More sketches on cards

Recently I did a few more sketch cards for the Topps company. This time around they were for 'The Clone Wars' trading card set. Sixty six to be exact. This is proof that there's always a way to make the nerdiest undertaking even nerdier. I had fun, sketch cards are a good exercise in working speedily in a small area. As the deadline approached there seemed to be quite a few heads around the Clone Wars studio bent intently on finishing their quota. I think the crew cards worked out great, although to be fair we had the advantage of being able to scrub through the movie files for ref on our spare time! Sorry about the repetition of some images, the top group are the comp cards that Topps returned to me, the others are a random sample of the batch.

Time for the quarterly report

Well, it's as I feared, I keep meaning to update but never get around to it. Since it's ComicCon in San Diego next week this seemed like as good a time as any. I wasn't planning on going this year but at the last minute it turns out that I'm part of a panel on 'designing the Clone Wars' so away I go. What's been going on over the last 4 months? Real life things like a trip to Yosemite National Park which was pretty amazing and work stuff like Clone Wars and Clone Wars-related jobs like sketch cards and one whole comic cover. I've also cobbled together some material for a joint self-published art book called 'Battle Milk'. There's four of us involved: Myself, Wayne Lo, Thang Le and Jackson Sze. There's even a website to visit!

www.Battlemilk.com

The book's 80 pages, softcover, full-colour throughout. It was hard work but really rewarding, I'm pretty happy with how it all worked out. We'll be at the nervebomb/abysmo booth, pretty near where the big fancy booths like DC are so if you're one of the several million people attending the con this year please swing by. If not, we'll have the book for sale via the interwebs too. For me the best thing about Battle Milk was that it forced me to come up with some new artwork that wasn't commissioned or part of any job, I just made it up as I went along. I need to try and make time to do this kind of thing more often, just drawing for it's own sake. There were some ideas I started but abandoned too, I'll post some over the next few weeks after I flesh them out some more. Still can't believe it's four months since I last posted anything. Where do it go?

Scribbles are good for you

So it's the day after WonderCon, which, despite the horizontal rain, was fun to visit. First off I have to say thanks to Dave Filoni, Supervising Director on the Clone Wars, for the shout out during his presentation on saturday evening. The cheque is in the post, Dave. But I still prefer Kit Fisto.

I didn't get around to all the tables I'd have liked to in Artist's Alley but over all I thought that the show was pretty much the ideal size. San Diego is an experience and all but it's gotten so big…

I decided to put up some thumbnails tonight. The Superman ones are from a DC one-shot from a few years back. I've posted how the final cover ended up so you can compare and contrast them. Thumbnails are something almost everyone does and there's usually a really great sketchy energy to them that all too often gets a bit lost when working on the big fancy final version. These are pretty much 'actual size'. They may not be all that glamourous but I think they're fun to look at.

The other images are from an issue of 'Star Wars:Republic' that's been used again for one of Dark Horse's more recent hardcover reprints. Originally Luke was in the picture, he got replaced by Doc from the Rogue Squadron books at Randy Stradley's suggestion. Then her helmet got revised to match the established one from the comics for the final print version.

Although I learned a lot about digital colouring while working on this run of 'Darklighter' covers, I like the thumbnail more!

I should mention that some poor misguided souls are visiting the yahoo group listed on the left, I need to get over there and see it for myself one of these days…

Three is better than none, right?

Well, despite lofty ambitions, I only got to colour three of my Indy Heritage sketchcards. The Marion and Indy are part of the infamous 'returned six' request to Topps but the zapped nazi has been released into the wild.

Updates? What updates?

Well, I finally made it to the internets! Thanks to Juan Torres for very kindly setting up this blog for me. I've been threatening to do this for years but it would still be nothing but talk if not for his efforts. I'm hoping to keep the updates as current as I can. After 12 years of freelancing I  somehow managed to find myself in a full-time job at Lucasfilm Animation Ltd. working as a designer on the forthcoming 'Clone Wars' 3D TV series (!) 

LAL have yet to realise that there's been some terrible mistake so I'm just keeping quiet and showing up every day. Everything from the show is still under wraps so the upcoming posts will all be from side projects and the, ahem, 'archives'. For now I've posted a few scans of sketchcards that I worked on for two of Topps' trading cards sets for '08, 'Lord of the Rings Masterpieces II' and 'Indiana Jones: Heritage'.

I hadn't worked on any sketchcards since Topps' 'Revenge of the Sith' release and the hobby has come a long way since then. I tried to keep these drawings nice and loose but there's a lot more going here than there was on the older, quicker cards. I don't mean to say these are' better' in any way, I don't believe that detail automatically equals quality, I just spent longer on these cards, is all…

Thanks for stopping by, updates and stuff to come, hope you enjoy, 

-KP-