Okay, final post on this He-Man illustration. It’s all colored. I got the urge to try and mix in some graphic design elements and halftones. I’m trying to bridge my cartoony t-shirt design style and my painterly style. Maybe I’ll revisit it for a touch up someday, but right now I think it’s time to move on. I’m still trying to find the balance between detailed rendering and simplicity that’ll yield the best results.

I’m back! The internet was out at the apt for a few weeks, but I had time to work on some freelance projects and play some video games during the down time. I also went through at least 7-8 more iterations of Skeletor and decided to settle on this.

I’m not sure if it’s the most dramatic of poses but it’s got the epic-slow-motion-before-the-film-is-sped-up-300-action-movie feel. I think in the rendering He-man’s face is too scared now, so I’ll have to bring back some of the energy as I finish up. We’ll consider this a learning experience and apply said lessons to my next piece.

The Spidey image that I’m so proud of looked nice on the front page, but I don’t think it represented me well enough to be landing page material. It was time to do a fun silly caricature of some sort for the front page. After some trial and error and a dozen sketches I settled on a cartoony/detailed style I liked. It’s an amalgamation of my evolving Photoshop painterly style and my cartoony Illustrator vector style.

I really wanted to go with the sketch of me on a Segway, as a tribute to Arrested Development, but felt it was a bit too whimsical. Comparing myself to GOB Bluth, may not be the smartest professional move to make either. I also thought about redrawing myself in the pose Spidey is in, but the sketches looked too much like I was doing a backflip. I had a dangerous backflip incident while camping once and did not like the look of that image. I ended up going with the one of me in a “read for action” pose with a sketchbook in hand. That is also an Iron Man glove in the sketch. Soon that artwork will see the day of light.

I’m pretty happy with the result that is on the front page now. I think the shadows on the hands need some work (the light source on them is all wrong!) and it needs some texture work. I’ll be touching it up as I also work on some complimentary Flash code for it. Here’s a little preview. I’m going to keep my new Flash skills I picked up building Loud Dog’s gallery viewer last month by building a game “inventory / stat” screen for my caricature. You can put silly clothing on me or feed me gross vegetables through the power of ActionScript 2.0 and XML!

I have important client work to wrap up the rest of this week, but should have the prototype up sometime next week.

I don’t want to alarm anyone but 2010 is less than 11 months away. It’s hard to say what kind of technological advances will infiltrate our lives as we enter the double-digit decade of the 2000s. The best way I can see myself preparing is by launching a brand new site, with this new “blog” technology I heard about on the streets. I also have a “Twitter” and “Flickr” account. That should put me up to 2006 standards easily.

In the upcoming weeks I will be setting up an online shop for ordering jet-pack fuel. Until the fusion-cubes arrive though, I will probably just sell some original art, prints, and other primitive collectibles. It won’t help you fly to work, but it might look nice on your wall.