S.O.U.L.

I'm at it again with yet another digital color project from Nate Miller's up and coming Dominion Press Comics. This piece is a pin-up featuring the main characters from the S.O.U.L. title: Showtime (back) Hakeem (lower right), Honey, (lower left) and Hood (right). Sanford Green crafted the original line art. I love the crisp sponteneity in his work. The vingetting of the overall compostion actually made laying in the base colors easier than usual. I'm shooting for a vibrant anime inspired palette with a painterly feel and also experimenting with a bit of rim lighting.

I'm working in Photoshop CS2 with a single color layer for the line art, plus two adjustment layers with the back ground gradients. I'm also considering adding in a NASA shot of the mood to add just a twinge of realism to the scene.

Onward!

It's strange how quickly I'm reconnecting with people from school whom I haven't seen in a long time via Facebook.

I sent a box of Christopher Elbow chocolates to a friend who just moved from California to New York. They arrived in a special insulated box. She had to wait a few extra days to get them because FedEx woudln't leave them at her door. The company made arrangements with FedEx to send them to her job, but they ended up at her door anyway and could have gotten stolen. But everything worked out.

I'm working on a redo of the Ash piece that won me my Photoshop Users Award. Kev Ferrara and KingShaj from ConceptArt.org gave me some good pointers and pushed me to try a stronger, more expressive pose. The new version evolved into a kind of firefighter who has just survived being overtaken by a wildfire. I'm calling her a "quickliner" based on the idea of her being able to dig a trench with the speed of a crew of ten or more, using her special shovel.

I would like to spend a couple of days just drawing, inking and coloring anime-style characters for practice. I've accumulated a lot of sketches that would look good finished. I also need to update my website.

After receiving a link from the Illustration.net group to James Gurney's blog, I realized that I should probably be spending considerably more time maintaining my own. A lot has happened this year. And I expect that a lot is bound to happen before the year is out. It's late, so I will have to make this entry short, but tomorrow I hope to expand on some of the more exciting news and events of 2008 in the Land of Eurayo.