What's a Skullkicker?

Hello Friends,

Here we are three weeks into 2011 and I must say that the time is flying already. This post should have gone up yesterday but I was unable to find the energy to write with (actually I was too busy playing Call of Duty: Black Ops). So, I hope that you'll forgive me for not staying true to my weekly blog entries. This entry is all about a comic that I've found very interesting called, Skullkickers. I've mentioned it before, but I haven't really said too much about it. Allow me the opportunity to say a few things about it.

Skullkickers is a monthly action/ adventure comic put out by Image Comics. It's the creation of, writer Jim Zubkavich with art by Edwin Huang. This comic is extremely entertaining. Every issue is clearly defined and packed with action and humor. I like it mostly because it's a break from the world of 

superheroes. The story so far follows two mercenaries as they roam a fictional landscape reminiscent of the Middle Ages in Europe. The only difference is that this land is inhabited by monsters and other strange creatures. For the first arc (I'm only two issues into it) they are looking for the killer of a Chancellor, who was mysteriously assassinated. His body is then abducted by a gang of thugs and this leads the two mercenaries on a wild goose chase. As for the third & fourth issues I'm not sure of where it's headed. I just look forward to seeing what kind of crazy situations Jim & Ed can conjure up for the duo as they travel into unknown territories.

You must be asking, "Why is he saying all of this about the Skullkickers?". Over the past month I've been working hard on a piece of my own for this comic. I've been working through new techniques that I learned from those great tutorials that I keep talking about from Digital Art Tutorials.

It even seems like Brian Haberlin has something new that he's working on with Philip Tan (Taleweaver, Batman & Robin), called Captain Wonder 3D, being put out by Image Comics. This is of course, beside the point. I won't get sidetracked any longer and I'll just show you what I've been up to!

Finished Colored Piece

I had a whole lot of fun experimenting with new techniques for this piece and drawing the Skullkickers guys was a lot of fun too! Edwin must have a blast working on these guys every month. He's very lucky. This was a three step process that I really didn't document in great detail. My advice to anyone doing this kind of work is simply this: be patient! Coloring takes twice as much time as drawing does. You have to give it time when you're coloring or it just won't do your pencils justice. For this piece, I skipped the inking process. I made a very dark photocopy of my pencils at a reduced size of 73% and scanned that in. I did this mainly because I don't have access to a large format scanner. The original piece is 11"x 17".

Step One: Pencils

I really was satisfied with the pencils that I did for this piece and that's why I skipped the inking process. I was able to get the crisp line that is common in comic art. Plus, with a little photoshopping I adjusted a few tones here and there. Inking is still essential to comics but I just didn't want to go through with that mechanical step as this was all about the colors! Yes, you inkers out there are all work and no play!

Second Step: Grayscale and Flatting

This step is really not fun at all, but necessary to the final product. The idea here is that you have to create your foundation to color on top of. Once you've created your gray tones you should keep them all on one layer. Here's a look at my layers palette so that you can see what I mean. 

The reason for why you do this is so that you can make quick selections of your areas from the graytone layer once you've begun your coloring stage. You need to be able to select areas easily without having to constantly make new selections for the same areas. That's how comics are done.

It's really all about efficiency. In most cases, a "flatter", or a guy who lays flats, will lay in all of the graytones before the colorist goes in and starts working his/ her magic. This is mostly a practice done in the USA and some European countries. This is not the case for most Asian comics, which are mostly grayscale. Digital coloring has gotten to such a point, with the latest technology, that the possibilities of what one can do are just about limitless. The scariest part is that Photoshop hasn't changed all that much. The technology was really just waiting for people to catch up. Now we're here at this point where comics have never looked better. I'm looking forward to producing more work like this in the near future. As usual, thanks for stopping in and seeing what I'm up to! If you have any comments or questions please drop me a line. I'll check back in later this week.

Wait...more Skullkickers stuff?

Here's a picture that Jake took of me with Edwin (right of me) and Jim (far right). I got the chance to meet them when they came by Woburn for one of Larry's Saturday Comic Shows last month. They're very cool guys and I was lucky enough to buy the first two issues of the comic off of them (it sold out).

Digital Painting- I told you that there'd be masks!

Hi All,
          First of all, I hope that you are doing well this week. Secondly, I would like to thank all of you for helping me to get this blog to almost 300 views in fewer than two months! I couldn't be more pleased with the positive energy that I'm getting. Keep it coming and I promise to update every week.
          Lately, I've been doing a lot of drawings and not taking them up to the next level. The following is a tutorial of how I took a drawing from Thanksgiving and brought it through to a finished digital painting over the past 2 days. This is just a taste of what I've got in store now that I've recovered from being sick and I've had time to watch Brian Harberlin's tutorials. I hope that you enjoy it!

Step 1

So, by now you know that I'm obsessed with Venetian masks at the moment. That's the main reason for why I chose this as my subject. The first stage is a simple pencil drawing done on Strathmore drawing paper. Here we see that I've added some background effects into the piece in photoshop.

This is a snapshot of another window that I had open where I experimented with making smoky effects by varying brush styles.

I recommend playing around with 'Scattering' & trying out 'Texture' to
 see what works for you.

Step 2

Okay, so at this point I'm trying to add in highlights and position everything for when I start to paint. I wanted this to have a cool glow effect as well, so I found out how to take a brush and convert it into glowing energy.

This is a weird shape that I made and later cut out and used for the glowing energy that you see below.

I took the shape and threw a Gaussian blur (Filter/Blur/Gaussian Blur) on it and warped it under Edit/Transform/Warp. I then highlighted it with an airbrush and did Hue/Saturation adjustments to it. After that I flattened the image and started working on top of it.

Step 3

Next, it comes time to add colors. I didn't have a color scheme in mind so I started with any ol' colors really. The point here is to just carve out the clothes and face. The colors can change instantly. Keep in mind that I have a selection of the actual figure and I can make adjustments to the color by selecting it and using Hue/Saturation.

With the selection on. Darn marching ants! Quick tip: command + H will hide them.

Step 4

Here is what I came up with after adjusting the colors. I use pink and purple to often in my work so I wanted to break out of that. Yellow is also a challenging color to use because it is so harsh on the eyes if not used properly.

This is what it looks like with the line art layer turned off in PS. Kinda crappy, huh?

With some tweaking you can see that the figure is getting more volume with the addition of some backlight. This is really my first time successfully using backlighting- it can make or break a piece. In this case, I think that it works nicely.

Step 5


Here is the final product, after about an hour of smudging it up with the 'smudge tool'. I like to work with the strength at about 50-60, because 100 is just too strong.

I hope that you found this enjoyable. It really was a fun piece to work on. If you'd like to see more work like this in the future please leave a comment and let me know. Right now I'm working on an 11"x17" painting from last week's post. I'll have my progress from that up soon. Thanks for checking out my blog! Until next week....farewell!