Thursday, August 21, 2008
Trying to keep up with my man Von Glitschka over at Art Backwash by posting work more frequently.
It's a pretty easy sell to dial me up and say "do you want to draw superheroes today?" The answer is most likely going to be a resounding "yes." I've seen plenty of examples of what I'd call "corporate superheroes," where a company wants to pursue a comic-aesthetic for something and they tend to go overly generic and BAM! POW! ZAP! all over it. It hate that. I also believe that many of the artists who draw those didn't grow up reading and drawing their own comic books. So when the task finally came to me (6 years into my career!) I took it upon myself to do it right. Because of budget restraints, I didn't go full Jim Lee/Joe Madureira/J. Scott Campbell -style on it like I'd want to, but rather went to a style that most kids born after 1990 associate with superheroes: Bruce Timm, the amazing artist behind Batman: The Animated Series.
Started off with a sketch of each (Hero and Heroine, who I call Captain Keyboard and Mouse Girl), although they would be composited by the client and thus illustrated separately. One these were approved (with a few changes), I moved on to create the finals.
Captain Keyboard was originally based on Captain America, complete with giant shield and airborne ranger goggles, but the shield was axed in favor of a cape (which any reader of Watchmen or viewer of The Incredibles can tell you is a bad idea for costumed adventuring).
Mouse Girl was based on Wonder Woman, with some Batgirl thrown in on the costume (the Double-W shows a bit too much skin for the corporate environment, I guess).
I didn't quite nail the style — I suppose that's why he's Bruce Timm and I'm Nate Voss — but these were still a lot of fun to do. More than anything has me jonesing to dig up more of Timm's artwork — some of which seems to be not as safe-for-work/children as his Batman stuff. (fair warning for your Google Image Searches!)
media: brush and ink, digital color
 
Saturday, August 16, 2008
HOORAY!
Despite the delay (two weeks and counting now?), I was able to snag one of the … let's say … unique copies of the original print run. While the pages inside may be somewhat chronologically free-spirited, the cover looks like honey-in-a-glass-jar sweet!
Opening the envelope it arrived in was definitely a "moment," even knowing the book inside was flawed. It was an interesting experience, flipping through it, I was looking at the illustrations so close my nose was leaving marks on the pages. I think I'll do a complete project recap when the book is on store shelves, right now all I can say is "Geez, Nate. You sure did draw everything big enough to fill the entire page, didn't you?"
Wednesday, August 13, 2008
Since The Legend of Lil' Red's release has been unfortunately delayed a few weeks, I thought I'd give you guys a glimpse of the logotype that I designed for the cover and the title page of the book. The idea was to keep the type treatment very "collegiate" and to reference sports graphics (hence the double and triple outlines) without getting all pointy and stabby like those logos tend to nowadays. It's for kids — you've got to keep the stabby to a minimum. Based on the typeface Serifa by Adrian Frutiger.
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