Blacksad and other stuff too

G'morning! ( or G'afternoon or G'night wherever you are)

A few things this week, first off BLACKSAD!  Blacksad is one of my favorite books so it's about time I actually posted a pic of it. If it's a book you're not aware of you now NEED to make yourself aware of it, the writing, the art ALL of it is so very, very well done.

Had a lot of fun inking the coat, I reckon I'll try some more Film Noir style pieces this year, referencing it was just great.

Aaaaaaand something new, I now have a facebook art page. There's a few pictures up on it at the moment I'll post more and more every week. So if you dig my art please go over there and give it a like by clicking here . Just to give you a little more incentive, as soon as I get to 100 likes I'm going to giveaway a few prints. So by merely just liking the page you could be in with a chance of winning these

Flo and Telephone Tess could be YOURS! So please click the link and I'll pick a name out of the first 100 likes and that person will get a copy of these.

I'll post up some sketches, warm ups, inspirational pics and pieces from the blog here as well, I'll also post up a lot of the figure studies that I only post on twitter so you'll get more than what will be up on the blog.

Anyways, that's it for now, catch you all on the new Facebook page and the blog!

Laters!

Back Blogging

Hey folks sorry about the flakey posts these past few weeks, really been squeezing out every waking minute of the day recently.

I did another storyboarding talk this week out in DCU as part of their Media week. Got made a member of the DCU MEDIA PRODUCTION SOCIETY, not too shabby! :) This is me after the talk with events manager Aisling Sinclair, who I must thank again for the invite.

 I got some new stuff done before Thought Bubble this weekend. Thought I'd post that stuff up.

A few pin ups and some new sequentials I'm working on from a Deadpool sample script

Hope you dig em!

Here's the Pin Ups, Reeeeeeeeaaaaalllly like drawing Black Cat :)

Here's some Deadpool pages I'm working on

More of these to follow soon


And more of these too, I wont be posting up any more inks of these but the pencils I will for Sure, Here's the complete page one of Carrie and Rufus

That's the lot, time for me to clock back into work again

Laters I'll gfill you all in on Thought Bubble next time. Have a good weekend!

Storyboard Workshop & A New Pin Up Girl

Hey folks,

a day late with the post but better late than never. I've just been busy this week.

Before I say anything else I want to say THANK YOU so much for showing such an interest in my storyboard workshop. Amazed with how quickly it sold out, i promise i'll make it as good and worth while as I possibly can. Thanks again!

Big thanks to Pegbar, Animation Skillsnet and The Science Gallery too for making all this possible.

Aaaaaaand below is something I drew up yesterday. Clearly I haven't had enough fun drawing pin up girls so here's another.

It's actually a character for a poster I put together for a friend of mine who's running a striptease aerobics workshop in Wexford. If any of yee are interested in the deets, give me a shout on facebook/twitter and I'll send em your way.

Kinda dig the character so here she is in all her glory.  As usual I prefer the black and white.

I'll do my very best to get next weeks post on time as it's been two late posts in a row now.

Anyways, chat then folks!

Fun Stuff!

Hey folks so here's this weeks blog post.  2 black and whites this week!

This is a birthday card I did for a mate of mine, she's been asking for a picture of Shakira's ass for a while, I felt it was my moral duty to oblige. Here's Shakira doing that 'bum lift' thing from the she wolf video

Aaaaand this is a project I've been ticking away at for a while now, just getting pieces done in  small pockets of free time. It's for my mate Paddy Lennon, he's a writer and he's currently sorting out his superhero novel 'Flare' and he was sound enough to ask me to do the cover. I've been one of a lucky few to read this book, It's Class! Recently Paddy has put excerpts of his book up on his blog so give it a read here so you can get a taste of the book and then spend all of your monies on it when it's out!

The characters your looking at here in the cover are (going from left to right are) Aimee DeWitt and in her superhero uniform she's kicks ass as Revenant, Ryan Curtis also known as Flare and Hiroshi who rocks it in a pretty awesome Mech suit, or as Paddy put it so elequently ' basically War Machine on steroids'!

Hope you dig em. See you all next week, same Ben time(ish), same Ben channel.

Fred's Got Slacks WIP

So as promised, a new blog post.

This is still a work in progress but I really wanted to keep the weekly blog posts going so here's Fred, she wears slacks REALLY well! A mate of mine asked me to do an album cover for their band Fred's Got Slacks ( awesome name right? ) You can check out some of their stuff here .

It took me an AGE to get around to it but I finally am. Pretty happy with how it's going so far, when it's finished, I'll post up the final piece.

Really enjoying doing my black & whites lately so here's another!

And here's the colour in progress. More to come soon. I'm hoping to get a bit more time next week to work on some new blog stuff as well, between trying to get to the 2D Fest this weekend and clearing out work for it, it was next to impossible to do a whole lot more this week.

Anyways go enjoy the bank holiday weekend, I'll see you all next week! Laters!

Snookered

Hellooooo,

I keep getting busy and leaving the blog idle, so I set myself a new goal. I'm gonna start blogging once a week, whether it's work in progress or fully finished pics it's going up. No excuses! The Internet knows no mercy and neither does my guilty conscience. Soooo I'm really gonna try and stick to this. This means 4 more posts before Christmas and I'm going to continue blogging during the holidays. So let's get started.

Almost as soon as I said that I'd blog once a week on twitter I immediately blanked! Perfect timing. I had nothing. What I was doodling was pretty dire and forced, I haven't actually had a block in a long long time just couldn't shake it off.

Yesterday I remembered that I started saving pics into an inspiration folder ( I hadn't used it in a while). It's full of stuff I thought was pretty cool and it inspired me, but I was too busy to do anything with it at the time so I kept the pic until I had some time to do something with it.  This was the pic I used a inspiration yesterday

It's Duffy. Something about this pic just really hit home and I was doodling ideas straight away. Much better ideas, stronger drawings ( anyone else think she kinda looks like a living Gwen Stacy? Just me? ).  So with Duffy in mind and a project I want to get off the ground next year with Gary Reynolds I drew this,

I'll get to colour this next week and I'll also want to draw something so there SHOULD be a couple of things on the blog by Friday 14th. See you all on the blog for them! Laters

Alright so here's the rest of this post, I started dropping in flats. This process usually takes me a while because I'm partially colour blind. But I have a umber of palettes saved for such an occasion. So I took from a couple of em for this one. This usually leaves me with a general early idea of whether the palette works or not. I probably spend more time on this than any other stage, other than thinking about what I'm going to draw. It's time well spent if you ask me.

This is what that stage looks like. I used to paint primarily in grey before I went to colour but now since I use a number of saved palettes i find it easier to paint with colour and cross reference that with a greyscale. I can then make changes in the greyscale or the colour version, whatever one I feel that I'll get the most out of at the time. Here's what that version looks like,

I think you can tell that in this greyscale I played around with a darker skin tone and black stripes on her top. Something about it just wasn't working for me so I ended up going right back to the drawing. I ended up taking out the dangling strap

I just wasn't able to see it in the colour version but when I brought it back to the line I really felt that the strap kinda ruined the whole flow of the pose. I was happy enough from this point on so I felt comfortable making any additional changes while painting.

Here's some flats with a shadow thrown in. The shadow just helps me see the shapes better when I go to paint it, just I know the kind of brush stroke I'm looking for.

The first thing I do when I start painting is always the eyes. If I get this part right I have the character set, I'm happy. If I feel near the end that it needs another touch up, it gets one. I think the eyes are one of the most important part of the pic. It's where people are going to look, if the eyes don't rest there permanently they are def going to stop for a second or two or slow down before they look at the rest of the pic. I'm sure we've all heard that the eyes are the window to the soul, so give em some time to get em right.

From here on it's all painting and texturing. Going back and forth with greyscale and flipping the image so I know It's all working the way I want.

So this is it almost there.  Pretty happy with how it's looking and at this point its pretty much going to look this way at the end. I always feel like sprinting to the end when I get this far, that's when it's time for a tea break/sleep and come back at it fresh so you don't end up spoiling anything. I'm still fixing things at this point and adding in stuff so best not to spoil anything important.

The Thong. I was referencing a pretty unique thong. I thought it looked fancy, everyone else thought it looked wrong or it had fallen down so best nip it in the bud and make the change. Here's a thong we're all familiar with. I think it was the right call, looks better for it.

This is it almost there. I put up some wallpaper, threw in a few more shot glasses and yes the pool balls actually say 69, Hi-Oh!!

So after a few fixes and the final lights put in here's the finished version, beside the all important Greyscale version I use throughout painting it. I think it lets you see how one informs the other

I ran this past my girlfriend Amanda last night ( If you're into make up and similar stuff like that check out her blog here ), funnily enough she said, "what if she had a black top". I thought that was kinda funny since I tried a black top early on in the process. I shrugged it off thinking it cluttered the palette, but I'm willing to try anything at any stage if it makes what I do better and did up a black top version. I think she may have been right, I honestly can't choose between the two.

More posts to come real soon. I'm hoping to get one more out this week and I'll have another one for sure on the blog next week. Trying to do a lot more with the blog from here on my friend Peter McNally is knocking up a load of great posts over on his blog and it's inspired me to do something similar. Check out his blog if you haven't before it's one of my fav's

 I hope you all dig this I'll do more like it soon, Laters

Telephone Tess

Soooooo I've had this idea for a while that I wanted to do a collaboration with a friend of mine. I figured I'd ink it up and see if he wanted to paint it. And he's on board HUZZAH! I'll reveal his name when he's finished painting it, I don't want to give it away now.  Soooo this post is a work in progress here's the inks of 'Telephone Tess'. I hope you dig it cause I had a lot of fun drawing it.

Then I got a new iPhone and found myself a place that make custom iPhone covers soooooooo I figured I'd do up something for the phone and came up with these guys I wanted to keep the colours really basic, mostly cause the guy I asked to paint it will do a better job than I ever could and I wanted the cover on my phone to be uniquely mine but kind of passive. So kept em like so,

Hope you all like. Laters


Pardon the amateur photo, just got the iPhone case delivered. I'm really happy with it, it printed out really well and the case is very sturdy/strong.

I'd happily recommend Case-Mate to everyone http://www.case-mate.eu/diy?bypassLandingPage=true

Or if you'd like your very own design please feel free to ask, I'd love to design more. All my contact details are to the right under the Bio