The Cards Are Here!!

54 Intercontinental Cuties have arrived!


Which means we'll have them for sale tomorrow at Action Figure Freddy in San Francisco.

And then at San Diego Comic-con Booth 4800!

San Diego Comic-Con BOOTH 4800

Myself, Josh Cooley and all 54 Intercontinental Cuties will be at booth 4800 at the San Diego Comic-Con next week. Booth 4800 is my usual location on the show floor along with Scott Morse and Jeff Pidgeon. This time around we'll also be joined by Jim Capobianco!

In the Program guide we should be listed as Red Window.

Hope to see you there!

Intercontinental Colors

Here are the first batch of finished full color cards for "54 Intercontinental Cuties", a pin-up playing card deck by Josh Cooley and myself. They will be available for purchase at Comic-con this year then shortly thereafter here on this blog.








If you haven't seen Josh's process for making his cards yet, check it out. It's very educational.

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.

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.