Hurm...

Recently, a friend called me out on my neglect of this sight. Now I feel bad. Mea culpa, mea culpa. In the hopes of making amends I offer a holiday cocktail drawn entirely in Pages. That's right. Drawn in a word processing program.

But that seems insufficient, and so in the hopes of keeping the ball rolling I'd like to ask for help from anyone who happens to read this missive. Any characters you'd like to see in a pinup? Or things you'd find amusing to see drawn by yours truly? You need only leave a comment or drop me an email.

Last but not least, I've been checking out some friend's sites this evening to check in on what they're up to and was blown away by the work of one Kyle Frink. Great paintings, great comics, and the series of US senators is truly sweet. Do yourselves a favor and check them out!

I'll try to post more regularly in the new year.

Dammit Billitteri!

Hold on to someone's shoe for a few (ok... many) months and they start to get a bit snarky about wanting it back. So stage 2 is now done and the sneaker is all taped up and ready for ink. Now I just need to figure out what to put on it.

P.S. You owe my $6 for the tape, Mike.

Big Beautiful Scanner!

Today brought the home studio closer to completion with the arrival of a large format flatbed scanner and an equally sweet printer (not yet hooked up). Naturally, something needed to be scanned immediately. So it's old, but that doesn't matter since it could not be scanned yesterday.

Woot!

I love you Epson.

Swine Flu!

Colin made a request. I was happy to assist. Other slogans:

"Die by the Swine!"

"The Price of Pig Love"

Picnic Bits

Working on a fun little piece for Digital Picnic and decided to use this as an excuse to better acquaint myself with Illustrator CS4. Started with a simple pen sketch and am now working on building it all up in the mac. Far from finished but thought it would be fun to post the progress.

Fallcon recap and ".faust"

Fallcon was great as always. Thanks to everyone who showed up and made it a fun way to spend a weekend. Dave, Dave, and Adam were great neighbors and seeing friends as well as making new ones was all kinds of excellent.

As if that isn't cool enough, ".faust, the Summoning" is now up in its entirety at: http://www.sandboxtheatreonline.com/

Check it out. Can't wait to see the show.

Fallcon!

Tomorrow and Sunday I'll be at the MCBA's Fallcon at the Grandstand of the State Fair grounds in St Paul. I'll have some minis, prints, cards and original art for sale as well as doing sketches. Should be a fun weekend but be sure to swing on by and say hello. If it was Fullcon I'd say "there's no Fullcon without U!" but it's not so I can't. So maybe, "there is no "fail" in Fallcon"? At any rate, be sure to come for a visit.

Faust!

Done and in full color. For some reason Blogger is creating weird color shifts on the jpgs, but no worries. You can see all six pages at http://joelvollmer.wordpress.com/comic-art/




Big thanks to Dave Wheeler who provided assists with the color.

Brock Sampson makes me happy.

Thank you Mr. McCulloch, and thank you Mr. Warburton. This one's for you.

I'll have to do one last color check tomorrow for oddness but this feels pretty good to me.

Now up and running with CS4

So after hitting the wall with my real work, I decided to take a few minutes and play around with the blob brush in combination with my wacom tablet.





Fun stuff. Once I get a better feel I may have to do something a bit more ambitious.

Flatting colors for Brock

Lots of work still to do but most of the flats are done so selecting areas to work in will be easy.



*** A ton of color work was lost on this file due to a hard drive failure. I'll get back to it as soon as I can. Sheesh. ***

Instead of going to bed

This happened.



or this.



Not sure about these as the finished colors but it feels like it's close.

Time for bed.

** Maybe this. Thanks for the suggestion Terry. **

I feel slow this week.

Yet everything is hectic. Weird.

Colors in progress:



More to come. Hopefully soon.

Tabasco!

Today was day 2 of an intro class I'm teaching on Photoshop. I gave them all the assignment of making some type of promotional / marketing piece using things they could collect on google. It seemed unfair not to do it myself and so...



It made me giggle and then I realized without the spirit of vengeance it was actually a pretty decent ad piece. Go figure.



Thanks to whoever owns the images I used.

The K is silent.

Based on some sketches from last week, it seemed like a good idea to make some illustrations and put some t-shirts up on etsy or something similar. My theme is "surf sharp". To this end Surf Sharkp is now underway. Still some decisions to make regarding use of text and / or a greater visual presence of wave. Still kinda fun. If anyone has reccomendations on a good sales on demand place let me know. Later.

Tattoo, of course. But tat-shoe?

A co-worker asked if I'd be willing to potentially ruin one of his brand new shoes by drawing all over it. "Sure," says I. "Why the hell not." Ink sticks but the nibs don't work so well so I guess the whole thing will be done with brush. Now I just need to decide what to put on it.

No one voiced an opinion...

so I went a little crazy putting in a ton of little feathered lines.

Venture Bros (inked?)

Just finished the first pass of ink, keeping the line weights pretty even and now am conflicted. The nice clean, crisp quality seems good so it's tempting to just scan it as is and do the rest in colors. Then again, it seems like some variation of line weight and some spotted blacks would expand the space and add some visual pop. Pondering will happen. Voice opinions at will.



"Why must you be the screen door on my submarine, Brock?"
- Hank Venture

"They hit me with a car!"

In preparation for Fallcon I'm working on a couple pieces to use as limited run prints. Hellboy is the first, I'm undecided on using Wonderboy, but it's now official... there will be a Venture Bros Tribute print chock full of Brock Sampsony goodness. Just finished the blue line roughs. I'll do one more after this. I'm thinking something a bit more on the sexy side but haven't picked the lucky fictitious lady yet. If there's someone you'd love to see me put to paper give a holler.

Sorry for the rather sad digital pic but these are the available resources for quick posting so we all must cope.

Finished Faust inks

Soon the colors will be in at which point I will drop in the text and send them out.

New day. New header.

Seems about time to change things up a bit, so it felt like a good time to make a new header. There's some internal back and forth on these two options at the moment and it seems likely that I may just do a fully custom header instead of using snippets from recent work. But this should do for now.

More Faust previews

Vacation was great and now I'm back and almost finished with the inks for FAUST! Then it's back to work on my favorite project as well as trying to get some stuff ready for FALLCON. Yeehaw!

A Brief Hiatus

Friday marks the first day of a vacation long past due, so there won't be anything new here for the next week or so. On the up side, I'll be working on a whole mess of stuff as soon as I get back so no worries. Until then, here are some pics of a current project to tide you over.

Finished Hellboy... I think.

I ended up really liking the texture. So I made some tweaks to a number of spots I missed and then added some shifting color to the water to give it a bit of form. Last i cropped the image down to get rid of the messy edge spots, bumped the canvas size back to 11X17, and dropped a small outline around the image. This should be it barring any weird color issues I may not be able to see.

More colors for Hellboy

Despite a looming deadline, I felt the need to work on this a bit today. Still unsure of how to work the water ( or even wether or not I should ) since the original plan was for simple flat colors. If I detail it too much ( at all? ) the swirly graphic elements won't make sense and if I leave it flat it may not match the rest of the piece. This is where I'm at:



Now normally this is close to where I stop, but I had a notion and started playing around with various ways of adding textures which lead to this:



And soon after this:



Not sure how I feel about it and am now considering the final output. Time will tell.

Hellboy Flats

Dropped in some flats today. Not thrilled thus far. The plan was to use flat colors so it would mimic Mignola's stuff a bit in tone but just doesn't feel right. A few days away from it should allow me to come back to it fresh and we'll see then.

Stuff from an Inking Demo / Hellboy.

Last week I was doing an inking demo for my class and gave them the choice of Catwoman or Hellboy. The vote was 9 to 1.



I also put together an inking practice sheet for them comprised of pencil samples from some amazingly talented guys and, well, I just couldn't resist taking a stab at it myself. My god it was fun. Almost has me tempted to build an inking career, but the storytelling issues are what I love figuring out so maybe not. Still... fun!