Back Yard Adventures

The pencils for my next comic for Sequential class are done! I'm pretty pleased with how they came out. Getting to draw Hercules beating up monsters, while having it relate to my childhood was a fun experience. The assignment was to do a comic based on something from our youth. And my youth consisted pretty much wholly of me and my brothers adventuring in the woods behind my house, stomping down ferns, and other such awesomeness. So I decided it would be perfect to do a comic about that. Maybe one day, if this Hercules project gets picked up this'll be some story about how when he was a kid he'd pretend to go on big adventures, and sure enough one fell into his lap when he grew up. I don't know though. I just wanted to draw him punching some stuff. And having an evil king get really pissed about it. I didn't want to worry about getting the likeness of me as a little kid, so i just came up with one that I thought would fit with the older Hercules.

The last line is, "Awww, porkchops again?!"

Here it is!

Let me know what you think. It'll be inked by friday, so excpect an update on that this weekend. Next week is coloring and inking it. Also for next week will be the last painting I'm probably doing for thesis. It's Camulos charging into a cave, sword drawn, beatin' up some fungus men. Its coming along, and its digital, and I'll post it once its done.

-Zachariah

Hercules V. Zombies, Camulus Model Concept, & Old Gauche sketch

So here it is, the painting that took way too long. I don't even know what to say about it at this point. Its the same size as the painting I posted in the last entry, 24x16 and completed entirely in gouache. I used a process on this that I hadn't used before which was doing a drawing, scanning it, then printing it out the size of the stretched paper and using a transfer marker to get the drawing onto the paper. This seemed like a good idea at first, but the first time I tried I had already primed the paper and put a layer of matte medium on. Because of this, when I used the acetate based transfer marker it fused the paper to the matte medium. When I pulled up the paper, it brought some of the matte medium with it and gave my nicely primed paper a nasty roughness to it. So after re-stretching the paper, and transferring the drawing pre-prime, I finally had a good base to start the painting with. I will probably never use this process again, at least not on something this size, as it used multiple markers just to get the job done. And it took waaay too long. I could've just redrawn the thing in the same amount of time.

So after all that was done, I went into painting it. Which with gouache took me about four to five weeks. But with my schedule at the time, I was only working on it one to two days a week. I could've maybe done it quicker. Who knows, I just know that I got a lot better at painting with gouache during the process.



This next piece is the concept I did before I started modeling Camulus in 3d. I realized I hadn't posted it yet, and thought it was about time I did. Its just done in pencil on bristol. Hes a big dude. I mean, he is celtic got of war and all. And those Scotsmen loved their war. Hes got a really big sword, which still needs to be modeled in 3d.



And lastly heres a gouache piece I did during class a year ago, but never got around to scanning until now. Its pretty small in real life, maybe 10x4 inches. I still really enjoy it, which is why I'm posting it. It was done for an inclass assignment where we had to illustrate droplets. And I do enjoy a good spray of blood. So I decided I'd paint a samurai, blood splattered across his face, roaring into the sky. He was fun to do. Maybe I'll do more with him in the future. Only time will tell.

On a side note, I took a bunch of reference photos for my comic I'm working on now. Expect penciled pages for that to be up this week, along with sketches for the 3 paintings I'll be completing in the next 4 weeks. Super intense deadlines as always. Until next time


-Zachariah

Celtic War God

Update! Heres a sketch for a piece I'm working on for the final in my digital illustration class. Its based off of Frank Frazetta's first Conan cover.I then lightboxed the small sketch onto a bigger piece of paper. (Still in progress.)
Scanned in the drawing and went to work with my poor-mans photoshop skills. (still in progress)
More updates to come as it reaches completion!


-Zachariah Bauer