Here’s a quick sketch I did a few days ago of one of my characters, the Grimm Creeper. He’s an assassin/hunter who primarily works for Nemcromn the main villain in a comic story I’m working on. He has hyper quick reflexes, agility, is a master of stealth and several fighting techniques.

Grimm Creeper Sketch

This last weekend I took a trip down to my home town of Las Cruces, New Mexico to watch the premiere of my friend Carlos Parra’s zombie film  “Dark New World” which he wrote and directed. It was filmed in 16 days with a budget of $3,000 dollars. Watching the movie though, you wouldn’t know that it was done for so little. The quality of the acting and the story telling was top notch.  Although the premiere was actually at Allen Theaters on Friday the 13th (which by the way had 2 sold out screenings) I went to the premiere on  Saturday March 14th at the Fountain Theater (which also had a  sold out screening). I chose to go to the screening at the Fountain Theater because there was a Q & A with Carlos and several actors from the movie.

“Bio-terrorists unleash a devastating plague across America and the chemicals from the bomb kill millions.  Days after the attacks, the recently dead begin to rise and devour human flesh. Sam and Kat seek refuge outside of the city in an abandoned house with eight others. Rations are running low and people are dying. Sam and Kat are in over their heads.
Do they fight to survive out in the world against zombies or stay and fight the monsters within?”

I really enjoyed this movie. I’ve been a fan of zombie movies for over 20 years now. I still remember the first one I watched as a kid “Return of the Living Dead”, and of course I’m a fan of all George A. Romero’s films. This film like all good zombie films doesn’t focus on the zombies but the survivors of this Dark New World. We see how people cope with the horrors of these monsters, but more importantly we see how people’s true nature starts to surface.  Who leads, who follows, who takes advantage of others, and who protects the weak? Carlos brings great camera shots and amazing character development though out the film. I thought some camera shots would look  great in a graphic novel.

Dark New World dvd cover

What’s really cool for me is the part about how I helped contribute to it. Although I wasn’t involved in the writing or the filming of this awesome movie, I did kinda help with the idea. A few years back I use to own and run a comic book store called Modern Age Comics. I remember myself and a few of my customers were talking about zombie movies and how we should make one. Carlos was the perfect candidate for filmmaking, he had previously filmed a short for the Governor’s Cup film competition called “Why Can’t it be Tuesday” the day in the life of a graphic designer.  Some of which was a actually filmed in the comic shop. Carlos took the zombie project by the horns and wrote a great script. Unfortunately I was in no financial means to go any further with the project. I was in the process of closing my store down. But Carlos was energized by the zombie film and took upon himself to see it through. I’m proud to say that I was able to assist with his casting call for the film. Carlos held the initial casting call at my store location on the last weekend I still held the lease. The turn out was great with about 150 people showing up for the audition that day.

Q&A with writer/director and cast of Dark New World

It was fun to watch people I actually knew personally on the big screen. The character of Frost was played by one of my old customers Tony Baker and the role of Jinx was played by Johnny Tabor who I worked with at the Las Cruces Sun News. Both these guys are great actors and brought the level of the movie to greater heights. I still remember playings Heroclixs with Tony in the comic shop. He’s now living in California doing stand up comedy and has been in a few movies. Right on dude! The funnest part in the move was when Carlos himself made a cameo as “George”, a zombie movie buff quoting “Night of the Living Dead“. Like writer/director M. Night Shyamalan and Quentin Tarantino, Carlos casts himself as an unforgettable extra in his own film.

There was a lot of buzz for this movie too. Carlos did a great job of marketing his film with a website, a myspace profile, and flyers. He received a good amount of press too. With articles written about the movie and it’s premiere in Yahoo movies, the Las Cruces Sun News, and an on-line interview he gave with KRWG public radio. It’s also very cool that the movie is listed in IMDb (The internet movie database).

Dark New World can be purchased on dvd at the films website:  http://www.darknewworld.com. Every sale will help finance Carlos in taking the film on the road to film festivals. The movie will be showing at this years Eerie Horror Film Festival. Right on dude!

Here is a digitally inked Pinup of an awesome penciled piece of the Fantastic Four by artist Ariel Padilla. I found the pencils on his DeviantArt page and I knew I had to ink it. I used Adobe Illustrator so I could create a vector image. This way it can be reduced or enlarged with no pixelation of the image. This is actually my second piece digitally inked but the first I’ve done in Illustrator. My Batman 2.0 character redesign was my first digitally inked piece but for that I used Photoshop. I have used the Illustrator in the past to create illustrations, logos, advertisements and marketing but this was the first time I incorporated my graphic design skills in to inking.

I have a wacom tablet but for this digital inking I used only my mouse and the pen tool. So basically the piece is all straight vector anchor points. This illustration took about 5 hours, which is longer then I thought it would, but it was fun and a nice practice piece. On my next Illustrator ink I plan on using the wacom table and the brush tool. Right now it is all about having fun and learning to use tools I use in my graphic design work in my comic book art work. My next step will be to create flats for these inks, and maybe color them too.

Fantastic Four Digital Inks

Here are the original pencils by by Ariel Padilla.

Original Pencils by Ariel Padilla

Want to see the steps I took to create the digital inking. Check out my blog post: Comic Book Digital Inking Techniques with Illustrator Vector Anchor Points

When I read there was going to be contest to redesign Batman, it sounded like great fun. Titled Batman 2.0: The Dynamic Do-Over. This cool project was arranged by the great people at Project Rooftop. With Batman’s death in Grant Morrison’s Batman R.I.P. and Final Crisis comic stories, Gotham city will still need a Batman. In my personal opinion Dick Grayson is the right choice. He’s the Dark Knight’s original partner, Robin the boy wonder, he now goes by the name of Nightwing. With the new Battle for the Cowl story line from DC coming out soon Project Rooftop announced a very specific contest: redesign the Batman uniform to suit his most likely successor Dick Grayson AKA Nightwing.

Here’s my redesign of Batman 2.0 for the he Dynamic Do-Over contest.

Batman 2.0

With this character redesign of Batman 2.0 I took elements from both the classic Batman look and different aspects of Nightwing’s costume.  Replacing the color of the bat on his chest to a blue and extending them across his arms. The cap and cowl are the same blue in a classic Batman style. I’ve given my Batman 2.0 more compartments for all those nifty gadgets he’s so well known for. Taking ideas from Nightwing he’s boots and gloves now have compartments as well. I tried to give him a darker suit color of grey to help him hide in the shadows.

I had lots of fun with this project. I first started with a pencil drawing, then I digitally inked it and colored it in adobe photoshop.  This was my first real time using my graphic design skills with one of my comic book drawings. It was cool to actually work with flats to color this drawing. I will post a blog showing all the steps I went through in the future on how I created this illustration.