Manic Monday!

It's just another Manic Monday... but me and the wife are taking a much-needed baby-free get-away this weekend. Let's get Manic!

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My sister-in-law is in Paris right now, and just took a bunch of photos of the so-called Luxor Obelisk. It's one of a pair that originally stood in front of the main temple in Luxor. Obelisks are a fascinating piece of Egyptian iconographic sculpture.

In short, everything in heaven should be mirrored, whenever possible, on Earth. A Twelfth Dynasty Pharaoh (Senwosret I think) had the first obelisk erected under the theory that the rays of the sun itself could be mirrored by the construction of massive 'ray' of stone that reaches high into the sky and which terminated in a pyramidion which was itself covered in gold leaf. During the reign of Hatchepsut (subject of much of my research right now) the entirety of the obelisk was often covered in gold leaf! That's a lot of gold!

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The Nunez family just got cable, and man I missed it! We went with AT&T UVerse and while I can't speak for other areas, our service guy was awesome and for that alone I'm sticking with them for a bit.

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I can tell I'm a dad because, while watching the fairly average video (featuring a fairly average song) "Fuckin Perfect" by Pink, I was actually really moved by the redemption of the mom and the love she had for her daughter.

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Right now I feel like the only food blog I need is Francis Lam's at Salon and the only cookbook I need is Mark Bittman's "How To Cook Everything". Really, I could stop reading everything else and be set for the vasy majority of the rest of my life.

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My comic recommendation for the week: Check out this short story from an old issue of Creepy. It's written by Archie Goodwin and drawn by Al Williamson (both are sadly departed now). It's reprinted in its bried entirety at that link, and draws from real-life experiences of both creators involved. Great stuff.

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I started on a Hatchepsut sketch last week, and am continuing it this week. Worked the face a bit more to completion and started on the Serpent Crown, which I can tell already is gonna be a bitch!

Have a good week!

Foto Friday!

It's the end of the week, and I thought I'd end with something a little fun. It's Lucia as an Orange Lantern! Check it out (and then I'll translate that last sentence, for those of you who don't speak Nerd).

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So, in the universe of the Green Lanterns, there's... ah, screw it! Just go read up on it if you're interested. Basically I based Lucia on a comic character who's motivated primarily by an id-like need to possess things. Yes, I do see some overlap. Haha. Don't tell her I said that!

I'd have done a bit more on it, but time's a'wasting. I'll do some tighter pencils and/or inks in the coming weeks.

Enjoy your weekend!

Egyptian Thursday

Welcome back! It's Thursday and (as of last week, at least) that means it's Egyptian Thursday! I'll be doing a piece of art relating to that ancient world power. Maybe photo-realism, maybe comics, maybe something else... whatever strikes my fancy.

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First a little background. Egypt is generally divided into vast periods called Kingdoms (Old, Middle and New). These were divided into Dynasty; usually grouped by families (like say the Tudors or the Hapsburgs), these were listed numerically one through thirty.

The period I'm working in is the New Kingdom, and within that the Eighteenth Dynasty. The Eighteenth Dynasty is in fact the first dynasty in the New Kingdom. It's a time of big conquest, big trading, big monuments... Frankly, it'd be hard to not find a great story to tell in all of this!

Hatchepsut, Egypt's first female pharaoh, comes from this period and lies right in the middle of the Eighteenth Dynasty. I did a drawing of her a month or so back but I'm pretty unsatistifed with it. Let's try this again!

(Oh, and just an aside: This is an example of the vast spans of time we're dealing with in Egypt. The United States has existed 234 years. The Eighteenth Dynasty (one of thirty remember) lasted for 243 years. Yep, long time.)

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Hatchepsut here is wearing the Blue Crown (also known as the Serpent Crown) and it's generally associated with the Pharaoh as military ruler. This is a pretty good first pass on this drawing. I'll post the next step sometime next week!

The Missing Ink

The Missing Ink is a chance for me to do something inking, whether it be over my own pencils or over some pencils of a different artist. This week is a bit of a catch-up week for me in other areas, so I'm showing off something that's a little older. This is a inked piece I did over artist extraordinaire Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez about two years ago now.

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Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez is a great artist blah blah blah, genius, master, "forgotten more than I'll ever now"... all that stuff. He's also incredibly fun. Check out this page. There are so many ways to draw Superman battling some villain and Wonder Woman swooping in. Check out that Wonder Woman in the last panel though. I swear, no one draws WW like Garcia-Lopez. No one.

That was obviously the focus of the page, and needed to be the focus of my inking. This isn't to say that the rest of page didn't matter as much, just that the last panel needed to matter the most. That's a slight difference, but one that I feel is pretty important in inking.

There's some spots I'd go back and fix up now, in hindsight. I'd approach the grey tones a bit different in the first panel, and I think I lost a bit of the Garcia-Lopez look with Superman's face in panel four. I do think though that panel two came out well, and I stand by that Wonder Woman figure.

Hope you like it. They'll be some new stuff next week, promise!
(First up is the pencils by JLGL and then the inks by yours truly)

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Turnaround Tuesday!

It's Turnaround Tuesday!

(Intro if you're new: Turnarounds are a great way to get a feel for a character and to see if you can get a handle on their look and personality, even more than a pin-up. The fact that you're drawing them in three fairly static poses means that the defining elements of the character have to be displayed in small, subtle ways. And they're fun!)

This week we're doing one of the super-heroes best "equipped" to fight villains. And that's where my boob jokes will stop.

Ladies and gentlemen.... Power Girl!

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Power Girl is, in summary, Superman's cousin from a different dimension. (There's a migraine-level amount of further detail, but go to Wikipedia and don't blame me!) Why Power Girl has such "crime fighting advantages" when Supergirl (Superman's cousin in this dimension) doesn't is beyond me. Maybe it's cause Wally Wood didn't create her!

PG's a great character, with a lot of personality. Big, in-your-face (that's not a joke there. Stop it.) and very engaging in the right hands. If you're looking for some good Power Girl stories, some of those 'right hands' would be Geoff Johns (who wrote a great arc in JSA Classified #1-3) and Jimmy Palmiotti (who wrote the first year of her most recent series). Both writers collaborated with my favorite Power Girl artist, Amanda Conner. Conner gives Power Girl such a range of emotion and expression, while still conveying the action and drama that the story might need.

Do yourself a favor and go check some of that stuff out. After you check out the turnaround, that is!

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Manic Monday!

Last week of the first month of the new year. Already? Did you know that older people experience time as moving faster than young folk. It's true. I'm old.

Let's do this!

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Little bit of art goodness that everyone should check out. First, Brian Bolland did a beautiful (if that's the word) commission a couple of years ago. It's call Joker Trophy Wall and really, just go look at the thing. Man, he's amazing.

Anyways, a little after that Kevin Nowlan was commissioned to do a second in the series. It's called Bizarro Trophy Wall. Nowlan's got a whole blog post up with a couple prelim sketches and the finished piece. He calls it a "peculiar idea which seemed to work". I call that an understatement. Thing's awesome. (Check it out here)

Only question is... which do you like better?

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Little bit of April goodness: A new, deluxe format release for We3! We-freaking-3! Great. Really, like I said of Flex Mentallo last week, this is one of those books that's basically required owning if you're a comic fan. It's like a monk owning a bible. You just kinda assume, right?

Oh, and there's ten new pages of story to sweeten the pot. Swoon. (Mo' goodness here)

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The Australian Open has started and it's making it difficult to focus on anything else going on the larger culture. That's all.

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Last week I did a model sheet of a handful of Egyptian crowns. Bet you didn't think there were that many, did you? Well, guess what? There's more!

Here's round two. Happy Monday.

Foto Friday!

Wrapping up the week here, and it's time for Foto Friday!

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Having just drawn Flex Mentallo for the first time (on Monday) I wanted another crack at him. I decided that I needed to approach it a little more in my style, so I went in search of some photo reference.

I've already said this before but Flex Mentallo was based (pretty shamelessly) on Charles Atlas. That seemed like a natural place to start, and I looked and looked but didn't find anything that jumped out at me. I wanted something a little too posed and dramatic. Nothing.

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I went with seemed to me to be the next best thing. You may know him as the former governor of California, or maybe as the Terminator or Kindergarten Cop, but once upon a time Arnold Schwarzenegger was a world-renowned bodybuilder. Charles Atlas was a big early influence on Arnold, and the style and posing are close enough in era that I thought I could make it work.

If I found the right one. I think I did.



Awesome right? Perfect mix of over-the-top Thinker wanna-be and melodrama. Perfect.

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I started laying out the body for Flex; I'll definitely need different reference for his head, Arnold doesn't have any resemblance really there. Not much so far, but here's how the process is shaping up.