Termite Bianca

This is another pin up I did a couple years ago that is also seeing the light of day. The character is Termite Bianca from an Italian sci-fi comic of the same name created by Marco Bianchini, Marco Santucci and Patrizio Evangelisti.

My piece is for Fantasia Termite Bianca, an international tribute book which will also feature the very intercontinental assortment of Katsuhiro Otomo, Katsuya Terada, Akemi Takada, Yoshitoshi Abe, Foo Midori, THORES Shibamoto, Maya Miyazaki, Sho Murase, Bob Eggleton, Bryan Talbot, Oscar Martin, Daniela Uhlig, Otto Schmidt, Lokman Lam, Paolo Barbieri, Maurizio Manzieri and Mario Alberti.

The book will be available next week at the Lucca Comics and Games festival in Lucca Italy. And online shortly thereafter here.

Monster Roll

Monster Roll is a short film directed by my friend Dan Blank. You might remember him from the Whatever Lola Wants short I posted here a couple years ago.

I feel very close to this project as I've been watching it develop over the past few years. That and I absolutely love it, it's about sushi chefs who fight sea monsters. How is that not awesome? The final goal is to make a live action feature, so show your support and watch the short at www.Monsterroll.com you'll be glad you did.

UPDATED! with a direct link to the short itself.
You should still check out the website though, there's some cool behind the scenes stuff. Oh, and be sure to watch it full screen. And crank up the volume. I'd say make some popcorn too but it's only six minutes.

‘Trick’ and Mortar

Tr!ckster, the pop up store and home to all things creator owned, now has a permanent brick and mortar location in Berkeley CA.

2631A Ashby Ave.
Berkeley, CA 94702
510-665-8900

Hours: Tuesday-Sunday 11am-7pm

Tr!ckster carries everything I have available here on the blog including Banana Girl statues. So if you're in the area and want to save yourself some shipping costs, stop on by.

APE Commish

A couple Copic marker commissions I did at APE this past weekend.

APE 2012

I'm going to be at the Alternative Press Expo in San Francisco this weekend. You can find me at one of the Red Window tables 526, 527 or 528.

I'll also have a fresh supply of Banana Girls on hand!

Skadi

I jumped at the chance to do this pin up a couple of years ago for the very awesome Katie Rice because I'm a big fan of her work. She and Luke Cormican do this hilarious/ridiculous web comic called Skadi. She's a barbarian girl on a quest to eat of every meat.
This pin up has finally seen the light of day in their new book compiling the first two years of Skadi web comics. It's premiering at APE this weekend in San Francisco. Look for it!

Gone Fishin' Part 3

I like using acrylic wash because it has the look of watercolor but it doesn't reactivate when it gets wet. This way I can do all my values and modeling first in a way that can't get messed up, then I apply the brighter but much more delicate concentrated watercolor as the final step to add all the chroma.

As you can see below I start adding the concentrated watercolor to her skin, then bathing suit next. I do the light colors first because if I did it the other way around there's the danger of the dark color bleeding into the lighter. At this stage I don't attempt any modeling, I only lay in the concentrated watercolor as flat tones. Modeling will only mess it up. The Lumas are completely translucent so the acrylic washes underneath show through perfectly. Next I move on to the orange of her hair and the blues for the fish and the ocean and sky.

I always paint a test subject simultaneously. I try my colors on the test first and if it looks a little off I can fix it for the real piece.

And here's a scan of the final art.