Jack Frost : Rise of the Guardians

Hellooooo,

A couple of things to blog today, the first is this

My friend and incredible artist Adam coloured up my Blacksad piece from a few weeks ago.  Some of you might have seen on it my facebook page this past week ( cause I couldn't wait to post it up). Hope he feels like colouring more of stuff, cause well he just makes it look better! If you dig his work, go check out his blog it's class!


I've been pretty busy this week. Just got a chance last night to knock out this pic for the blog. It's Jack Frost from Rise of the Guardians. 

A great film that I only saw over Christmas and watched a bunch of times since.Wanted to have a go at drawing him since.  Anyways, thats me this week, catch you all next friday or over on my facebook page that im recently giving some love and attention to.

Laters!

Cappy

Working on some new test scripts at the moment. There's one or two people in it that I haven't drawn before and This guy, Cappy. Pretty swamped this week so I just inked up a sketch I drew of him during in the week, it started off as a lunch time doodle but I just kept ticking away at it. I'm always a bit, I dunno "surprised" isn't the right word but its all I got right now, to see Cappy with a gun and actually shooting people.

Really looking forward to seeing winter soldier so this was a lot of fun to do. hope you all dig it.

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!

The Goddamn Batman!

Another Commission piece this week as the hand is only starting to heal up properly but look, NO SPLINT NOW :) HUZZAH!!

Was asked by family to knock out a Christmas pressie of Batman Arkham origins. Knocked this guy out, its A0!

Wouldn't mind having another stab at the Batman Origins costume, there's a lot going on in it. Next week I'll actually draw something for the Friday. 

Here's a pic from the printers just to give you an idea of the scale.

Anyways I'd better get back to work. Catch you guys next week. Same Bat time, Same Bat channel! ... (see what I did there? Ahur hur hur)

First Blog of the New Year!

Yooooo,

sorry about the blog silence but I have valid reasons

1 - Really busy up until the Chrimbo holidays and any free time I had went into the commissions I had to do, which I obv couldn't post cause it would have been a Christmas pressie spoiler.

2-  Look I sprained a ligament in my drawing hand so :P,  it's on the mend now tho and I'm back drawing, according to doc I'll be 100% drawing fit by next week

So I'm gonna post up some of the commissions I did now and keep some other ones for dry spells, like say when I'm busy or sprained my hand ( not that I EVER plan on spraining it again)

So here goes

This was for my friend Dave, who asked me to do a caricature of his missus Claire.  Usually when it comes to family and friends I point blank refuse to do caricatures for many reasons. But I grew up with Dave and Claire, now I live in Dublin and they're in Wexford so if I got it wrong, well I'm not around to hear about it! So why not have a go at it  ;)

After I told Dave I don't usually do caricatures of family and friends he said all he wanted was " a girl with black hair with a lab coat on" (as Claire works in a lab). When I got the chance to work out the caricature it didnt really take long, turns out Claire is pretty easy to draw.

side note - By the way EVERYBODY in facebook land, well finding reference on you to draw is a tad easy and a little stalker friendly... just something to keep in mind

So here's the pic, I just thought it would be a little funny if I threw in a bottle of wine into the mix and made it look like Claire was swigging wine from one of the test tubes in the lab.

and here's a pic of Claire with the pic, everybody's happy. ( Note her awesome Christmas jumper! )

Job Done! I'm back to blogging weekly now, I'll have a new Facebook art page soon that'll be updated a little more regularly so watch out for that too!

See yee next Friday!

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!

Storyboarding Talk at Electric Picnic!

Hey Folks,

Happy Weekend,

late post this week as I usually blog Friday morning ( Irish time ) and wasn't sure what I'd post up until now. Buuuuuuut I have a couple things left handy for such a week when things get so busy I don't get a chance to finish anything. This is one of those weeks.

Here's a piece I'm still pretty happy with from a cartoon I still adore. This is Heatblast from Ben 10, I drew this up for a mates kid who had the flu at the time and was ( hopefully still is ) a Ben 10 fan.  Hope you guys dig it too.

Aaaaaand here's the Ignite Talk I did at Electric picnic this year in the science gallery tent.  I talked about storyboarding and the way the Ignite talks work is like this - there's 20 slides that auto-advance every 15 seconds, for 5 mins. It was a lot of fun to so, some of you may have seen it already as I put it up on Facebook and Twitter during the week.



Here's the Youtube link as the video isn't loading via blogger, I'll try get sorted so it can play on this post.





see yee next week!

100th POST!!

HEY EVERYBODY ( HEY DR. NICK!)

this is my 100th blog post.. somewhere Dan Spencer is laughing at the guy who never blogged and used to shun technology. But here we are, Technology embraced and a 100 blog posts later.

Here's my folio for DICE, the finished Northlanders pages I did last week and some Secret Avengers pages. Had a lot of fun on these

I just got sent my Ignite talk that i did about storyboarding as well, I was hoping it would be up on the website for the 100th post but alas it aint so, hopefully I'll have it for next week!

right these pages, they show action, some talking heads, cars, helicopters, longboats, they show some super heroes and some vikings. Covering as much as I could and here's hoping these are the pages that land me that job in comics!

Hope yee dig em! see ye next week, same Ben time, same Ben channel :P

Comics Folio

hey folks,

here's some Northlanders pages you haven't seen & one you have seen before. Still have a rake of pages paneciled and not inked, only going to throw up the finished pages between now and DICE. Might throw up the in progress work on twitter.

Hope yee dig em. More to come next week, I'll prob put up my entire folio for Dice next Friday, so look at this post as a sort of Friday the 27th post 0.5

Comics stuff

Alright folks

Digging the well here for something to post, posting a lot of WIP stuff as I've been writing more this week than drawing... I dont hink I've ever said that before. so here goes

Another panel from the Carrie and Rufus book I'm working on,

Just a little something to keep the blog ticking over as it's one of the few finished pieces I've knocked out this week.

Here's some other stuff I've been working on some inks and A LOT of pencils. But since it's all soooooooo rough i'm gonna post up bits of the lot so you can see the process of it.

So here it goes, here's some stuff I've been working on in a Northlanders test script. I've re- started this so many times now my plans are a little more abstract or loose than usual as I know what I'm looking for now. I should note that I've started and restarted this sooooo many times now cause I keep going back to it a month or two at a time die to work, this time I'm just gonna get it done.

Alright so this how I start planning out everything, the VERY first thing I do is make a mess.  Plans for how I think I'll tell the story sporadically placed among plans I have for character designs. This time it just happened to be on an A3 sheet cause that's what was in arms reach of my animation disc. Other times its an A5 book or A4 paper i use for my printer, just something to get the ball rolling and get some kind of idea down. At this point I'm just trying to get a feel for what I'm drawing.

As they say in Pixar, "fail early and fail often". Start trying things at this point, test how far you can push a design, do it all here not later. I spend a lot of time working on this. There's a rake of other drawings done as well but since this stuff is soooooo sketchy and almost abstract I thought it would be more interesting to show, we all got to start to somewhere.

All the little images are panels featuring what I think needs to be shown according to the writers script. After I do this I figure out how I want to break down the page. I always break my pages down by using focal points... this part is pretty abstract, panel shape & bleeds are all figured out here in just their basic shape. Squares, rectangles, empty space, if a shot is going to have a dutch angle or a camera tilt, whatever it is that im going to employ to lead the eye around the page correctly. That's what happens here.  

After that, it's pencils

loose, very loose, any elements that need fixing are done so on the fly while inking, and then it's inked

 

well sin é! More vikings next week!

Storyboarding Workshop and COMICS

Hey folks,

Pardon the lack of posts last Friday but I wanted to get all this stuff together.

First things first, Pegbar in association with Animation Skillnet will be back this month, there will be a storyboard workshop in The Science Gallery Thursday the 29th of August. I'll be giving the workshop. All the details are on the Pegbar website here and you can buy your tickets via the Science Gallery website here.  you can also call inot the science gallery and get your tickets if you have any tech issues just ask em at the reception desk when you go in.

 The workshop will cover basic board techniques, I'll share some tips I have picked up in my time as storyboarder and provide a storyboard production package for anyone looking to build a portfolio.  I'll even review your folio and help get you ready for the industry.

And here's somethings I've been working on the past few days/weeks you might dig.

The first is a page from a short story I worked on for Coimicí Gael's Rírá with writer Dave Hendricks and letterer Aidan Courtney. It'll be out soon so keep an eye out for it, it'll be a great book and it's aimed for readers of about age 8is + I'd say. Had a lot of fun working on it!

and here's a WIP panel of my Carrie and Rufus book,

It's slowly taking form I'll keep you all updated as I go along with it. Having an incredible amount of fun working on it.

That's it for another while anyways, I'll be back blogging again on Fridays.

Laters1

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.

In with The New, Out With The Old

Hello,

Things have been a mixture of busy and messy these past two weeks, so only getting to blog now.

First off, here's the final version of the Fred's Got Slacks cover. Differences between this and the last WIP are the paints on her back, some hue changes and obviously font and background changes.

If you feel like adding some new tunes to your playlist check em out they're pretty class band! Here's a Link to their stuff, all the songs that are on this EP are here and there's a few more as well!  Give em a listen you'll be happy you did.

Before I go any further is should say a BIG congrats to my friend Miki who has just finished his book The Jolly Roger and it looks AMAZING! Be expecting some fan art here of his book The Jolly Roger soon, check out his work here . And another BIG congrats to Darrin & Shawn for getting Earthruler sorted over on Kickstarter anything you pledge from this point goes towards an extra special stretch award! Check that out!

And here's the next thing. This is something I've been toying around with for a while now and since well, what seems like ALL my friends are doing comics of their own now, I'm going to bite the bullet and get a comic of my own on the go.

 That's right John you'll no longer have to ask me when I'm going to bring out my own comic, it's happening.  I haven't chosen a name for the series yet but it's 8 issues of short stories about Carrie (the character above who you might remember from an earlier post ), and Rufus, the fox below.

It's early days yet, still writing the majority of it and still working on the designs. Rufus's design is essentially finished but I'm still playing with and trying different things with Carrie's design. But here it is, I've said here now and I will finish it.

Because I love post apocalyptic EVERYTHING! That's the kind of story this is going to be, where these two survivors happen upon each other by chance and grow to be a formidable duo against the dangers of the post apocalyptic world they now live in.  Yes, there will be zombies. I like zombies.

I'll post up my progress with it as I go along. I'm also working on two other comic related gig's at the moment. With two awesome writers and all around really sound blokes! Aaaand if I get their permission I'll hopefully have some character designs posted here next Friday. I'll also have some samples from a Northlanders sample script I'm working on at the mo.

So there it is, many irons in the fire, at least one's gotta come out with some kind of notice right? ... right? RIGHT?

so Sin é as we say here in Ireland. More to come really soon. Laters!

Another progress Drawing: Batman and Catwoman

Hey Everybody

Here's this weeks post. It's a very (very, very very) belated wedding present for two close friends of mine. One night over a few beers my friend told me he'd love a pic of Batman beating the living daylights out of Spidey. Me being a colossal Spidey fan said "Grand", I'll draw one up for your Wedding, only Spidey will be annihilating Bats!

Now after sobering up, keeping the idea that it was a wedding present and my friends would have to look at this for quite a long time I thought Spidey smashing up Bat's face was the wrong way to go. So I tried to go with something a little 'classier'.  This was pretty easy to figure out what it should be considering Batman was the requested hero, so Batman and Catwoman seemed like the perfect route to go down. 

The trick with this was to make this look like Bats and Catwoman are actually in love. Much like my friends Brendan and Helen. And NOT like a typical over sexed up, fan boy mess of a drawing. It was a wedding present, it had to be right.

So after struggling with it for quite some time starting something, finishing it and starting something else again. I eventually landed on this one. Fell on my feet here having struggled with it for so long. Love is supposed to make people strong and weak, I think I managed to keep the character of both of these iconic comic book heroes while reflecting the love that doesn't make Batman stand so tall, and makes Catwoman give up a little bit of her balance.

Anyways here it. If you read all I had to say above, thanks you're a proper legend!

Some really roughs first just to get it started, I'm liking making more decisions while inking/clean up these days

Started working in the details, I use Sketchbook Pro for most of my digital inking and cleaning up my storyboards

I zoom in and out a lot when I work on pieces like this, its important to see all of what you're working on

Here's the final inks on the Happy couple

After I get the drawing/inked part sorted it's into PS for some painting for a variety of brushes.

Here's a C.U. on Batman and Catwoman. I usually leave the brush editor out so I can twist and move the brush

After I get to a point with the digital flats I bring up the opacity on the greys. After going back and fourth This was the final Black and White of the piece.

I turned back on the grey on the characters and played with the Bat Signal splatter in the BG. The whole idea about displaying the bat signal was even over the city Batman watches, Catwoman still has all his attention ( corny and sort of against the character but hey, this is a wedding present :P I can do this because artistic license and stuff!)

Here's the final piece, a colour change and a re-edit of the bat signal. 

I showed the piece to my friends last night, I woke up to a Facebook message this morning. Everybody's happy :)

I'll have another blog post very soon! Laters