This is Kade, from Arcana Studios. This is part of a group project with some other cadenccomicart repped artists, including Tim Seeley, Chris Dibari, Ryan Stegman and several others.

older than sin, and his beard could grow no whiter. He wanted to die.
The dwarfish natives of the Arctic caverns did not speak his language, but conversed in their own, twittering tongue, conducted incomprehensible rituals, when they were not actually working in the factories.
Once every year they forced him, sobbing and protesting, into Endless Night. During the journey he would stand near every child in the world, leave one of the dwarves' invisible gifts by its bedside. The children slept, frozen into time.
He envied Prometheus and Loki, Sisyphus and Judas. His punishment was harsher.
Ho.
Ho.
Ho.

--Neil Gaiman from the short story collection Smoke and Mirrors

Some 2 minute and 5 minute life drawing studies

Here's a little digital sauce.

Playing around with markers here, learning how they behave. Markers are fun.

Cyclops sketch I'll color for real at some point.

Back to doing some training. Here is a Rockwell study. This is about 3 inches in height.

I was working on a page, saw a blank piece of Bristol and three minutes later there is a Hellboy sketch. And there you have it!

To make up for the scribbles I posted, here are some finished pages.

I never post this kinda BS. I love this little drill though. I learned it from LeSean when we were working at the same web animation place a long time ago. He's got stacks of this shit all over the place. It's a great exercise. You take a scene from something you like (Sean does mostly anime, but I do films a lot), and you freeze the pertinent frames and sketch 'em out. You can learn a ton of things this way. Composition, storytelling, and little things like what you see when you draw. You see what you're good at picking up right away, and what technique issues are apparent in their most basic form. These days, I don't draw it to the point where it's really legible, because I'm always addressing basic compositional shapes, not the drawing of (in this case) the animation.

This is a quick little scene from Steamboy. I only spent a few minutes here. Usually the drill should be an hour or two, so you can fatigue, and then really start to pair down what you "care" about. You stop thinking about illustrating and start hitting the shapes you really think are pertinent to storytelling. This was and is a great tool for me, both for learning and warming up.

I stopped short here because I ran out of 3B lead, and I HATE sketching with hard lead, lol. I also picked a rotten scene, because the storytelling is mostly backgrounds, CG and special effects, but gotta roll with it. All the same, this drill is as fun as it always has been.

-N

I've been working on a massive, 100 page graphic novel for the past few months, and will continue to do so for the next couple. It's been fun and challenging, because I'm drawing, inking, and putting the computer tones on it. Bryan Hill is the writer, and it's coming out this fall.

I've been in St. Louis without real internet access for a bit, but that's all solved now thanks to my favorite thing in the world, my macbook. I love it like the Knicks love overspending. Enough yackity yack, here's some art.




This is Nina Carmichael.