I
begin by sketching a rough draft
on a Blue Line Pro preprinted 10x15" comic book board, using a 5H
drafting pencil. Nowadays I prefer this kind of smooth board over
regular paper because it keeps fine pencil detail and doesn't soak up
too much ink.If I need reference materials I use downloaded images and swimsuit catalogs but never copy or trace anything directly. Once the sketch is completed I ink it with a 02 Pigma Micron pen and erase all pencil marks with a Staedtler Mars Plastic eraser. Then I run over the drawing adding in some definition with the 02 or 05, using a 08 for the comic frame borders. Generally, all the characters and individual items get a heavy outline and everything close to the viewer gets a heavier outline.
I scan the board in at 300 dpi as black and white line art, sometimes scanning it in two or three parts to reassemble in Photoshop -- for this I firmly set the edge of the board against the border of the glass in the scanner for the best alignment. An alternate method is to take the 11x17" board down to Kinko's and resize it down to 81/2x11" on one of their big copiers.
Cleaning up the line art is done in Photoshop, then I usually make several layers including a background color, line art, flat colors, shadows, highlights, lighting effects and any other needed adjustments (I tried using a 4x5" Wacom tablet but later decided my $20 optical mouse works just fine for the type of work I do). The finished drawing is resampled down to a web-friendly size whereas the large original file gets backed up to a second computer or archived to a CD.
I've mentioned before that I do not consider myself that skilled at drawing, inking or coloring and that all of this is just good practice. If you currently draw or want to learn how to draw, I suggest picking up a couple of affordable books I consider a great resource; 'Drawing the Head and Figure' and 'Cartooning the Head and Figure', both by Jack Hamm.
Most importantly, don't give up!
December 30th, 2005 -- I added some scans of old stuff I decided weren't too embarrassing to share. I didn't bother making thumbnails so I apologize to all of you 56kers.
Here are a few older drawings I rescanned and recolored recently. I have been adding in simple backgrounds to finish off the original idea of the drawing and with practice it has all become much faster and easier to do. Every now and then I will rescan an old drawing and redo it for this section of the page. Click to get the full sized jpg.
| Old version |
New version |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
One bamboo rod, two
bayonets, some TNT and frag grenades, some duct tape and some
rope. Add a damsel in distress and you have a dramatic scene
being played out in some darkened corner of the jungle. |
 |
...or possibly in some
darkened corner of a Nazi dungeon? |
 |
I really need to get away from using downloaded photos as quick backgrounds. That's cheating. |
 |
Here's a somewhat recent
sketch
that still needs to be finished off and inked. |
 |
Here's the rough sketch
for a new "war-hammer" graphic I have been wanting to do for a while
now. |
 |
Here's a pencil drawing
from 1994 that I plan to redraw very soon (it would be easier than
trying to color over all that pencil shading). If I choose this
futuristic storyline I've had in mind for years as the background for a
webcomic this would be the main character. I wrote some background for a post-apocalyptic online comic book series but after reviewing my ideas and one or two "automatic sniper robot" sketches I realized what I had in mind was basically a rehashed version of an old 16 color DOS game called "Wasteland", the same southwestern US region complete with radiation zones, underground sleeper military bases and rogue killer robots roaming the desert. |
|
|
|
 |
One thing I messed with
back in '92-93 was a rough design for a type of powered armor after I
saw a guy wearing a back brace at the state fair. For the armor
to maintain some flexibility at the waist it seemed logical to support
the weight of the torso mainly on the hips which in turn are supported
by heavy duty leg mechanisms. |
 |
But the problem with
powered armor is that it probably has internal life support and other
electronics that generate quite a bit of heat, so some sort of cooling
method would be necessary. |
 |
A lighter weight armor,
intended for riot situations and operating in tear gas and low-light
conditions. |
 |
Colored pencils take too
much time and do not have an "undo" feature. |
 |
I wrote this script for a
comic book about mechanized space marines, isolated and forgotten on
the losing side of an interplanetary war. |
 |
This one was done as sort
of a demo on what the cover might look like. You can see I
haven't reworked the design of this armor at all since '93. |
 |
This one was sort of a
request; a guy in the SB group mentioned seeing a drawing of a woman,
self-bound with chains and one of those old-fashioned padlocks with her
cat calmly sauntering away with the key tied to its tail, her eventual
release from her bonds uncertain. |
 |
Of course, some of us know
how unpredictable cats can be. And, well, pretty much any cat
would immediately take off at full throttle and perform many acrobatic
leaps
and backflips once it realizes something is tied to its tail,
eventually
chewing or pulling the string off and conveniently leaving the key and
gnawed
string under the couch or behind the dresser or the water heater down
the hall. |
 |
Knowledge is power.
Knowledge of power is power. Knowledge of electronics to harness
the power of power is pow... eh, you get the idea. |
 |
This one was a request
from a user on the EverQuest message boards for a non-commercial
T-shirt they wanted to do. Hopefully sometime we'll see how it
came out. |
For the last few months I have been doing the 'Sarah & Wolfie' strip and getting lots of good practice. I have an idea every now and then which leads to motivation to do another sketch but I feel I'm best motivated by a request for a certain kind of drawing.
Back in the early 90's and my first few computers I started collecting scans of drawings by and inspired by Dolcett, Farrel, Demver, Guynard, Gnarly Thotep, Benson, Bishop, Salazar, Tarsi, Saudelli and many, many others although hard drive crashes and other mishaps have kept my collection to a manageable size. I have always appreciated the wide range of ideas and outlandish mechanisms for bondage brought to life by a simple drawing and an imagination. And sometimes bondage drawings are harsher and much more severe than real life but nobody really gets hurt.
A few years from now I think I would enjoy seeing one of my drawings offered in a collection alongside other drawings by the artists above (and probably with my copyright tag cropped off or edited out -- I kind of expect this to happen anyway). If all things were right I would probably concentrate on getting a lot better at drawing and doing adult comics, doing original T-shirt prints, possibly venturing into Flash animation or maybe doing bondage artwork for some kinky publication on a semi-regular basis. Of all the career-related fantasies I think that's one of my favorites.
This site is not related to any wargame, role-playing game, computer game or anything of the sort. "Warhammer" is an old nick I used from the BBS era that carried over to use for an adult bondage site that is now my own personal damn site. If you're here looking for anything other than that, you're in the wrong place. Go away.