"Iron Man By Design"... By Design

IRON MAN: LEGACY #3 came out yesterday, the one with my variant cover on it. To celebrate I thought I'd post some of my preliminaries. My original idea was to use the clunky Mark 1 suit since it seems more WWII, and I could put a flying fortress kind of spin on it. I thought the nose art worked better for it. I also tried some flight jacket inspired designs with the nose art on his back. Marvel liked the sleeker designs so I went in that direction.



I haven't managed to find a copy of the issue with my variant cover yet, apparently there's only one every twenty five copies. If anybody out there has an extra they'd like to part with, let me know.

Intercontinental Process

This time I thought I'd show some process all the way through to the final product. If you're just tuning in, these are for an internationally themed pin-up card deck I'm producing with Josh Cooley.

These are some of my first thumbnails, not all of the pieces started out this way but it definitely got the ball rolling.



You can see a few of the early ideas for the Egypt card above but I later settled on Cleopatra. As you can see by the roughs below I did some exploration before I found a pose I liked. I knew I wanted to have Cleopatra swooning over a photo of Marc Antony, but how exactly took a little trial and error.



Ultimately I decided with this version since it seemed the most queenly.



The composition wasn't quite working right with the way the corner suits were falling so I flopped the image when I inked it.



And the final card with color.



Here's the same process again with the Vietnam card.





When I inked this one I separated the foreground elements from the background. Just for ease of inking mostly, but it came in handy when I was coloring too.



And the final colored composited card.



The deck will be available to buy at the San Diego Comic-con in July, then shortly thereafter will be available for purchase here on the blog.

Intercontinental Box Art

When coming up with the aesthetic for the box design of "54 Intercontinental Cuties" Josh and I were very inspired by some really cool two color pin up playing card boxes from the fifties. Josh came up with the brilliant idea to use an airline stewardess theme for the box and the card backs.

Below is an early rough design pass that I printed and folded together into a box to get a sense of what the real final box would look like. As you can see all the text is hand written and is overall pretty rough, but this gave Josh and I the ability to make our final design decisions.



So here is some of the art I created for the box art. I inked it with a brush on paper.





Below are a couple pictures of the "dummy" which the manufacturer created as a template for the real thing. It's a sturdy flip-top cigarette style box and inside are blank dummy cards which are the same size and material that the final product will be. The dummy is made partly for our approval so we can get a sense of what the final product will be like but also the take our final measurements to create accurate box art.



And lastly here's a sneak peek at the final art for the front and back of the box. Special thanks to Erin Cooley for putting the final package art together in "In Design" and for helping with the fonts. And To Josh for writing the hilarious text for the back.

Intercontinental Inks

Back to the girlies!
Here's the first batch of inks for my and Josh Cooley's "54 Intercontinental Cuties" playing card deck. Josh and I decided to do line art with digital color to keep them consistent with each other. Since our styles vary already, painting them traditionally would make consistency that much harder.

WW II Iron Man

Ronnie Del Carmen and I were both lucky enough to be asked to do variant Iron Man covers for Marvel. They're part of an alternate reality series of covers called "Iron Man By Design 2.0". Marvel assigned a cowboy theme to Ronnie and a World War II theme to me. I had a blast doing it. You can read some more about it on Comic Book Resources (and have a look at Ronnie's)



My cover variant will be for IRON MAN: LEGACY #3 on sale 6/23/10

Yet More Intercontinental Cuties

It's that time of the week again! If you're just tuning in, Josh Cooley and I are making a pin up themed playing card deck for release at comicon this year. 54 Intercontinental Cuties in total (that's 27 each).
Here are a few more roughs.

More Intercontinental Cuties

Here're some more of my playing card roughs for the deck Josh Cooley and I are making for comic-con this year.







Remember to check out Josh's blog to see his pieces.

54 Intercontinental Cuties

A few posts ago I was hinting at a new project thats been keeping me busy, well this is it! "54 Intercontinental Cuties" is going to be a real life playable poker deck. On the face of each card will be a unique pin up girl themed to her own country.

This time around I'm teaming up with my good buddy and fellow Pixar story artist Josh Cooley (who draws some pretty sassy fillies himself). We're splitting the art for the deck down the middle, so we'll each be making 27 original pin up girls total.

These "girls around the world" themed cards will be somewhat oversized to better display the art, but not too big that you can't play a decent card game with them. We should have them printed up just in time for the San Diego Comic-con this year, then they'll go on sale in both of our blog shops afterward.

So here are some of my rough drawings for a few of the countries being represented in the card deck. We want them to be funny and lighthearted each with a little bit of a story gag if possible. For the end product they will be inked on paper then colored digitally.







Check out Josh Cooley's blog to see some of his card drawings for the set. I'm really excited about his, the guy is a laugh riot.
And keep your eye on this blog too, I'll be posting some more roughs soon.

Dan DeCarlo’s Jetta

I'm a huge Dan DeCarlo fan and if you know his work you can see why. One of my favorite DeCarlo characters is that "high school sweetheart of the future", Jetta. Who is Jetta you ask? Well you're about to find out. A mountain of gratitude goes to Craig Yoe for compiling, for the very first time, the entire Jetta comic book run in one retro futuristic edition.
And I got to be a part of it! In Pin-up form that is.
Here's my contribution to the book:


And the study (not in the book, I don't think)


The book has a ton of other awesome Pin-ups, like these for instance:


Craig McCracken, Jenny Lerew, Justin Ridge, and Katie Rice respectively (Katie's is genius btw).

The full list of pin ups:

Alan Gutierrez
Andrew Pepoy 
Becky Dreistadt
Ben Tan
Bill Morrison
Bill Presing
Brandon Ragnar
Colleen Coover
Clizia Gussoni
Craig McCracken 
Craig Yoe
Danny Hellman 
David Reddick 
Dominic Marco 
Fabrizio Pasini 
Jay Stephens 
Jenny Lerew 
Joakim Gunnarsson 
Hedvig Häggman-Sund 
Justin Ridge 
Kali Fontecchio 
Katie Rice 
Leslie Cabarga 
Luke McDonnell 
Mark Frauenfelder 
Mike Maihack 
Molly Crabapple
Paul Guinan 
Robert Ullman 
Ryan Hungerford 
Scott Tolleson 
Stephanie Gladden 
Stephen Silver 
The Savanella Sisters 
Tracy Mark Lee

The book will be released to comic shops Wednesday, April 14th, and to regular bookstores shortly thereafter. Or you can always order it on Amazon. Here's what the cover looks like, so keep your eye out for it.

Shameless Plugs

Many apologies for the lack of posting lately, I've been busy with a new project that I'll reveal soon. In the meantime a few plugs:

I was recently graced with the honor of writing the quote for the back of the new artbook by the amazing Monsieur Z (site, blog).

Which was a great pleasure as I'm a big fan of his work (you should be too). He even drew a hilarious caricature of me to go with the quote. I'll post it if I can get his permission.

The website DigiBiDi recently added a 17 page preview of Matt Peters and my own Rex Steele: Nazi Smasher book.
You can see it right here:

As far as I can tell DigiBiDi is a site specifically dedicated for previews of Comics, Graphic Novels, Mangas and BD naturally. Or at least that's what I assume, not being able to read french and all.



Lastly I'd like to plug my good friend Robert Smith aka "the Iguana".
Rob and I went to comic book school together and we learned much from each other. He works in the New York animation industry and has inked a bunch of Kids Next Door comics for DC. He's in desperate need of a blog, if you know him try to convince him would you? He does however sell some really cute (and sometimes naughty) girly art on Ebay for way to cheap.

Happy Valentine's Day!

Sketchtravel

I'm very lucky and honored to have been invited to contribute to the Sketchtravel book. Sketchtravel is the brainchild of Gérald Guerlais and Daisuke Tsutsumi, it's a sketchbook thats passed by hand from artist to artist across the world. Once it's finished It'll be sold in a benefit auction and published as well.

Sketchtravel blog

I finished my page almost two weeks ago. I'm not allowed to show the whole thing so here's a small detail to whet your appetites.



I was also privileged with the honor of handing off the book to the amazing Carter Goodrich of New Yorker fame.
I nerded out over that one.


(thats Ronnie Del Carmen lurking in the background with his beloved coffee and/or iPhone)

"Help the Hodges"

While I was at CTN I contributed to this group drawing to help raise money for the Hodge family. It's got quite a line up of famous cartoonists on it. Today it goes for auction on EBAY along with many other fundraising items and art. Lot's of cool stuff actually.
See www.helpthehodges.com for details.

iPhone App!

My dream of one day having my very own iPhone app has finally come true! Thanks to Bobby Chiu and Imaginism Studios, it's part of their new line of artist sketchbook apps. 30 virtual pages to fit in your pocket. This redheads sketchbook will be the first of a series to be followed by two other popular female hair colors.
Follow this link to learn more or purchase.
To celebrate I'll be giving away free copies via promotional codes to 20 lucky loyal Daily Peril followers. So keep an eye on your inbox, it could be you!