90's X-Men Animated

It’s FINALLY heeeeeere!!!!

Yes I know I’m a bit excited but I’ve been working on this piece on and off for months and I am sooooooo glad that it’s finally over (though it was a lot of fun)!

This piece is my homage to the 90’s Animated X-Men cartoon, one of my favorite 90’s cartoons and easily one of the most influential towards me as an artist. I absolutely love that it was heavily influenced by Jim Lee’s designs, something that was so important to me as a kid since I was getting into comics during his legendary run on the comic book series. He’s always been one of my artistic idols and it’s great to have the chance to put my own spin on his work.

I will say that this piece was a lot of fun for me when it comes to my “comic book” style and I think I grew a lot through it. I’m continually trying to refine what I feel my comic book style is. I’m really striving to showcase a painted style that reflects some of my biggest comic book influences (like J. Scott Campbell, Jim Lee, and Marko Djurdjevic) while at the same time bringing an exaggerated style from animated designers that I love (Phil Bourassa influences me so much nowadays, probably more than anyone realizes).

For those of you that are still here and interested, artistically this was a real challenge for me. With my previous Batman Animated Collage piece I had worked with roughly 22 characters but with this one I decided to push even higher by roughly 10 more characters. That definitely presented a lot of challenges when it came to composition and layout. However, more than anything, the real challenge was the patience to keep going and paint so many characters in one piece. Luckily I made it through and while no painting ever truly gets to the level of epicness that I’m striving for, at least for where I’m at right now, at this point and time in my artistic growth, I can say that it was the best that my skills would allow me to accomplish.

Anyways, I’ve been sitting on this for a while and thought it’s best now to put it out there for all of you to see. I was hoping that I could unveil it at Emerald City Comic Con 2015 but it was too much of a rush and I didn’t want to sacrifice quality. So long and short of it, this piece will be making it’s debut at MegaCon 2015!

In closing, I hope this piece brought back some warm and fuzzy nostalgic feelings for you and you remember the 90’s with fondness; it’s one of my favorite decades! Thank you for all your support and if you feel so inclined please like this and feel free to share it with your friends!

Daryl Dixon Animated .GIF

Here's a LINK to an animated .GIF I created showing my process for creating my recent Daryl Dixon painting from my Walking Dead Series (which you see here)

. You'll notice that I messed up and had to start over. Such is life lol! But I think that it's good for everyone to see the process, especially beginners because it's good to know that everyone still messes up from time to time. Just part of the Journey:)

P.S. If you're interested in buying this print please check out my Etsy Store LINK

It's update time!

 Well it's been a while so it's time for me to update! It just seems like Facebook is so much easier that unfortunately I just don't do this as often :(

Anyways, first up are some more Photostudies, this time of Hit Girl and RoboCop. After that comes some old paintings I did for the Lord of the Rings Card Game by Fantasy Flight Games. Finally you can see some of the printed cards that I recieved!

Luke Skywalker -"The Empire Strikes Back" Photostudy

Here's another Photostudy, this time from my most favorite of the Star Wars movies "The Empire Strikes Back".

This did take a little longer than I wanted, about 2hrs and 20 mins. However, I'm really trying to learn how to nail faces and this was just one of those times that it was a little more difficult. Luke has such a recognizable face and I think sometimes just knowing that there is a self imposed time limit means that it can be a little more difficult to capture the essence of the character.

Either way this was a lot of fun and as always great practice. It's interesting too because I changing up my approach a little working more with soft brushes to have smoother blending and gradients. Not sure if I'll stick with it forever (since I do love texture brushes) but it's great fun to experiment. Also, I have to say I really love the high contrast of the movie still that I was studying from. I love cinematic lighting!

New Art!

 Scorpion Redesigns: Here are my turnarounds for my Scorpion Redesigns. My goal was to redesign Scorpion (from Mortal Kombat) for a High Fantasy genre such as Lord of the Rings.

This was a great exercise for me because in my professional work I never really do turnarounds. More often than not it's just characters in static poses in order to convey the idea. It really forced me to think in 3 dimensions.

If there are any 3D modellers out here who would like to model this, please feel free to have a go at it. Just let me know as I'd love to see the final product! Thanks!

Photo Studies: Got inspired to learn and practice from "The Dark Knight". Commissioner Gordon's likeness got away from me but I feel like I got Joker's. Gordon took 1hr and 25mins and Joker took 1hr and 15mins.

How to paint a Black Alpha poster in 10 easy Steps!

Well maybe these steps weren't so easy lol :) Anyways, here it is. As you can tell it changed throughout the painting process, especially with a little tweaking in the composition in the end. I had originally thought that I would add all of this typography to make it look like a real movie poster but sadly it's just not my strength. I just could never get the type to look cohesive so I decided to drop it and not focus on it. Anyways, enjoy!

-Blake

Black Alpha is a trademark and copyright of Tom Rasch

Black Alpha Poster

Here’s a little fan art love for “Black Alpha”!

If you don’t know who or what Black Alpha is then let me enlighten you! Black Alpha is the brainchild and upcoming comic book series from my buddy Tom Rasch. Without going too in-depth, basically think of it as an intergalactic space adventure that brings together story elements similar to Batman, a little bit of Iron Man tech and takes place in an expansive universe similar to Star Wars.

Every since I met Tom and saw his passion for this story I knew that it would be a success. The first thing I thought when I looked at the character designs was “This is gonna be on Cartoon Network’s Saturday night line-up”. Anyway, I fell in love with it and could see how this world would one day branch out from comics to all forms of entertainment and it’s starting to happen! Needless to say, if you haven’t checked out Black Alpha, you need to right now! Here’s the link to the Black Alpha fan page on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/blackalpha3

Please like and share with you’re friends too!

As far as this picture goes, I’ve been working on and off on this for about a month. I knew for the past year or so that I wanted to do some fan art for Black Alpha, but as is so often the case it was easy to get caught up with other things. Finally, I decided that I really wanted to tackle it.

I knew that I wanted to do something different with it and my first thought was something that was like a Star Wars poster. I’ve always loved Drew Struzan’s work; especially for the Star Wars posters (he’s easily one of the greatest illustrators of all time in my opinion) so I decided to channel that type of feel into this painting. It was a real struggle, trying to figure out how many figures to put in. Initially, I had thought of doing a lot more but I felt it might get a little too cluttered, so I decided to streamline it a little.

Another struggle was to try and give a digital painting a feel that was similar to Struzan’s traditional work. It was a struggle but I learned a lot and had fun, since I do love texture! Anyways, you never get as close as you want but for where I’m at right now it’s as close as I can come.

In the end I tried to take a little artistic liberty with the color schemes and some of the designs to try and make it feel cohesive in the painting. It’s really just my interpretation of the Black Alpha universe, so there are some slight variations from the comic designs.

One last thing I thought I’d mention is that in order to try and emulate Struzan’s work, I decided to keep to a minimal color palette. Since most of his work has a very warm color scheme I decided to stick with that, hopefully giving the impression of working off of a burnt sienna paper.

Well if you made it this far congrats! Oh and if you’re curious, as always, this was painted in Photoshop CS4! Have a great day and don’t forget to check out Black Alpha!

-Blake

Black Alpha is a trademark and copyright of Tom Rasch

ProfX 01 Photo Study

Here's another one I did from Saturday night. This is James McAvoy as Professor X from X-Men: First Class. This was a lot of fun as I got to see all the different colors that made up his face. There were browns, yellows, greens, oranges, pinks and blues. All very interesting and very helpful for me when thinking of color palettes for future paintings.

This one was done in 60 minutes and as always in Photoshop CS4!

Study Work

I've been on a kick doing study pieces recently. Here's one I did of Gandalf from a still from The Hobbit and the other two are based off of pictures John Singer Seargent painted.

Gandalf took 1 hr and 5 mins, the other two were 2 hrs and 15 mins each, and they were done in Photoshop CS4. Enjoy!

Thanos

Hey everyone! Back at the first Denver Comic Con I met a super nice artist by the name of Jon Hughes. We hit it off and became buddies and a little while back he asked if I wanted to collaborate with him on a piece. He gave me a the line art to and I ended up painting it and what you see is the final :) Hope you enjoy! And by the ways, if you haven't checked Jon out yet, why don't you go take a peek at his work! https://www.facebook.com/overgroundcomics

Orc Mustering Ground

Hey everyone! Here's some more work from The Lord of The Rings Card Game. This one is called "Orc Mustering Ground". It was painted in November of 2011 and was for Fantasy Flight Games. Enjoy!

Assault

Hey everyone! Here's some more work that I did last year for the Lord of the Rings Card Game from Fantasy Flight Games. This one is called "Assault"

Troll Purse

Here's some more Lord of the Rings work that I did last year for Fantasy Flight Games. This time it's the Hobbit himself, Mr. Bilbo Baggins. Enjoy!

Grip Grab, Pinch Nab!

In continuing with this weeks theme honoring the upcoming movie "The Hobbit", here's some more work that I did last year for Fantasy Flight Games Lord of the Rings Game! Enjoy!

Copyright Fantasy Flight Games

Wind Whipped Rain

Hey everyone! In honor of "The Hobbit" which will be coming out this Friday, here's some more work that I did last year for Fantasy Flight Games.

This is once again from their "Lord of the Rings The Card Game" and specifically their "The Hobbit: Over Hill and Under Hill" expansion. These two characters are Fili and Kili.

As you can tell, I've painted a lot of dwarves for them lol! By the way, if you're interested in the game here's a link:Link

So Here are two 1940's style Pin-ups of the comic villians Harley Quinn and Poison Ivy. Obviously, if you keep up with my blog you'll notice that the white outline with Poison Ivy is a slight modification from the original. I did it with Harley and liked the result so I thought I'd add it to the Ivy Pic. Anyways, I hope you enjoy these two Batman Baddies :) Enjoy!

Animated GIF- TMNT vs Zombies: Michelangelo

Here's the final Animated .GIF in my series of "TMNT vs Zombies" pics. Just in case you didn't know it's Michelangelo :) Enjoy!

http://www.dolphinboy2000.deviantart.com/#/d4wxn4l 

Cat Mad king

Here's another illustration I did for Mystic Warlords of Ka'a Link. You know as I look back on them I always think, man this sucks! But it's a learning process. I do wish though that I would have had more than a day to work on this piece. Oh well! Enjoy!

As always I am available for commissions so if you are interested in commissions please private message me and we can discuss rates. Thanks!

Copyright Warner Bros.

Bera Blade of the East

Here's another illustration I did for Mystic Warlords of Ka'a Link.

As always I am available for commissions so if you are interested in commissions please private message me and we can discuss rates. Thanks!

Copyright Warner Bros.

Steampunk Elf Painting Process

I was rummaging through my files and I thought "I've never shown my painting process for my Steampunk Elf". So here it is :)