Baseball Player Commission

I was recently commissioned to paint this unnamed baseball player. I was given two pieces of reference, an old sepia photo...     and a pair of his pants.

The photo in question, nice pose but kinda blurry and little to go on as far as rendering it in color.

Luckily with the pants I was able to extrapolate the color information on the rest of his uniform.

That being said I did decide to change up the angle and pose a bit to give him a bit more dynamism. His leg hanging out in front was just a bit too 'normal' so i gave all his limbs a tweaking bringing the leg up a bit the foot out forward a tad. 

I didn't do anything that would violate the laws of physics or make him look superhuman, just giving the image a little energy. Also making it look a little different from the photo makes me happy, I hate just plain replicating it for the sake of replicating it.

Finished Product rendered in watercolors and airbrushed inks on illustration board:

I think the final image speaks for itself. I enjoyed working on this more than I thought I would, never having illustrated a sports player. 

Custom Action Figure: Fantastic Four

 This is a big one! I customized the entire classic Fantastic Four! 

 To start off with, I'm not sure why it is so hard to get companies to finish off teams, they'll get three figures in and then kaput! For the Marvel Universe line I was determined not to wait for them to get around to it...
(which they still haven't)

I went all out for this team as I wanted them to be as correct as possible. To start with- while the Mr.Fantastic released in the FF box set was nice, I thought he should have the Jim Lee Cyclops body that so many figures are done on now. This would make him a better size in relation to Johnny who I wanted to look more like a high schooler. He did still use the head from the box set Reed Richards though.

 The next figure up was Sue Storm, everyone's favorite Invisible Woman. She was made almost exclusively from the FF box set figure but repainted.

Johnny Storm was tricky. He started out as a Marvel Universe Bucky which I beheaded then ground off his boot cuffs and flared gloves. He gained a head from an Indian Jones Mutt figure with repainted blond hair. For what it's worth I'm still looking for a better head, but this will do for a while.

 It's clobberin time! The figure whom had the least work done to him was Benjamin J. Grimm. It simply consisted of painting his underwear to match the rest of the teams. It is necessary to point out that this was the one figurine that was not form the Marvel Universe line. It is the much superior Superhero Showdown Thing. I highly recommend picking one up if your serious about your Fantastic Four!

 All the figures were painted in Tamiya acrylics with the airbrush and detail painting was made much simpler when I discovered that I had lots of tiny '4' decals left over from a 1/1000 U.S.S. Enterprise model kit.

The Fantastic Four is Marvel's first family and I was happy to finally get their classic looks on the shelf in a good looking form.

Custom Action Figure: Vulture

Not too long ago I finished up a custom of one of my most desired Spider-Man villains...

THE VULTURE!

 I knew i had to make him after I found the perfect head rolling around in a bag of junk figurines.

 He was cobbled together form the body of a Marvel Universe Silver Surfer for the somewhat stringy emaciated muscular look. His arms came from An Avengers Assemble Falcon. Luckily they popped right onto the Silver Surfer arm pegs. Finally his feather collar was sculpted from milliput.

His final paint job was rendered in Tamiya acrylics. He filled a very large hole in Spidey's rogues gallery, here's to hoping Hasbro makes some more characters who are sorely missing in action!

Giant Size X-Men #1

Sort of used this piece as an airbush test when I got my new compressor. 

Started out as a black and white value study to get the sizes and positions and poses all settled. Used ink and brush and pencil to figure everything out.

After airbrushing inks to lay down a base gradient for all the color fields. I went in and picked out all the details in watercolor.

 Close ups show some of the finer detail like the hair on wolverines arm.

 Final detailing was handled with colored pencil. Most outlining and finer areas are all colored pencil.

 I was REALLY thrilled with the Bamf! around Nightcrawler.

Only a few things were really modified from the original image by Dave Cockrum. But I was really happy to change up Angel's pose in the background.

PORTRAITS!

Just finished up some portraits for some patrons. Thought they came out fairly decent!

 Candace

and Eddy.

These were rendered in watercolor and airbushed inks on illustration board. I have to say I was really pleased with the final result. By airbushing the waterproof inks as a base gradient layer it makes the actual brush painting fairly quick and simple.