One more card up my sleeve

I totally wasn't expecting to do another sketch card any time soon but I saw something recently that gave me almost instant inspiration. But first things first. The closest thing we ever got to see in terms of some kind of ROM and Spider Man cross over was a cameo in ROM spaceknight 23. No doubt some kind of team up story between the greatest of the spaceknights and arguably Marvel's most popular character would have been nothing short of epic for ROM fans. So getting back to my inspiration it came when I saw this black suite Spider Man fan art by my good friend from Greece. It was one of the coolest and most creative web swinging poses I've ever seen and I knew almost right away I wanted to use it some how with ROM. I hammered this sketch card out it just one evening. Don't forget to check out part of the source material from Nikoskap ...
http://nikoskap.deviantart.com/art/Web-swinger-634802666

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And speaking of all things cool and Spider Man have a look at what I passed by just last week. This can be found in the city of Hayward at a custom plastics fabrication business called Bell Plastics (2020 National Ave.). But I'm also happy to say that Hayward has been home before to other public art of our friendly neighborhood Spider this can be found on Tennyson Road  Man http://www.itsadansworld.net/2010/09/united-by-style-marvel-takes-dc-to.html

Damn, What a difference some color makes for this ROM & Starshine fan art!

Pencil and inks by Jeff Slemons & colors by  Ian Sokoliswki 

The posting title pretty much says it all but in case you might want to see the uncolored version go here . . .
http://www.comicartfans.com/GalleryPiece.asp?Piece=971922&GSub=156008

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Update 7/07: We've also got a new custom spaceknight figure that turned up from Chris yesterday. With the addition of Seeker Chris now has made every final member of the Spaceknight Squadron among other spaceknights and characters from the Rom series. I believe most of those figures have been sold off but you can still view them in his deviant art gallery
http://custom777.deviantart.com/gallery/?offset=0

DAMN! That looks good in color!

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A little while ago I came across this awesome coloring job for this Sal Buscema HULK vs THOR line art
http://www.deviantart.com/art/Hulk-Vs-Thor-By-Sal-Buscema-327576237 So of course I left my compliments and gave the artist a heads up about the recent commission piece that Sal Buscema did earlier this year (my April 4th posting) and suggested it would make for a great coloring job project. As you can see our friend here (who's from Portugal) turned out another fantastic piece so let's here it for this labor of love as someone who has done a lot of coloring work this was a pretty time consuming effort.

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Here's something cool I found that looked like it might have been intended as some sort of cover concept. Unfortunately I don't know who the artist is but seeing this makes me really wish there had been a Sabra mini-series or at least some sort of one shot special. I dunno maybe one of these days I'll do something with this when I have some time. Sabra was created by Bill Mantlo, Sal Buscema and Belinda Glass.


X-MEN Days of Future Past: Just wanted to share with you all that I saw the movie last night. I thought it was pretty good and arguably the best film of a franchise that never quite reached a level that could be described as great. Yeah there were some logic gaps, some discontinuities and even a running time that was a bit too long. But all that aside it was still a well thought out story line complimented with some fantastic acting and plenty of homages to 60s / 70s American pop culture. In a lot of ways Quicksilver is the sleeper high light of the movie I wish we could have seen more of him then we did.

Other cool stuff from my Memorial Day weekend included some temporary exhibits at The Oakland Museum of California that I checked out. The first one was on the history of the San Diego/International Comic Con (since 1970!) in which I learned that the Comic Con has become the biggest event The San Diego Convention Center holds every year and as you may have guessed it generates far more revenue for the local economy then any other annual event in the San Diego area.
http://museumca.org/exhibit/sunshine-and-superheroes-san-diego-comic-con
Also at the Oakland Museum was the Art and Giant Robot exhibit which featured among other things this awesome display of the classic giant size Shogun Warriors. It's really cool to see how over the years all this one time obscure comic book/sci-fi nerd stuff become so mainstream.

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Rom, Captain Marvel America, Iron Man & Sabra team up fan art

About a half dozen new pieces of Rom related fan art have appeared in the past couple of weeks or so. But with the exception of the Sal Buscema commission art I posted last week it's all been pretty mediocre. So, I just did something my self. As far as I know Sabra and Captain America never appeared together in any sort of team up situation.

That's a shame seeing that both characters are iconic symbols of patriotism from their respective countries which happen to be closely allied. Now as you can see here they could be springing into action against most any enemy. First thought would be the Dire Wraiths of course but what about HYDRA? I totally dig the idea of Rom teaming up with Captain America and Sabra to fight a bunch of fucken nazis. Speaking of Hydra and Cap. any of you notice how last week's episode of Agents of S.H.E.I.L.D totally corresponded with the events of Winter Soldier with direct references and all?

 

Chris, good job on your latest spaceknight customs.

The challenges of digital coloring

Here's some of the latest fan art by Dann Phillips that recently showed up on deviant art. I usually only like to color art work that primarily consists of bold and fine line work on a white back ground. Fan art that consists of heavy shading in multiple darkness to lightness values represent a lot of coloring challenges that can make what normally would take me well under an hour to taking me half the day to do.
But on a whim in between breakfast, listening to the news and working out I tried something new out on this piece. Of course I used photoshop to do this in so I'll put it in Laymens terms. Basically, it deals with making multiple copies of the entire art piece and assigning an individual color swatch to each one. Then you just lay them all on top of each other and remove what you don't want from each one until the full picture appears. And then there was a little touch up work done using the more common photoshop features like the air brush and color fill tools.
I may end up tweaking it some more over the next couple of days but for now I'll post how it came out initially.You may notice that the this new coloring method doesn't produce the more vibrant colors as seen with the type of fan art I more typically color. The U-Foes coloring job from a few postings back is a good example that. Never the less it's always good to expand your horizons a bit from time to time.

When it comes to the well fare of your children trust no one other the greatest of the spaceknights to get the job done.

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Just a little something for shits n giggles I whipped up in photoshop and decided to throw in here as an after thought. I'm sure the inspiration for this is pretty obvious.