LEGO Star Wars Ships!

Here's a 2 page spread I did a while ago for the LEGO club mag. I think it was only used for the European version so fans in the US may not have seen it before

Images removed by me. Sorry.

It was fun to focus on just the two ships and background compared to all the panels and elements in a normal comic. The planets are a little loose but I think they still work since they are not the focus. There were some additional elements at the bottom of the page but I removed them for this post (looks more elegant to me).

I wish I had the opportunity to do more Star Wars stuff but so far I have only done this and one other comic. Who knows what the future holds? Right now I am doing another Indy story and it is turning out very well, IMHO.

Exo-Force: The Lost Images

Are you ready for this? Here are some images from the last Scholastic Exo-Force book. You know, the one that was canceled and never printed!!! I think this book had the most fun illustrations of all the books so I was personally upset when I heard the book was canned.

These have never been seen anywhere so I hope you like 'em. Remember, these are still copyrighted by Scholastic so you can't use them for anything!

Look out behind you!

Ow, my arm!!!

Up, up, and away...

The Golden City... Destroyed!

This book chronicled why the Exo-Force had to leave the Golden City and trek to the dangerous forest region lower on the mountain. The actual journey to the forest was covered in an 8 page comic I did for Lego Denmark. That comic has never been seen in the US as far as I know (only in parts of Europe). Hopefully I can post it sometime so you can all see what happened. A similar story ran in the Lego Club Magazine but was shorter and not as exciting.

Mecha Drawing Step-By-Step

Hi all. I made this drawing a couple of weeks ago and thought you might like to see the incremental stages of the drawing. I took photos with my digital camera as I went along. using the camera is faster than using my scanner and it seems to pick up some of the more subtle colors better than my cheap A3 scanner. (Most A3 scanners cost$1200-$2500!!! but mine only cost about $200)

I decided to do a more traditional "Transformers" style mech this time around. This mech can turn into a car.

1) Rough sketch. I used a blue colored pencil to make a rough under drawing. Blue pencil does not pick up on photocopiers and scanners if you tweak the contrast/brightness settings just right. I added a little dude to the mech's shoulder to add some interest.
2) Inking. I decided to try inking with one of my new Japanese brush pens and it really worked great. I'm left handed so I ink from right to left to avoid smearing the ink.
3) Stupid Humans! Arrrrrgh! I realized that the guy I drew on the mech's shoulder was waaaayyyy out of scale so I enlarged him as much as I could without using any white-out. I think I got the proportions a little weird... people are hard!
4) Inking finished. Finally! This took a while to draw and I'm glad it is done. I couldn't figure out what to do with the lower legs so I just stopped drawing at the knees. I tried to lighten the blue pencil as much as possible with an eraser but I couldn't get it light enough without erasing some of the ink too. The blue pencil could muddle the markers when I color the mech so I decided to make a copy and color the copy. I set the coppier contrast to a higher setting and it dropped out the lighter values of the blue pencil so I had a nice, clean drawing to color.
5) Basic coloring. I didn't have a lot of time so I only colored the guy and some of the translucent bits. Hopefully I'll have time to finish it in a couple of weeks. I still haven't decided what color to make the mech, but I'm leaning towards red.
6) Detail. Here's a detailed shot of the upper torso. You can get a better idea of the subtle color overlays I used- see the faint blue in the face visor? The guys pants color was made by layering a brighter blue and a cool gray.Well, that's all for now. I'll post the color version if I ever get around to finishing it!!!

Wordled

I found this fun web page that takes all the words from your blog and makes them into a single image based on frequency of word usage. You can affect how the layout, colors, font, etc... look. Here's mine.

Apparently I use the word MARS a lot!

Make your own Wordle