-shots as opposed to an ongoing monthly title. This left me time in my schedule to do work for Marvel's Creative Services department. These were the people who commissioned art for liscencing, coloring books, toy packages, statues, and a million other projects.

You may remember that in the 90s there was a boom of theme restaurants, like Planet Hollywood, Hard Rock cafe and a zillion others. In 1998, Marvel decided to get in on the act and opened "Marvel Mania Hollywood" on CityWalk alongside the Universal Studios theme park in the greater Los Angeles area. Creative services asked me to draw some character shots for the restaurant's menu and provided me with a template of odd shaped panels to place them in. Here's the results, inked by Scott Koblish -




Marvel generally wanted the characters to be "on model" and provided me with current reference for some of the characters. I'm certain, for instance, that the Fin Fang Foom drawing was based on John Romita Jr.'s version. The Sinister Six illustration on the other hand, was obviously based on Ditko's versions of the characters, which I'm sure was my own decision since, as I've stated before, it was my favorite comic as a kid. Anyway, I did the drawings, sent them off, and never heard anymore about them.

Flash forward 10 years to Christmas 2007. I received The Marvel Vault as a gift. It's full of reproductions of various collectibles and little seen memorabilia from throughout Marvel's history. I didn't really get a chance to look through it too much until last week when I was sick, and guess what I found on page 169? If you said "the Marvel Mania menu", then you were obviously actually paying attention to this rambling post. Here it is, in all of it's full color glory -



The restaurant only lasted about 2 years, so I never expected to see this long forgotten art actually in print. It was a nice surprise.

Checkers

Sorry for the lack of updates recently. I'll be posting more regularly soon, but in the meantime, here's a little something my daughter and I colored in a restaurant last week while waiting for our meal -

Old School

Bear with me for a little bit of stupid self indulgence. Today I was going through some unpacked boxes from our last move (3 1/2 years ago!) and came across some very old artwork. Sadly, there is no date on either of these masterpieces, but it's safe to say that they were produced when I was quite young. If I had to guess, I'd say I was somewhere between 7 - 10 years old when these were drawn. No doubt that titanic Spidey/Electro battle was inspired by a reprint of The Amazing Spider-Man Annual #1, which was my all time favorite comic book as a kid. You can supply your own sound effect for extra awesomeness.

A Little Bit of J.C. Leyendecker Greatness

I discovered something great earlier this week - this blog.

So far there is only one post on it, but damn, what a post! - 31 huge scans of J.C. Leyendecker Saturday Evening Post covers. They were posted back on August 2 and there's been no new activity since, but I hope we'll see more eventually. In the meantime, if you can tear yourself away from the sheer awesomeness that is the Leyendecker blog, be sure to check out these essays at the always excellent Illustration Art Blog.