Four Days Until Free Comic Book Day!
Only four days left until Free Comic Book Day! I've mentioned before that I'll be at Four Color Fantasies in Rancho Cucamonga, California at the big signing event. Owner Chris Brady has an auction for the Hero Initiative, and I'm donating this Mary Marvel sketch to it. Minus the FCBD countdown balloon, of course.
Woo-hoo! Free Comic Book Day! It's gonna be great!
Baseball on the Brain
I've mentioned previously that I'm working on a Free Comic Book Day comic for the Lake County Captains. Now, I can reveal the cover…
In case you're wondering, that's The Captain, Skipper and Skippy, Grover the on-field announcer, and the three racing fish, Willy Walleye, Pauley Perch, and Buster Bluegill. You may remember them from when I designed their bobble fish.
Wow, it's less than a month away! I really need to start busting out pages, don't I?
Happy Easter!
Happy Easter everyone! And yes, I did have coffee today. Ah, so tasty!
New Tools and New Drawings
A lot of cartoonists have been saying great things about Manga Studio. There's a special going on from the Manga Studio Folks right now where you can get the full version for $149. So I bought it to check it out. Hey, if it's good enough for Dave Gibbons, it should be good enough for me. The deal only runs until the end of the month, so you don't have much time left.
Here's a quick sketch of Amazonia I did just to try out the program. It's pretty sharp. I'm looking forward to trying it in more things.
And, because I know I haven't been posting much, here's a new Love and Capes panel, too. I name-check a lot of people in my book. Here, I've named Darkblade's police chief contact after Chris Sims, uber-Batman fan, writer for Comics Alliance and all around good guy.
Pulling Back the Curtain
Just to share, here are the original rough pencils for a page of Love and Capes. It's a scene between the Crusader and Amazonia, and I think it has some nice movement to it. I've got a sheet of board with the 8-panel grid on it, and I toss some tracing paper on 
top of that and go to town. You'll notice some redrawings in the right column. When I've got an image like Mark leaning back on his hands in the third panel, that doesn't work, I'll overlay tracing paper and redraw away.
There's another sheet of tight pencils that I ink from, but it's nowhere near as cool looking as this. I wish I could translate all the energy in the pencils into the final inks.
It'll be a while before this prints, so enjoy it now.
Of My Own Volition
It's no secret that I hate drawing horses. I just can't figure out their anatomy, especially how their legs work. But, when I got a request to draw Valkyrie, something in my head said "Draw Aragorn, her winged horse." I'd already drawn Val once, so I definitely wanted something different. So I went for it.
Admittedly, I cropped the image so you couldn't see much of the legs, but I think I still did some okay work on Aragorn. Val's not bad either. The temptation with her is to draw her in warrior, so itwas nice to show her in a softer moment.
And, as always, click to embiggen!
Hellcat-- in Technicolor!
Sometimes jobs just get away from you. I didn't mean to finish this one so early this morning, but I got up and couldn't help myself. So here's the finished, full-color Hellcat.
Okay, now to draw some Love and Capes. Really.
Who Doesn't Love Patsy Walker?
Today started out with such grand intentions. I was going to draw stuff. But then, pretty quickly, things went off the rails.
It took my forever to dialogue the new Love and Capes page. Then I dealt with some client logo designs and burned some data DVDs for another client. It was sunny, and I felt the siren call of my first Convertible Day. There were a ton of e-mails to return. I finalized Love and Capes #13 with my printer. 
I met with a client. I got an awesome present in the mail. Whew!
I'm only disappointed because yesterday, I put out a call on Twitter for commissions, and I got a bunch of them. It was great, and I was looking forward to tackling them. I figured I'd draw at least three of them today. But life gets in the way, and I managed to do the pencils for one.
But, 
since I don't post a lot of work-in-progress stuff, I thought I'd share this Hellcat commission that I'm working on. I don't do a lot of profiles, but I thought it caught her sense of movement pretty well. If you look, you can see where I originally had her left leg lower. Moving it higher accentuated the pose.
I'll transfer it to good board tomorrow, I think. I should have a new page of Love and Capes on the schedule tomorrow, too. We'll see if I can handle them both.
Anyway, the first image is my col-erase pencil rough (man, I love those things) tightened with mechanical pencil. The second one is the tight pencils, which will be transferred to bristol for inking. And then scanning and coloring.
No Idea Ever Dies
This could almost go into "Wayback Wednesdays", but not really. Here's a scene from an upcoming Love and Capes scene. In it we see the Crusader and Windstar. Windstar's been seen in #4 and #8, and mentioned in #12. He's a character I created back in my teen years, and some of the slice-of-superlife subplots I created for him have found their way into LNC. This issue is the first time he's getting 
any serious screen time, though.
It's nice to be able to work him in. I don't know that I'll ever do a Windstar series at this point, so it's nice to be able to use him somewhere.