Battle Cry

Here's a quick post of new illustration just in time for thanksgiving.

Cú Chulainn's Rage

 

 My good friend Will Sliney asked a bunch of his friends to create some illustrations for his forth coming creator owned book, Celtic Warrior: The Legend of Cú Chulainn. Cú Chulainn was basically the Irish Achilles, a ridiculously powerful warrior who has ever lasting fame but a very short life. Sound familiar?

Here are my thumbnail sketches, I began with a straightforward approach to the project your basic pin up hero poses.  But I wasn't too thrilled with any of them, while researching the character during the thumbnail stage I came stumbled this:

    "He sets off on a foray and kills the three sons of Nechtan Scéne, who had boasted they had killed more Ulstermen than there were Ulstermen still living. He returns to Emain Macha in his battle frenzy, and the Ulstermen are afraid he will slaughter them all. Conchobar's wife Mugain leads out the women of Emain, and they bare their breasts to him. He averts his eyes, and the Ulstermen wrestle him into a barrel of cold water, which explodes from the heat of his body. They put him in a second barrel, which boils, and a third, which warms to a pleasant temperature."

And I decided to make the moment in which Cú Culainn's rage ignites the focus of my illustration. 

After deciding on a composition I went on and fleshed it out some more and liked what was going on.

I blew up the above sketch and reworked it on tracing paper. Ironing out all the kinks.

Happy accident from reworking the drawing on tracing paper was that I ended up flipping the composition with out realizing it. Which in my opinion made it better.

At this point I was happy with my overall drawing and proceeded with my color comps. This is the one I settled on after much debate. ( You can see the rest of my color comps on a earlier post. Here. )

I added a little bit more activity to the boiling water in my final inked drawing.

After scanning in some textures, some gouache painting I did over my drawing and photoshop. 

Here is the final.

 

Until next time,

Ricardo

The Thrilling Exploits of Una Albers Lady Adventrix

 Here's a couple color variants of a cover I made for the comic 

"The Thrilling Exploits of Una Albers Lady Adventrix" 

written by Monica Smyczek, Illustrated by my super talented buddy Jake Cohen. 

Jake asked for a minimal stained glass style cover, after going online and researching stained glass designs. I came up with the following sketches.

 

Sketch #3 was chosen and I got to work. After making my color comp I proceeded to paint the different glass tiles with gouache on acetate in an effort to get that nice streaky stained glass feel. I had originally hand drawn all my lines, but they just felt too messy. Enter Stacey and her Illustrator magic, she helped (by help I mean do everything) me trace the drawing in Illustrator for some nice, crisp lines. 

Finally, I put everything together in Photoshop for the finish.

Color Comps

Making decisions about the colors in my Illustrations is probably the hardest thing.

So I'm gonna sleep on this one and make a decision later. 

Of course all suggestions are more than welcome!

On the Home Stretch

Almost at the end of a crazy long project. Hopefully I can say more on it soon.

 

A little bit of Something

No Fear of the Black Ink

Decided to go all out with the black on this one.
Trying some different things with ink, 

hope you guys like it as much as I found it fun.

NBA Top Performer

I was away for a while so I couldn't keep up with the top performers. 

But here is last nights top performer, Lebron James, 

who viciously outplayed the league MVP D- Rose.

NBA Top Performer

Dirk 48 pts. on 15 shots. Yup he's the top performer.

NBA Top Performer

Although the numbers didn't show it. But if you watched the game Taj Gibson and his 2 monster slams (One in D-Wade's face)  flipped the momentum towards Chicago's favor.

NBA Top Performer

D- Wade put the nail on the Celtics coffin with his performance tonight.

NBA Top Performer

 Though his stat line didn't show it. JJ Barea was the catalyst to the Mavs 4th qtr versus the Lakers.

NBA Top Performer

Dirk Nowitzki's line 28 pts, 14 rbs, 3 ast, 2 stls = Top Performer 

NBA Top Performers

This one was a long time coming, Zach Randolph has been a beast in the playoffs,

and it was no different in the game 1 Memphis win over OKC.

D.Rose for the Win!

Derrick Rose went through the trees for the winning bucket.

NBA Top Performer for Wednesday

Manu Ginobli proved to be the difference for the Spurs last night.

NBA Top Performers for Tuesday

Dirk put the Blazers to sleep with 14 pts in the 4th qtr.
 

Rojon Rondo owned the Knicks and Dwight Howard annihilated the Hawks.

NBA Top Performers for Sunday

 OKC's Dynamic Duo of Durant and Westbrook took out the Nuggets.

 

 

 

Ray Allen buried the NY Knicks with a game winning three.

Chris Paul was on fire today. Beast

Honestly, it took me over 6 hours of drawing to figure this bus out!

Chicago

True Grit

Hello,

Went and saw True Grit recently, and thought it was a great film with a lot of very well composed scenes.
So I decided to make an Illustration based on the film.
Hope you like it.