Rocking Concept

Some concept art I did for a music video pitch. At the moment there's not much I can say about it. I do hope this video-concept will get picked up, if it does I'll get do more work like this.

This was done in a bit of a hurry but I sure had fun with it! Ink on Illustration Paper, digital colors.

Coloring Denis Bodart's Hellboy Cover

I am a big fan of Denis Bodart's work. This Belgian artist makes some amazing comics. He is probably best known for his Green Manor series, a series of short stories about a  Gentleman's club in nineteenth century London, with rather violent members. He has done a lot of other stuff too, but it is hard to find most of it here in Amsterdam. (I believe that apart from Green Manor and his very first comic Saint-Germain des Morts, his work has not been translated.) Luckily we are living in this digital age, where artists have blogs to share their work!

Last week there was an awesome post on Denis' blog showing a drawing of a Hellboy cover. I posted this drawing on my tumblr and mentioned that I'd love to see it colored. The next evening I started to color it myself, using Photoshop. I didn't intend to finsih it, it was just a little experiment. I have always loved Hellboy and am a real admirer of the understated coloring by Dave Stewart.

Because I had a lot of fun coloring this thing I kept going at it, even though I actually had something else I had to do. Some hours later I had done this entire mock-up of a Hellboy cover. Even though I quickly discovered that I'm really not Dave Stewart I sure had fun and learned some things in the process too.

I posted this colored cover on my tumblr and of course I dropped Tony Lariviere (the moderator of Denis' blog) a line, to inform him that I had used this image on my blog. And this morning I discover that he has actually posted it on Denis' blog! A pretty good way to start my day!  

Below is Denis Bodart's original drawing, the image above is the colored cover mock-up I did. 

Drive Corner

As you might have noticed I thought Drive was a pretty cool film. I especially liked the whole 1980's vibe of the film. I also think that Ryan Gosling's jacket is pretty cool. I had this image of the Driver as a comic book character; the jacket is really not unlike a superhero's costume, it even has a logo on it.

The image of the Driver as some kind of comic book hero inspired me to the illustration above, for the awesome Cornered Blog. Some of you might remember that I did another corner for them back in March. (That one was also based on a film, btw.)  

I really hope you also like my Drive Corner!

Ink on paper, digital colors and lay-out.

Another Driver

Another drawing of the Driver. The color is based on an effect I saw in The Hunter by Darwyn Cooke, it is not completely similar but that also has a lot to do with my lines, Darwyn Cooke left more open space and also draws with color; he does the inking and coloring of the Parker comics himself. The colors are also done tradiotionally with a PITT artist brush pen.

This drawing of mine was done with ink on paper and digital colors. I will try to do some colored drawings the way Mister Cooke did his, might be a cool exercise.

Recently I'm experimenting a lot with different halftone effects. I have always liked halftones and had a tough time to find out how to recreate the old fashioned print effects in Photoshop. It feels like I'm getting closer, though!

That line is from the book by James Sallis btw, which is also pretty cool.