Sorry for the crazy radio silence, but I promise there’s a good reason! After months of effort, I’ll be launching the preview issue of my comic “1001″ at the Montreal Comic Con this Saturday and Sunday! Please come on down to Place Bonaventure to see more of my little secret project! <3

So below is the now finished Silk Road: Yemen piece; woohoo! I’m planning to crank out one more Silk Road piece, and after that the collection will be complete! Done in good old fashioned ink, not to old fashioned Painter and Photoshop.

Silk Road: Yemen (Finished)

And a little close up!

Close Up of Silk Road: Yemen

Come down to my table at the 2011 Toronto Comic Con to take a closer look at this print, my new stuff or just to chat!

Preview for Silk Road: Yemen

The thing I love about doing these Silk Road themed pieces is that I learn so much! My Yemeni Silk Road produce I chose was frankincense: an extremely tough shrub like tree that is so resilient that it will grow in the harshes desert climats, even out of solid stone. What makes it more interesting is that the bark of the tree is slashed 2-3 times a year so it’s sap bleeds out and ultimately hardens into a resin. And it’s that resin that, when burned, is the frankincense we know today; one of the first incense in human history. I thought it was amazing that the harvesting of frankincense predates the birth of Christ by over 1000 years. How cool is that?

You might think that I sound a little odd, getting so excited over a smelly desert tree– but anyone who knows me will tell you that the only thing that excites me more than art is arbitrary trivia.

Also, for anyone hitting up the 2011 Wizard Con (Toronto), I’ll be there with bells on selling this print as well as the rest of the Silk Road series, my sketchbooks and more!

So I’m currently working on an art nouveau inspired fanart of SheRa– that’s right, the Princess of Power! Check out the inks so far;

In other news, inking is really, really hard.

Perhaps, to you, untrained viewer, this looks like a pleasant progression from my last post?  But no, oh no, this inked debacle is my attempt at inking with a crow quill pen. To date, I’ve only ever inked in tech pens but something, something from far beyond me, possessed me to ink this full, 11″ x 16″ artwork using a crow quill or “dip” pen with my whopping NO experience in the medium. The results, as you can imagine, were gruesome to say the least;

Just a messy hand, eh? Well this is what it looked like every 15 minutes

Be warned friends; the tip of the pen is sharp enough to slice… and the crow quill gods demand a blood sacrifice.

…

But all jokes aside, using the pen was actually very cool. There was a pretty steep learning curve where I spent a good hour just doodling and crosshatching, trying to get a feel for it. As my first fully traditionally inked artwork (as opposed to inking with tech pens) I’d have to say this one was a wild failure with a lot of unexpected problems… ie. cutting the page accidentally with the tip, smearing wet ink and flicking droplets all over the place.) Having said that though, I already find myself very attracted to the medium and am excited to tackle it again. Hopefully with more practice I’ll be able to use the crow quill more regularly and add it’s lovely fluidity to my work. <3

And after all is said and done, at least I have Adorable Cat to get me through the tougher patches.

Anyway, I likely won’t be coming back to my lion tamer piece for a little while, but will be bringing an Arthurian legend to life before the end of the week– till then!

I’m happy to report that I’m home again-home again! August was locked down in Ramadan and September in a family reunion out in good old Winnipeg, but finally I am back in Montreal and on the drawing horse! It is, however, not a literal horse. But if it were, I’d be riding it into the sunset as we speak!

Currently I’m settling into my end of year commissions and client projects, as well as a number of new personal works; one of which is a circus themed illustration that, if successful, I may turn into a series. Here’s a preview! <3

And an exceptionally bad close-up shot that sadly I can blame on no one but myself and my shoddy camera skills. I even cleaned this up in photoshop. Ah well, that’s life for you.

And hey, on another topic, what a cool new blog theme eh? I spent a good amount of time tweaking this to my liking and will likely commit more acts of css violation before I have it just right. But I concede, my code habits aren’t very interesting are they? Well then, how about the Adorable Cat that has breached my workspace?

Now this blog has officially met it’s cheezeburger quota. <3

So I’ve finally roused myself from my Fan Expo 2010 recovery long enough to recap my weekend! To date, this s the biggest convention I’ve attended and I must say; I had a blast! Aside from meeting a ton of new and returning fans of my work, industry peers and friends from good old Winnipeg, I got the chance to see some amazing costumes and do some fun commissions!

Below are some of my favorite costumes along with two of my favorite commissions and lastly, a new artwork that was available in my exclusive, 2010 sketchbook. Hopefully we’ll be seeing a colored version of her shortly.

Sorry for the radio silence lately; it’s been a beyond busy month that’s only going to get busier as we move closer to FanExpo and all the new material I’d like to have available. One project I’m working on is my latest “Silk Road” piece; “Mumbai” (or Bombay, I haven’t decided which yet). Below is a little shot of progress so far. I was inpired by a  Kusmi Tea canisters as my color scheme.

In another direction, I’m currently working on a little ashcan comic called “1001″ which is my reinterpretation of 1001 Arabian Nights. I’m super excited about the project and hope to have the first few pages available at FanExpo.

More to come!

So recently I decided to try something different and submit an entry into Fantasy Earth Zero’s “Create a Character” contest. Of course, I love costume design, and fantasy especially is a genre that could use some shaking up; so I decided to create a minimalistic but edgy sorcerer.

Check it out at my DeviantArt Account!

Here’s a little bit of my process;

First off, I’ll usually start with some thumbnail sketches to help me test out the energy of different poses, themes, etc… Once I have a few that I like, I’ll usually move on to fleshing them out at a larger size, to see how well the energy of the original thumbnail communicates at full size.

Once I’ve chosen something I like, I’ll start sketching it out at about 10×14. For me, going smaller than that loses to much detail, and any larger and– let’s be honest– I wouldn’t have enough room in my already massive purse to carry this stuff around!

Once the pencil’s are done, it’s time for inks. When I was first starting out, I would do my inks right over the original sketch, but as I gained more experience, I realized that doing this put the original sketch at risk if the inks didn’t go well, and more importantly, the inks never moved very well over the lead or the indents the lead left in paper. This might sound nitpicky, but what seems minor at first will be quite literally blown out of proportion once it’s been scanned.

Anyway, when it comes to inks I have two approaches; in the first, I’ll take a piece of vellum (a semi-transparent paper ideal for tracing) and lay that over the sketch so I can retrace it cleanly in ink. In the second approach, I’ll lay the sketch and a clean sheet of bristol (a thick white paper with a smooth surface that allows for smoother inking) onto a lightbox. If you don’t know what a light box is, it’s a box about the size of a lap desk that emits light so that anything placed on top becomes semi-transparent; just like holding a drawing up against a window during the day. With the lightbox, tracing the original sketch onto a fresh piece of paper is as easy as if I was using the vellum I mentioned before. A lightbox is a nice investment no matter what type of artist you are. Or, if you’re a DIY freak like me, you can check out some tutorials on how to make your own lightbox.

Eventually when I have a nice, crisply inked drawing, I’ll scan it into Adobe Photoshop. When scanning, I prefer to avoid using the scanner’s build in white/black corrections in favor of “cleaning” the artwork myself. First, I remove all obvious debris, dust and stray ink in the drawing by simply using the rectangle tool in white and blocking in some areas very quickly. After that, I whip out my wacom tablet and start smoothing out some of the roughest parts of the ink work with a white brush just to keep all my details tidy. When I feel the sketch is as clean as it can get by hand, I’ll convert it to grayscale and start adjusting the levels (under Image>Mode>Levels) to make the whites as white as possible and the blacks as black as possible.

Once that’s done, I export the image to Adobe Illustrator where I run a “Live Trace” over it; this is an engine (originally a part of Adobe’s now defunct Streamline) that creates a clean, impossibly crisp vector lineart. On an aside, seeing the fresh new vector lineart feels as satisfying as a grabbing fresh, hot laundry from the dryer. <3

Aaanyway, once I’ve got the new vector lineart that will be the base of the final artwork, I’ll take it into a program like Portal Graphic’s openCanvas or more recently, Corel’s Painter, and start coloring my lineart… but that’s a WHOLE other walk through!

If you guys have found this information helpful at all, let me know! I’d be happy to go into more detail about tools and techniques with screenshots if you’re curious.

Happy weekending~!

So this past Wednesday, I braved the rain and headed to Dr. Sketchy’s Star Trek themed sketch night. Got to sketch two great models and met some interesting people to say the least.