"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.