Adam's Blog

I don't think I've ever colored the Lizard before and this one was fun to do. Something about coloring a green, drooling, loud mouth just takes me back to the high school days... This was colored by me, penciled by Roberto Di Salvo, not sure on the inks.

I posted this passage on my Deviant Art account about my color choices for these pages:

One of the countless things I learned from Todd McFarlane was his talent wasn't making anatomically correct people and objects, his talent was making them cool. McFarlane was genius for making the lamest characters and props interesting as hell, if not down right cool. Some times you need to do something scale and risk to being boring and sometimes you have to go outside the box.

If you look at the Spider-man #11 pages I uploaded, they are kinda similar. I wanted to try a hazy muted kinda day but the problem is Marvel likes their Marvel Adventures line to be pretty bright and punchy, so what to do? I went ahead and made the background hazy and used atmospheric perspective to seal the deal but I used "lighting" to bring the foreground forward. So for example, the only way to get color like this in a real photograph would be to use a flash or lights on an overcast day.

So had I wanted to color this "realistic" I would have made the foreground much darker and muted like everything else. Follow the rules of realism, then break them when you want to try to do something cool.

Doodles from this morning.

I've been dying to do this pic ever since I learned Katy Perry's boobs were bouncing around all over Sesame Street. I lost the likeness in Katy's face but since this was just a warm-up I totally went limp and didn't fix it. I figure you get the idea. ....Elmo's a pervert.

I did this sketch for a friend of mine after she joked about working out while giving her child a bath. Even though this is a quick “sketch” I proceeded on this drawing even though I shouldn’t have, or at least should have went in a different direction. I was the victim of poor planning.

My original idea was to draw a little boy in the bathtub and show mom working out, doing her taxes, and maybe one other bathroom task. For some reason I could not get it to work to save my life. Either I couldn’t get an angle/perspective that I liked or it just wasn’t telling the story—kinda like now.

I used call sketching sketching but sometimes I refer to it as problem solving, and maybe sometimes you should too. Why do some artists draw thumbnail sketches first? It is because they can see various ways to solve the problem and learn from each one. I’m not saying you can’t change along the way, but the more coherent picture you have in your head the better your end drawing will be.

I wouldn’t ordinarily post something like this but I figure it may help someone learn from my mistakes.