Darryl Pencils

And this morning we have Darryl pencilled and ready for inks.
I think this one came out quite well. People at the real J.O.B. described it as disturbing.

Your thoughts?
Cheers

Darryl

Now this posting has no tie-in to the Bob Newhart show. Instead it relates to a secondary character in the B.P.R.D. storylines. He's one of those funny characters that draws your attention and makes you feel sad for him and his situation. This will be one of the next pieces I work on. I have some great Canadian Birch tree reference so stay tuned.

Cheers

It's My Birthday This Weekend

I'll see you all back here on Monday.



Cheers

The Owl in ink

I finished inking The Owl piece this past weekend, dropped in the title and I've got a great idea when I go to color it.

Stay Tuned

The Owl & The Ood

I finished up the Ood pencils last week but didn't get a chance to scan it until now. The Owl was a quick piece once I found the right photo reference for the owl and downtown L.A. Nastiest part of that piece was finding that shot of the Peacemaker barrel. Lots of side shots but none of the actual barrel foreshortening shot.




Enjoy.

New Artwork

I'm working on a new piece based on Robert D. Forward's cut classic The Owl, so I'll have a scam of the pencils for oyu next week. I also finished pencilling the Ood piece that I previewed earlier. For now though I'm playing fanboy.
I ordered some Guy Davis pages earlier in the month and Guy tells me that the pages are working their way East. I've picked up 2 great BPRD pages and a wonderful all villains page from the Deadline mini-series. I'm also very excited because growing up in the sixties I was exposed to a lot of great comic book talent and one of them was Jack Sparkling and one of my fave comics was Spaceman published by Dell Comics. I snagged a nice page off of ebay from issue 5. That page is paid for and hopefully next week I'll be getting a couple nice packages of artwork.


Cheers!

SCARECROW!!!

To celebrate the premiere release of Disney's The Scarecrow of Romney Marsh (Dr Syn), created by Russell Thorndyke, I thought I'd post my version of the good Dr. and his 2 thieving cohorts.

Cheers.

Because Jeff V. Asked

I've been gone for a bit, between work, 2 weeks of the flu and my wife having some surgery. I haven't been doing much drawing, instead I've been catching up on some reading, watching some new and old TV and re-charging my batteries. My old friend Jeff Vella responded to my last post and I felt I had to show a peak at a couple projects I'm working on.


Enjoy.

Basic Things Color

Here's basic color laid in on the Things piece. I sampled some photo reference of Louisiana swamps and I made the effort of making sure that all three Things each have a different color palette.

Enjoy,
Mk

Things inked

Finally. It took a bit because of the detail and coverage, and I'm very happy with how it turned out. I also designed a quick logo and threw it on. Now it's time to color, however I've three more ideas kicking around in my head so maybe I'll start coloring and then break off to do some coloring.

Muck!
Mk

Pencils finished...inks await!

To quote JScott from the HellBoy Forum, "you might be sacrificing a few nibs for that one."
I'll be in inking Hell tonight.

Cheers

Muck Monster Progress

A little more progress on the THINGS piece.

Enjoy

Pencilling under way

Here are the beginning pencils for THINGS. I light boxed my photo reference for the skull and then used the light box again to layout in non-photo blue lines based on my marker sketch that I scanned and enlarged to size.

Cheers

Things

There's nothing I like more than zombies than muck encrusted swamp monsters. I've been a fan of Swamp Thing since the first series created by Len Wein And Berni Wrightson, then afterwards the revival of the character by Alan Moore, Steve Bissette, John Totleben and later Rick Veitch. Man-Thing appeared shortly after Swamp-Thing. The creature whose touch burns! I wasn't a big fan at the time, but I grew to like the creature, even though magical aspect of the later stories weren't my cup of tea. The Heap, being the one of the original swamp monsters, along with Theodore Sturgeons IT! were also top of my list. The Heap has a great backstory involving Baron von Emmelman, a World War I German flying ace who was shot down in 1918 over a Polish swamp. He arose from the muck decades later as The Heap and met the Allied ace Skywolf. Another much monster would appear later on TV as part of the Night Stalker series, The Spanish Moss Murders. The Louisiana based Paramafait", a legendary boogeyman would send chills through my young mind when this series first premiered in the 1970's. I've been pulling together images for this new piece that I've finally put down on paper. I have immense respect for the talents of Berni Wrightson, Frank Brunner, Mike Ploog, Steve Bissette, Rick Veitch and John Totleben so I want this piece to shine. Stay tuned for THINGS.

Cheers

Jack Kirby's The Demon, Etrigan

Growing up in the mid-sixties exposed me to the revival of comics led by Stan Lee and Jack (The King) Kirby. Now I wasn't an FF or Spidey fan. No, I was more of a monster/sci-fi fan and the one comic that I latched onto was in the early 70's was Jack Kirby's solo effort, The Demon published by DC Comics starting in 1972. Jack's story and pencils and Mike Royers inks drew me to this book. The over-the-top drawing style and big and bold story made this one of my favorites! Here's my take on Etrigan and Jason Blood. Pencilled, inked and digitally colored.

Yarva Daemonicus Etrigan

Ectoplasmic Color!!!

Here's our pal Johann Kraus in all of his gorgeous color.

Enjoy,
Mk

How to spend your Saturday evening

Here in the North country we spend it with family and good friends. G. Mike Dobbs has released his second book of the year, this one, a pictography of Springfield, MA utilizing his vast postcard collection of the area. It's a beautiful book with some amazing images. My favorite of course was the postcard depicting the monkey that burned down Springfield's City Hall. It's a true story, it's actually been published so of course it's real. Mike and his lovely wife Mary invited us over for a hearty cookout which also included Mike's mother Sue, Mary's sister Jo and family and also the likes of our Northern bretheren Mark (not the race car driver) Martin and Steve Bissette. They were accompanied by their wives Marge and Jeannie. The evening was filled with laughter, odd stories and wild accusations about Thomas Kincaid, Painter of Light ™. A good time was had by all, including Lucky the Wonder Bischon.

Woof!
Mk

Pencils awaiting ink

Here's one of the first pieces I did to get used to The Thing and Ulik. I'm not happy with the Troll Princess. I think she should be a little more Troll like but still come across as femine, but the writer wanted be to beautify her. I worked on another piece that you can see below with HellBoy and a different troll where I made the Troll Princess a little more attractive.

You decide!
Mk

Ben Grimm is tough to draw

That's all I've got to say about it. I worked up a third piece based on Bob Smith's Thing/Ulik proposal and I like how it turned out. I'll probably ink it over the next day or so. Tonight I'm off to see The Dark Knight (finally).



Enjoy,
Mk

Ecto and Sunny in Ink

Finished up inking the SunLord piece and I cruised through inking the Ectoplasmic Man piece. I love both of them and they are both good examples of my design style and how I approach different characters with a different style.




Cheers!

The Ectoplasmic Man goes to China

We've all read the history of Johann Kraus and how he became the Ectoplasmic Man, but what now? Well in my rambling brain I thought 'what if he went back to Chengdou?' So I've done my rendition of the cover of that adventure. I hope you like the pencils. The inks won't be far behind. Next up is a new piece for Bob Smith's Soldiers proposal. You might have seen earlier posts concerning this proposal. This time I'm going to go back and focus on the Ben Grimm/Ulik story line and see where it takes me.



Cheers

Beware the Lobsters Claw

Finished inking this piece a few days ago, got side-tracked by some digital coloring work for my buddy Mr. Jabberous, so it's time to post it and see what you all think?

Beware!

Etrigan in B&W

Here is the inked version of the Etrigan piece. Earlier I had posted the pencils, so for comparison check them out and see how faithful I was to my own pencils.

Cheers,
Mk

And they call him SunLord!!!

Here are pencils for a cover piece featuring my creator-owned character SunLord and his entourage. This is a character I started 7+ years ago, completed a few color pieces, had a great story line and then did nothing with. You can find older SunLord pieces over at www.masztal.com, but for now, check out the new and approved SL and let me know what you think.



And yes those are frog commandoes with big guns.

Mk

A Great Holiday!

We had a wonderful 4th of July weekend. My daughter came for a visit to celebrate her 12th birthday so we took a few extra days off, had some fun, some good BBQ (in the rain!), my daughter got real good on a new videogame called WarBlades and I actually got some time to draw something Oh, and we saw WALL•E. My wife and daughter loved it. They had a fun time with the characters and the wonderful animation.



Cheers

Shake it up

Take one proposal, shake it up a bit and you can then approach 2 different companies. Here's a HellBoy version of the Soldiers proposal. Change Ulik to Rulik, make some minor background changes and TaaDaaaa!

Ragnarrok!

The Thing

So not the easiest character to draw. You have to pay attention to the shape of his body and also shape the rock plates to help with some kind of modeling. This is a piece from James Smith's proposal Soldiers. It teams Ben Grimm with Ulik, a rock troll created by Jack Kirby. The short is full of grand imagery, intense emotion and wonderful character development. Stay tuned, maybe we'll sell this sucker to Marvel and we can finally see it in print.


Clobberin' Time!

Wall•E Did Not Disappoint

Well I was very happy with what the magicians at PIXAR turned out this weekend. Wall•E was a fun time, giving us laughs, heart felt imagery and a message...that if we keep screwing up our planet, we're not going to be able to live here anymore. The detailing and texture of this movie is as realistic as can be imagined. I can't say enough about this film...GO SEE IT!

It's Wall•E Time

I get excited about a few special movies every year, and the big one for me so far is Wall•E. I think Pixar has a smash hit on their hands and I think this movie is going to redeem Pixar in the eyes of the critics and fans that thought Ratatouille was a misfire.
Watch for the lil 'Bot to be Huge!

Whoa!

Back from Vacation and a Fenway trip

So we spent a wonderful week back up in Vermont. We visited more time up in Northern VT exploring Montpelier and Burlington. Are hearts, however, are wrapped around the Cooper Hill Inn in East Dover. Our first day there gave us the experience of snow squalls at a high altitude and it was amazing. We also brought along some Durian, which our hostess is quite fond of. We did not expect the Durian party that occurred and I was eating that stinky, slimy, pudding like fruit pulp right along with everyone.

We visited the Quechee Antiques Mall and I raided Steve Bissette's booth for some DVD's and books. We also hit quite a few used book stores, my scoring on Vermont native Joe Citro's book collection.
Once back we didn't want to return to the real world, however we had a nice surprise with a pair of Fenway tickets from my wife's brother. Awesome seats, a high temperature of 101 degress, but it was worth a little extra sweat to be sitting where we were.






Cheers!

One more before we Go-Go!

Flock cover #2. I love my splatter brush!


Cheers

Going On Vacation

It's our one year anniversary, see you in a week!!



Mark and Kathy

Mother's Day at Fenway

My daughter and I had a chance to take a stroll through Fenway yesterday as a Special Mother's Day event. We shared this time with about a couple thousand of our closest friends. If you ever get a chance to take one of the Park Tours, please do it. You'll be surprised how well this field has held up over the years.




Cheers

IRON MAN ROCKED!

'nuff said.

Cheers,
Mk

Flock 2_Final

Here's a revision to what would eventually be The Flock #2 cover. The original front-on shot was nice, but the powers that be didn't like it as much as the original side shot. I combined it with images of our heroes running through a steamy Florida forest. Color will be hopefully sometime later this week.



Cheers,
Mk

Finally...Color!

Life has been very busy the past week or so and it seemed like it took me way to long to finish coloring this piece, but it's done! I'm really happy with how it turned out. It took some experimenting with different brushes to get the feathers just right. I hope the wait was worth it.



Cheers

Terror in Ink

Stage #2, inked artwork ready for digital color. I've always been a tight penciller whether it be a piece I'm going to ink or someone else is going to lay ink down onto. No matter how faithful an inker is, sometimes minor things change, or in the case of either rough pencils and a dominating inking style, a completely new piece of art is born. In this Flock #3 cover, I made minor changes in the background. I decided to not fill in solid blacks to the bushes and parts of the building. Instead I used a loose hatching to help keep the background a minor element and let the Terror Birds stand out. Once I lay in the digital color, I will soften the background color and then change the background line art from black to a darker sepia so the Terror Birds will really pop. it will be an experiment that I hope works. My fear is that the cover will be too busy, and the main characters, Scarlet Rogue and Walks Backward, will get lost.


Stay Tuned

Terror Birds #3

Here's my take of Bob Smith's battle between the Scarlet Rogue (on the right), and Walks Backwards from the last 1/3 of his book, The Flock.



Rawwk!