Frank Cho

Frank Cho contributed to my dinosaur book. Dude sweats talent. He is just an all around great guy and master artist. Frank Cho Interview

Todd Nauck

Todd Nauck is a fantastic artist who helped me out on my first book:

drawing and inking with Todd Nauck

Dan Jurgens and panel construction

Dan Jurgens gives some solid gold panel construction advice:

foreshortening and panel construction with Dan Jurgens

J Scott Campbell interview

this is another great interview with J Scott Campbell artist on Gen13, Spider-Man, and Wildsiderz:

j scott campbell interview

Arthur Adams interview

This is a link to an interview with my friend Arthur Adams who has been and continues to be my biggest artistic influence.

Arthur Adams interview

tatts

I get asked to design a lot of tattoos. I'm always honored someone would want to wear my artwork for the rest of their lives.

Drawing Dinos

This is a possible cover treatment for my How to Draw Comic Dinosaur book. The dinos are pencilled by Brett Booth.

Flash 30

My buddy Brett Booth has a new comic out today, Flash #30. This is a fantastic jumping on point for new readers. This series is a lifelong comic dream fro Brett so I hope he gets to do a nice long run on the book.

Marshmallow Monkeys

This is a girl's bowling team logo I designed. This was a lot of fun, I really liked how it turned out.

Chuck Dixon's 10 Rules for Writing a Comic Book Script

Chuck Dixon's 10 rules for writing a successful Comic Book.

I recently found some old comic book scripts I worked on for Dabel Bros., this list of rules was attached to my first script as advice from an editor to follow.

1. OPEN STRONG.
Get your story off and running.
 
2. ONLY ESSENTIAL DIALOGUE.
Just the talking you need to put the point across.
 
3. AT LEAST THREE PIECES OF ACTION PER STORY.
They can be mixed major or minor action but there has to be something visual and in motion in your story.
 
4. REMEMBER THAT SOMEONE HAS TO DRAW WHAT YOU WRITE.
Take pity on the penciller. Don't make him draw something difficult over and over again.
 
5. FIND SOMETHING TO LIKE ABOUT EACH CHARACTER.
Even Dr. Doom has his good points.
 
6. FIND SOMETHING TO HATE ABOUT EACH CHARACTER.
Even Batman can be aggravating or Robin self-centered.
 
7. AVOID REDUNDANCY, DON'T DESCRIBE WHAT THE READER CAN SEE.
If your character's on a motorcycle crossing a bridge there's no reason to state this in writing.
 
8. EVERY COMIC BOOK IS SOMEONE'S FIRST COMIC BOOK.
Keep your storytelling simple, basic, and easy to follow.
 
9. THE LAST PANEL OF EACH PAGE SHOULD MAKE THE READER TURN TO THE NEXT PAGE.
Something exciting or mysterious in that final panel. "It's YOU!"
 
10. DON'T BE A SMARTA$$.
Folks don't pay good money for you to show off your college degrees. They want a good, fast paced story. Tell that story and get out of the way!
 

Hulk Smash!

The great thing about being an artist is you can make personal and creative presents for your friends and know that it won't be a duplicate gift! Here is a drawing I did for my buddy Stew's Birthday.

Galactus!

I draw something fun for myself for my Birthday every year, it is my present to myself. I've always wanted a picture of Galactus, the Marvel Comics' Planet Eater. This is a sketch Arthur Adams started but did not finish. Finishing it in a style similar to Mr. Adams' was a massive challenge. In the end I'm happy with the figure and the trees at the bottom. The clouds still need work and the way I drew space looks more like how Virgil Finlay would draw space rather than how Arthur does. I still have much to learn!

3D Structural Shapes

Basic structure forms, this video helps you understand the basic 3-D shapes you will be required to draw as an artist.

Robo Bean

This video is the big one. This is where as an artist you move from describing a figure to defining the figure. In the initial describing sections your lines are stating the direction and relationship of the various forms, but you aren't actually drawing the forms. In this video you are shown how to take a description of a relationship (the relationship of the torso and pelvis) and use it to draw an accurate definition of the actual forms. In the gesture you are drawing what the figure "feels" like, its basic rhythm, but the constructive steps are the actual forms. With the gesture you are implying a figure, but with the forms you are making a statement, the figure exists in space in this way.

The Human Bean

Here is a great short video on how to quickly draw the relation of the torso to the pelvis. It involves defining the two form's relationship as the two lobes of a bean.

Gesture Drawing

• Here is a great video on drawing successful gestures. I spend a lot of time training about forms and contours, I don't always emphasize the central action lines of the gesture as much as I should in my lessons. The gesture is the motion of the figure which is the framework for the figure. If you are familiar with my books the gesture step is what I describe as the "Matchstick Man" portion of the drawing. All successful figure drawings retain a sense of motion even when the figure is standing still. It keeps drawings from looking overly stiff.

Gesture Drawing Basics

The first step of drawing a figure is laying out the action of the figure, the central line which runs through the whole figure. It defines the rhythm of the figure in a very short quick sketch.

Quick Figure Front On View

I start most days with a quick anatomy drawing. Sharpie on an 8.5x11 copier paper. I added the briefs to retain my PG rating.

Brett Booth back in a Flash!

http://comicbook.com/blog/2014/01/13/the-flash-gets-new-creative-team-venditti-jansen-and-booth-in-april/

As long as I've known Brett Booth he has dreamed about being the regular artist on Flash. This news made my day! Wait to go Brett this is the fruit of all your hard work and never taking "no" for a final answer but seeing it as only a delay. I could not be happier for you buddy! Brett is going to tear into this book and set a new high standard.

Paolo Rivera studio tour!

This is the final for the Miracleman #9 cover. Lots and lots of fun texturing going on to separate shapes. The gears were done in illustrator, the rest is black sharpie and photoshop layering.

miracleman prelim

Most of my drawings start with a figure sketch. This is for the Miracleman #9 cover. You will see in the final I redrew the right side arm so I could incorporate the hand better into the overall composition.

One of the things which many artists struggle with is drawing varied body shapes. I will be adding more examples with drawing tips in the next few weeks.

One of the criticisms I often received was I skipped from rough sketch to final drawing with very few intermediate steps. What most folks don't know is my books get edited down from a much larger selection of drawings the publisher has to choose from.  I believe the idea in putting in fewer steps was to make the books appeal to a younger audience.  I actually do lots of middle steps, usually taking all figure drawings through the same basic steps. Brutes! features not only more of the middle steps (the good stuff!) but also color charts showing which muscles I have memorized and mentally use in every figure drawing.

Brutes Team Cover

Hard to believe but my Brutes book was finished in 2009, since then my publisher has been bought and my editor retired. Somehow the promised contract for the book fell through the cracks and the project ended up in limbo. So it is sort of like starting all over in the publishing business and needing to make connections from scratch. I've come up with at least three different cover ideas as different editors have wanted to emphasize different aspects of the book.  This was an idea I came up with to correspond with the launch of a little movie called The Avengers, anyone ever heard of it? I thought super hero teams might become a hot commodity.

I actually do most of my drawing these days with markers and pens and clean the line work up in Photoshop. I love the clean black and line marks, but the downside is there is no erasing.

start simple

 warming up trying to get proportions correct and just laying out figures with simplified muscles

This guy is pretty cut, you can see his muscles clearly, but to get to this stage, you need to start with a basic understanding of human anatomy. So one of our first tasks will be helping you identify some key muscle groups.

I will be uploading some illustration work from my book Brutes! How To Draw Massively Muscled Characters.

This first illustration is an example of how all muscled characters share the same basic muscles, just the proportions will vary from character to character. See if you can identity the key muscles in each differently colored example.

how to draw super hero video

I am super happy to announce a friend of mine from Art College will be appearing in my Brutes! how to draw massive muscles book. Christopher Maslon is a fine illustrator, and now he is also more ripped and tone than any man I personally know! His peak athletic form will be a great resource for those wanting to see real world examples of finely sculpted anatomy.

Here is the Sandman commission all finished up. I cleaned it up and put tones on it in Photoshop.

Well, I couldn't do it. I was using a brush a lot on this illustration and gradually it was looking less and less like I wanted. I scanned it in and reprinted it on a fresh sheet of illustration and I'm inking it all over again. Less brush, more pen, and a whole lot tighter. Oh and gobs of white out-I usually try to avoid white out on commissions, but it is speeding things up a ton.

I know, I know, I'm pretty bad about doing the blog thing. I'm trying to get more consistent. After drawing or writing for ten hours a day it is hard enough for me to answer the important e-mails, then if I have any energy left I try to blog or check comments on deviantart. So I though I would try something different. This is a work in progress. It is a commission of Sandman and Death.

This gives you a pretty good idea of how I work. I usually sketch real rough with markers and scan that into Photoshop. Then I plop down some perspective grids or pieces from photos for the background. Here I used parts from church arches to simulate the inside of Sandman's castle.

I then print this out on my over sized Epson Photo 1280 printer. Most people do this in shades of non-photo blue, I use all sorts of different shades because in the digital age you can drop out any unwanted colors. Right now my ink cartridge is running on fumes so all I got left is purple and pinks.

From the printout I may add a little more definition with a pencil and then I do most of my actual drawing with inks. This piece is a little different in I'm doing a lot of brush work.

This was the very first illustration I drew for Brutes! It originally was published in a European art magazine. I never saw it, but I hear it looked great and was well received.

This is one of the drawings from Brutes! That is a tattoo on his chest. Over on my Deviantart page I have the colored version up.

Deadman commission, pen and ink. I digitally added the thin light rays coming out of the ring and the lantern.

This is styracosaurus. The front end is kind of sharp and pointy.

Just a dinosaur Triceratops. Is anyone reading this blog or should I just stick to doing deviantart only?

KJ-52 is a great hip hop artist. He is a Christian so I can pump his stuff loud when the kids are home. I drew this up to see if he had any need for illustration work, sounds like in the future I may draw something up for him. Yay!

I currently have three pieces on display at "the Works" museum in Newark Ohio. If you are in the area stop by and check out the show. It runs from

March 26 through May 8, 2010

link to the Works

It's been a minute, but I'm still around. Thought I would go ahead and try blogging a bit again. Is anyone reading?

IllustratorX t-shirts are now available at ZAZZLE.com. They are pretty spiffy if I do say so myself. Check them out here:

T-SHIRT

Here are two of my latest inking projects.

Just a warm up character sketch. Some girl with a gun.

I love drawing elephants, here is another from my book Beasts!

Here are some cartoon characters I'm working on. 

  

illustratorx
test hi brett

this is a test

Just a minor spot illustration for my Hi-Yah book. My editor asked for some more changes, which means more drawings for you the customer. I don't mind, I could draw this stuff all day-oh wait, I already do. :)

Here is an old comic cover (1996) I drew for a book called Underworld-no relation to the movie.

Remember it is shark week on Discovery Channel.

Brett's Komodo Dragon before coloring.

Brett Booth's rendition of a Polar Bear.