Cork 55

Howdy. More Cork. I'm so sorry.

Ratfist Fan Art

Disrespecting another of Doug T's creations:

Cork 54

It's been awhile.
Ellis, I know you were guessing before as to what was GOING to happen in this scenario, but I have no qualms in telling you how dead wrong you were. This happened instead. I also just last night finished up another one as well so I'll have that posted in another day or two.

Ride Beyond Vengence (1966)

 Tuesday Movie Club.

You should have seen Chuck Connor's hair--for his mountain man scenes they put a wild rug on him. Crazy, man.

(Sorry for the poor Claude Akins & Bill Bixby)

Playing with a couple of Robot ideas

Actually , one robot idea. . Once I get a sketch I like, I'll convert it to a painting.

I'll use the wildfire photo for my palette.
Sketch the better robot, stylize the scene to my style. What hit me about this photo is the blueing on the trailer home. I want to use that on the robot/war-machine

Flopped. Which do you like better?

Random Creeple

I haven't posted any drawings in, like, forever, so here's something. My old brushpen dried out and I just recently ordered more off of Jetpen (click the headline for more info... sadly they appear to be sold out of them right now).  Now I have a few of them and won't be running out any time soon. I've got a bunch of drawings like this now that I will be sharing in the weeks to come.

Creeple © 2011 Rick Schmitz

Megamind

Question for Jeff if he notices this post. The IMDB trivia mentions Guillermo Del Toro being brought in to make the action more exciting for Megamind.
Any insider info about how that set with the story artists?
I loved the movie.

Color underlays

The scifi zamboony has a colorize overlay. But it's grey tones were underlaid.
I like the process of working with the line art that has been filled and alised to alpha.
Much better than multiplying the line art into color .

I took a super, loose, small , thumbnail and blew it up and used this underlay idea. But I'm also working from color photos for my color picks. These colors were from a shot of vacation cabins in Tahiti. That dodges my whole color blind issue. Picking darkest darks, lightest lights right from a photo.
Also, using the Candice channel technique, I advise duplicating the single GRAY channel while in grayscale vs duplicating the blue channel while in RGB mode. Then switch to rgb . The selection channel will travel with the mode change.

EYE EYE EYE

Kali's T Shirt. I (Ellis) noticed it in draft format and published it. Very cool shirt.

EYE EYE EYE

A Chance and Inclination to Draw

Lions Gate Bridge



Freighters on Burrard Inlet

Boy Genius

First off: !!!!!!
This opens up an entirely new story vistas for our Lil' Okie Ellis/Tales From The CORK comic.

Secondly, I need updates on Joni Gentry (spunky cute and should have found adventure in life, tho' I worry she didn't quite feel good enough about herself), Paula Garland (maybe too stuck on herself--but hopefully all that narcissism fired some ambition), Debbie Garlow (sensible enough to avoid a big head from her own high school popularity, though as life disappointed her, she became a vicious scold), Sharon Goforth (such extraordinary looks made her awkward in high school, and she sought the comfort of older men, didn't she?), and finally the exotic Ellise Franklin (Ellis-e? Ellis? is there a connection there? Were the Oklahoma hills of your birth year aflame with admiration for someone named Ellis??).

Please update us. And give us a clearer scan of Ellis Goodson, boy genius!

More Brush Pen Paris

The Chinese Charlie Chaplin who got his big break at the Bar du Marché.

Actually, I'm just making that up. But he did look like Chaplin. And in a notoriously all-white profession. Fun! I put up the whole thing over at Brush Pen Paris, the only blog that smells like fresh baguette....

Smear-Charcoal looking

I should be doing my Taxes

Actually I've done them. I owe for all my government cheeze.
It's time to do something about this being broke situation.

I might like this work. Meet new people. Insult them. Swim.

1970. Probably the year I witnessed the Clown take down

The only photo of a guy I remember as being wildly popular. He had to be avoiding having his picture taken.

Beehive hair style. Probably the last big year.

Brush Pen Paris, my nouveau blogue

I've started a new blog to chronicle my efforts putting together the long awaited Paris sketchbook.

It's called Brush Pen Paris, and if you click over, you can see this entire piece.

I've excerpted the most Mort Drucker-ish passage here. I swear to gawd, I'm not trying to imitate him! It just came out this way! But after seeing this, OK, OK, I give up defending the claims that my stuff looks Mad Magazine-esque.

You can see the original pencil and ink sketches of these faces at the new blog. I drew 'em from life, then translated them into a much bigger, more detailed composition.

Check it out!

Shane Gline's Cartoon Retro

Go to Google Reader and subscribe to Shane Gline's Cartoon Retro. It's got a lot of cool stuff. Like this old Frazetta funny animal strip. It's nice that the world wide web is out there scanning.

W.f.B.P.: Work from BrushPen

Happy Tuesday!
A section from a W.I.P. ink I thought I'd have finished today. It's concocted from a group of pencil sketches I made in a restaurant in Par-ee. I've rarely worked this way before...and I'm learning it's harder to come up with a final look than I'd thought.

I look forward to your harshest criticisms!

Xperiment to see if blogger loads super large file

It's large. But not as large as what i uploaded.

I'll ink this in Manga studio later and stick the result under this one.

Are you reading Nonplayer yet?

This is the most beautiful and impressive comic you will read this year.  Go get it.

Oh, and if you ever attend a TAG North meeting you might encounter the super nice Artist/Writer of this book, Nate Simpson.  He's a pretty regular attendee.

Priming the Pump

Firing up photoshop, screwing around as warm up for a sketch day. I wrote about that "use it or lose it" factor.
I'm about to get serious about story samples which I will share as I go.
I just said good bye to my pipe dream involvement with social game start up. So I'm focused.

Tales from the CORK!

I never caught this issue in the original run, did you?

I bet Tom Moon's got it--he's a Cork Completist.

I always wanted to do an EC-style cover--couldn't resist taking this all the way. Learned a lot about coloring, inking, composing, etc. (mainly I learned I'm no Marie Severin when it comes to color!)

Congrats to you, Scott, on 50+ strips of Cork--and here's to yr continued success!

p.s. I've got the straight image up over at Brush Pen Breakfast--plus some more ruminations on sources, inspirations, etc....

Manga Studio - Digging It

Watching Doug's little one hour presentation gave me a lot of confidence I could dig into manga studio and get something done. I did this bit of import and trace up in about 15 minutes.
I'm going to take Doug's lead, find a 5 page horror story i had thumbnailed and import that for inks.

Gil Kane would probably like it

At least with this movie they don't have to worry about working The Avengers into it.
Character designs look very cool. Inevitable comparisons to "looking like a video game."
I did like the nicely thought through, psychically pushed, saying of a reverential lamp oath.

I.T. Ellis-The Photoshop Clean Line Art Trick

Showing the channels. Duplicating the blue channel and inverting it. This allows dragging the channel down to the "dotted line" circle you see at the bottom of the channels window. This makes a selection of the alpha-white.

Go back to levels, Create a clean one. You can see your crawling ant selection waiting to be filled. You need to have deselected the blue-copy channel and have rgb again selected or photoshop will give you a confused appearance.

Showing black filling the selection. With transparency vs a white. There should be no white now. The only color used has been black and the fill has anti-aliased itself into transparent vs white.

Showing how clean color now looks under the new clean black line art.

HELP: Coloring Dry Brush in Pho-Sho??

With the depressing news from Sony, I feel a little silly bumping that post from the top of our TAG roll. But I do so in the service of art--I need help!

Does anyone have any advice for coloring my Cork tribute page? I am used to doing a primitive sort of coloring in Pho-Sho (Photoshop, 'natch): I push the levels to make my image more Manichean (grays migrate to either black or white--or "black or shite" as I just Freudian-ly typed!!); I make a layer that is just black line, and emptiness (transparency) for the white; under this I add a layer where I make my color shapes. Black lines on top of color blocks, just like inking a cel. Simple, right?

But the extensive "dry brush" in this Cork piece don't want to migrate. A LOT of the edges are mid-tone and don't easily migrate to either black or white (see example--if I push levels too much one way or other, edges become irregular--too much push toward black and I get blotchy inks like on the stove pipe; too much toward mid-tone/white and I get speckled remainder lie on the front of oven furnace [the white speckles in the ink]).

I'm getting funkiness like this (color is chunky right now):

Is there a way to progressively replace color through these edge areas--so that it would really look like my brush pen has been drawn over the color? Transparency doesn't seem to work, and besides, it would require a lot of fudging to get the right values....

Any ideas that can help a brother?