First come, first served to purchase this 9x12 full color original of Ultra Boy and Phantom Girl from the Legion of Super-Heroes for $80.00! Buy by 2:00pm, February 5 and save $20!
Carl and Ellie from "Up" Valentine Art
First come, first served to purchase this 9x12 full color original of Carl and Ellie from "Up" for $80.00! Buy by 2:00pm, February 5 and save $20!
This piece has sold.
The Incredibles Valentine Art Available!
First come, first served to purchase this 9x12 full color original of Mr. Incredible and Elasti-Girl. $80.00! Buy by 3:00pm, February 3 and save $20!
Hawkman and Hawkwoman Valentine Art Available!
First come, first served to purchase this 9x12 full color original of the Winged Wonders. $80.00! Buy by 3:00pm, February 2 and save $20!
Valentine's Day Art Special!
Buy Thom Zahler original commissions for Valentine's Day!
My #NYCC 2016 Schedule
I'll be at New York Comic Con this week. I'll be at C12 in Artist Alley the whole show, excepting… Thursday 3:00-4:00pm: Signing at the IDW booth
Friday 12:30-1:30pm: I’m doing a teaching workshop Family HQ – 1E16
Also, my "Captain Kirk and His Ladies" piece will be auctioned at the NYCC charity auction. The original and a giclee print (24x6, full color) are a package. This is the only place you can get the green wrap shirt Kirk.
I'll have two giclee prints with gold shirt Kirk for $75 at my table. And then a more in the smaller 18x5 size, the same as my Doctors Who print at the table for $15.
Also at the table I'll have Love and Capes, Long Distance, My Little Pony and more, including original art, sketchcards and more. I'll be sketching all weekend long, and being a mildly amusing conversationalist, too!
My C2E2 Auction Piece
C2E2 does a charity auction every year and I'm always glad to participate. Here's my piece this year, showing my favorite scene from this year's Supergirl TV show, Supergirl and the Martian Manhunter just flying together. It was the most comic booky thing I've seen on TV and it was glorious. The auction includes the original and a giclee print. Melissa Benoist will be at the show, too. Maybe whoever gets it might be able to get it signed.
Morning Warm-Up: Space Ranger
Rick Starr, Space Ranger was mentioned on the last episode of DC'S Legends of Tomorrow, so I thought he'd be a good morning warm up. The piece was done in Manga Studio, flatted in Photoshop with shading added in Painter. These experiments not only get my brain up to operating temperature but let me mess around with new techniques that I can try on new projects. Like the new unannounced project I have, but hey, I just drew page three of it yesterday. More news when I can!
Arkham Sessions T-Shirt
My friends Andrea Letamendi and Brian Ward do the excellent The Arkham Sessions podcast, reviewing Batman villains from a psychological point of view. They're going to be part of the new Imzy community, a new social media platform, centered on a positive community, in beta now.[image src="http://thomz.com/blogall/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/arkham_tshirt.png" align="right" border="none" link="#" alt="Arkham Sessions t-shirt" title="Arkham Sessions t-shirt" lightbox="false" ] To promote the site, and because I designed the header for their podcast site, they asked me to design a t-shirt to promote it. The design will be available as a shirt and a sticker (the sticker being able to be in full color).
More details as they become available, but follow @imzyhq on Twitter for more updates.
So I Got My Apple Pencil
My Apple Pencil finally arrived last week. I've been experimenting with it in whatever free time I have. Overall, I like it quite a bit. It paired easily and charges quickly. It's got a great feel to it. Mostly, I've been drawing in Procreate, which I like quite a bit. It does a lot of the things that Photoshop does and has a pretty quick learning curve. I do wish it had a straight-up magic wand tool to select an area.
I adore the different brushes, especially the pencil, graphite and chalk ones that create a really natural tool. They're better than anything in Photoshop and at least on par with Painter.
The problem I've had so far is line fidelity. The iPad Pro is almost too good. I'd like to be able to tweak it so there's a little more smoothness to my line, the way that I've done with my Cintiq and Manga Studio. I can make a pretty crisp line with a brush, but the Apple Pencil isn't a brush and doesn't have the same feel.
I'm following the same learning process I did with the Cintiq, Manga Studio and my Nostromo where I forced myself to do a drawing a day using that tool. That's been helping a lot. The Captain Cold sketch below took almost two hours to do. The Wonder Woman one took less than an episode of Castle. That's improvement.
The iPad Pro is doing what I expected it to do. Ultimately, I wanted what I call an Eighty Percent Device. Something where I could get 80% of the way to finished. With my current setup, I'd be able to at least create tight pencils for projects. I'm working on getting my inks where I want them. And I'm finally going to be able to sit on the couch and color comics pages! That will work well for me. Ultimately, I'll still need to take it over to the desktop and tweak and finish those files off, but being able to do 80% of the work on the iPad when I need to makes my convention travel schedule a lot more manageable, so I'm definitely happy with my purchase.