postk asked: Hey, I love your works! Do you have any role model in style of drawing, or maybe your favorite illustrator?
I have far too many favorite illustrators to mention them all, but some of them come to mind almost instantly: Hal Foster, Alex Raymond, Al Williamson, Paul Gillon, Moebius. It’s not that I try to draw like any of them (which of course would be impossible), but, being optimistic, I think that endlessly looking at their drawings may have some sort of influence in my, ahem, style. Eventually.
It seems that I restricted this improvised list to “already deceased comics artists”. Oh, well. Not my intention.
A drifting astronaut. Those of you who have been following this blog for a while will certainly know that this is one of my recurrent subjects, but I still haven’t found any good reason to stop it. Nor am I looking for one.
Regarding technique, this is another entirely traditional piece, just as much as the last drawing I posted: brush, ink and airbrush. This time I decided to use sumi-e ink instead of the usual Higgins ink, because I’ve found that the former gives a more uniform rendering when it comes to fill big areas of black. Maybe this is something specific to the brand (or even to the particular bottle) I’m using now, I’m not sure.
Also, note the tone on the planet; there’s a bit of innovation there. I inked it using black ink, then sprayed a slight layer of diluted, white acrylic ink with the airbrush; thus the black became grey. That’s the real-world equivalent to the screen blending mode in Photoshop, I guess. Messy.
predispositiontohumancondition asked: Your art is beautiful and inspiring. Are you still selling With & without prints? If so, how much?
Yes I still sell them. Now I sell all my prints through Society6, which I think is more convenient (and cheaper) both for me and for you. You can check them out here:
Thanks for asking!
relwordd asked: I really love your work! It's incredible. Do you ever think about making a webcomic? I bet it'd be amazing
Thank you for your kind words. I love comics, but taking into account that I hardly manage to post a single drawing every now and then, creating a consistent webcomic seems a bit beyond my possibilities. All my attepmts at doing “secuential” stuff since I was like… twelve have been doomed by neglect and lazyness. But hey, I may try again.
I like how this one turned out. Indian ink, a few layers of airbrush, and nothing else. I realize I’m using more and more the computer in the sketching stage, and less and less when it comes to the final drawing; which is, of course, the opposite thing of what I used to do a while back. It’s nice to get a photoshop-free drawing from time to time, even if it means spending a few hours cutting out tiny scraps of frisket film.
icantbelieveitsalreadytomorrow asked: what do you use to add tone to your under drawings?
Not sure of what you mean by the “under drawings”, but I think you refer to what I’ve sometimes called “the shadow layer”. Well, I don’t always use the same technique; it depends on what kind of effect I’m after and also on my current degree of laziness. Mainly the latter, to be honest. Some common options are:
- The brush tool in Photoshop
- Gray markers applied over the pencils, before inking
- Indian ink (or whatever other medium) applied on a separated sheet of paper, then merged in Photoshop.
- Screentone (I mean, physical sheets of screentone) applied over the inked piece. I use the ones sold by Letraset.
Not on purpose, but I think I listed them according to reverse order of awkwardness. If you browse some of my former posts you will find examples of all of these techniques, some of them with a detailed description of the process (well, sort of).
This one comes in two flavors. I just couldn’t decide.
Just finished inking this drawing, which is the somewhat unavoidable result of listening to Goldfrapp’s Utopia while looking at some stunning pictures of early computers.
That gives you a nice idea of my usual procastination subjects, by the way.
Look what came in the mail today. These are reusable water bottles produced by Camelbak, and yes, I drew those scary fishes. I was contacted to do this job a year ago or so. They told me that these bottles were intended for kids who like monsters and such, so they asked me to draw some deep sea creatures which would look scary (but not too scary), and slightly cartoony. I made the drawing, got fairly paid for it and they promised to send me some samples as soon as the product should enter the market. I completely forgot about that until today, but luckily they didn’t. What a nice surprise.
I do vectorial work like this one for clients from time to time, by the way. I don’t usually post them here in order to keep some consistency of style, or because of copyright reasons. But I couldn’t resist to show you this one.
I’ve been through a bit of a strain lately, and it shows in the lack of updates in this blog. At least I found a little time today to complete this drawing. Nothing too fancy, just something to get back on planet earth.
Moreover, I realized a few days ago that I hadn’t updated my website in a good while, and that I had also neglected my Flickr account as of late -something that worries me specially because that’s the place where I started to upload my work in a consistent way, even before I had a website of my own, and where I discovered a lot of extremely talented artists. You can say I have a sort of sentimental attachment to Flickr, yes.
Now everything is neatly updated (well, sort of), and more drawings are on the way.
