RISD III Spring - Cover to Cover - Lance Thunder

For the second open assignment for Cover to Cover, I decided to do a comic that my friends Keith and Art had developed, initially as a joke. The premise was to do the most manly over the top character. They came up with Lance Thunder and the Megariders. He rode monster trucks like steeds, wielded a chainsaw, and was just generally the most manly barbarian ever.

This was the initial pencils I did and posted on my DeviantArt page:I did a pretty quick digital paint job for class, but a friend showed the pencils to a friend who showed it to friend, and I was contacted by the ABC TV show DirtySexyMoney to ask if they could use it in an upcoming show. Apparently Donald Sutherland's kid in the show had a stack of comic books and they wanted to use Lance on top. So I asked my friends Chris McInerney and Erica Henderson if they'd take swings at coloring it. Ultimately the show ended up choosing Erica's version, but here are both.

Chris's:And Erica's:Also about the same time I worked on the poster for our Senior Show. Our Senior Show consisted of Katherine Batiste, myself, Rory Keller, Angela Gram, Keith Grassmick, Art Wu, and Stephanie Olesh.

RISD III Spring - Cover to Cover - Dune

Our last two Cover to Cover assignments were open. For the first one I chose Dune by Frank Herbert. Freaking love that book. I was up in the air between it and Ender's Game. However, Ender's Game struck me as incredibly hard to illustrate heh.I was 50 - 50 about which one of these sketches to pursue. I ultimately chose the one on the left, but in retrospect, kind of wish I'd done the one on the right.

I had a digitally colored version of this, however the file became corrupted. Crit was kind of harsh on this. I made the mistake that I was looking at an actual earthworm for reference, and forgot to take in to account, that it was shiny because it was wet... which a sandworm wouldn't be. Also, my professor wasn't a fan of what he felt was my going overly graphic with the worm, and composition... although another professor who wandered in during crit said he really liked that about the piece. Regardless I do have to agree with Jon that there's kind of a large empty space in the middle.Like the Wolverine piece, I'm hoping to get at this with some paints...

RISD III Spring - Cover to Cover - Wolverine: Netsuke

One of the last assigned covers for Cover to Cover was Wolverine: Netsuke. This was a return to a comic book cover. However, while many of us were initially excited at the idea of doing a Wolverine cover, the enthusiasm palled a bit after reading the comic. Someone in our class pointed out it was like doing a Superman comic and having him walk everywhere. Bring out the claws, Wolverine!
I personally wanted to do the thumbnail in the top left. However, Jon felt it wasn't "cover-y" enough. So I went with one of the ones he and I both liked. I decided to try out a new media/style, doing a charcoal drawing with the intention of either then coloring it digitally or sealing it and then doing acrylic on top of it. Due to time constraints, I did some very minimal quick digital color.The crit I received was very adamant about fixing the shoji screen background to be more accurate and felt the female face was neither abstract enough to approach brush making nor realistic enough to approach the drawing style of Wolverine. I'd been attempting to match the way the artist had drawn the woman in the interior, but agreed that it didn't work.
I went back in and made some of the suggested changes. I recently sealed it and I'm hoping to get to doing some painting over it sometime soon.

RISD III Spring - Cover to Cover - Misc.

Some sketches and whatnot from assignments where I didn't end up liking the finals.

RISD III Spring - Cover to Cover - The Goon

I was pretty jazzed for this assignment, considering it was a straight on comic book cover. I had never actually read the Goon and had to do some research for this. I decided I wanted to go old school sci-fi movie poster.These are the scanned pencils from the final, with text and whatnot added in.And this ended up being the final. The main crit here was that too much of the direction in the piece was a diagonal line between the bottom left and the top right. Also there was some argument over whether the robots were imposing/scary enough. Everyone seemed to agree that the guys in the bubbles were awesome heh.

RISD III Spring - Cover to Cover - Animal Farm

This assignment for Cover to Cover probably yielded my favorite finished piece. I love old propaganda posters and I really enjoyed going to town on this one.

The assignment was George Orwell's Animal Farm. My mind immediately went to old school Russian propaganda. I whipped up some sketches, including four finished sketches. Everyone was pretty jazzed about the one with all of the animals. While I had a lot of fun taking it to final... it took forever. Everything in the piece was drawn by hand with the mouse, mostly using the polygonal lasso and the airbrush tool. Even the lettering was done with the polygonal lasso and the fill bucket. I rolled into class completely sleepless, but Jon really liked it, so it was worth it.

RISD III Spring - Cover to Cover - Moby Dick

So I probably produced the stuff I like the most in Jon Foster's Cover to Cover class. So we'll start with that.

First assignment we had was Moby Dick. I remember reading Moby Dick back in high school and thinking it was the driest thing in the history of the world. Jon's instructions were to do a Moby Dick cover for an older teen male audience. With each assignment, we had to do 9 thumbnails and take one to a finished sketch. That was critted, and then we took it to final. I'll try to show you as much of the process as I have documented on each one. Here are the initial thumbnails and an alternate finished sketch I didn't use.So this was my proposal sketch for Moby Dick. I actually over developed a bit for the finished sketch. I was going for a graphic novel style approach. There are two whale bones arching in from the border and the whale skulls which are attached to the prow of the ship are represented in the design work towards the bottom. However, as you may have noticed I forgot to put them on the actual boat in the background.
I couldn't decide really where to go with it. General consensus seemed to be that the whale skulls needed to be more obviously skulls. But I felt they then started to look like teeth and liked them more as vaguely skulls/vaguely design elements. I still gravitate to one or another depending on my mood that particular day.I ended up using this one as my final: