Update Reminders!

Being that I don't get to post here as much as I'd like to, I wanted to remind you: if you want "up to the minute" updates on what I'm up to, please be sure to follow my twitter account @adultbraces From there, you have the ability to be up to date on everything I'm working on. Everyday sketches and photos that won't make a blog post at this location are posted, as well as crops and sneak peeks of stuff that I can't formally post :)

There's lots of dumb conversation involved as well!

Thanks!
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THESE ARE MY NEW FAVORITE THINGS!

Top. Notch.
Thanks Kerry Callen!







(via Kerry Callen)

My Life Lately

Ok, so some of my friends have been giving me grief for not making any blog posts in, like, forever; so here's one now.

The reason I haven't been posting in so long is because I'm on an amazing project and I'm really not allowed to show any of the art yet. Now before you roll your eyes, know this: I hate it when people write posts about art that they can't show you (Yes, I know, I'm doing that now. Thanks.) It's the worst and it's super annoying, so I decided just not to blog at all. However, with the help of some friends, I have come to the realization that not posting causes people to forget you even exist. Therefore, new blog post!

So, what's been going on in my life since my last post?

Welp, the first and pretty much the biggest thing to ever happen to me was the birth of my son, Brady. He showed up in July and that pretty much rocked my universe. All of the planning that we did ahead of time just wasn't enough! I realize now that you can never be prepared for something like this. It's hard work, but man, he's so awesome! Fatherhood really is the greatest thing ever.



Concerning the big secret project, all I can say is that it's an eight issue story arc and that I am doing interior pencils/inks and covers. Also, it's VERY cool! I feel so lucky to have landed it, as it's afforded me the opportunity to grow as an artist. It involves a whole new universe unlike anything that's out there, so the project has really tested my skills as far as world building and concepting. Every little aspect of this book had been designed. It's super exciting. Not to mention that the people I am working with are an exceptional bunch and are all super talented!

I can't wait until this thing is out in the public, as it has been an all consuming factor in my life. It's tough to come home from a full time job and bust out a respectable amount of pages per week. The only reason I do it is because I love it, and when it's out, hopefully you'll love it too!

In September, I decided to do something that I've never done before… I actually went to a con as an artist and not as an attendee! That was crazy but super fun! Detroit Fanfare was just the place for me to do my first con… not too big, not too small. Even though the attendance was pretty abysmal, the con was a great time & 'm really glad I did it. I got to make a little cash, hang with some friends and meet some new ones as well. Got to do some sketches too! For some reason, I only took pictures of the Captain Marvel sketches that I did. I don't get it.

In the meantime, I just keep drawing and try to be with my family as much as possible. I couldn't do any of this without my wife and child at my side. They are the best!

UPDATE: Kind of funny that this happened the same day that I spent all of my time writing this stinkin' blog post, but just out is a sneak peek of the project I was describing above! And it's on Boing Boing, so that's cool!

Also, I'll be posting more about Virga very soon!

Guy Allen Creative has launched!

Today I am pleased to announce the launch of my official website GuyAllenCreative.com It was a daunting task to get the site built, but for all of the struggle there was more pleasure and reward. This site would never have been possible without the hard work and effort of my friend Asif Gill. He basically did all of the heavy lifting when it came to building this thing, so please give him a visit here and here. Also please go check out his web comic 48 in Tokyo!

I invite you all to check out the website and feel free to contact me with any comments or suggestions. One cool feature that the site has is the ability to see the "line art version" of most of my comic work. Simply go to the bottom right corner of any image and if there is a button that says "LINE ART" give it a click and you can see the inks. Click the "COLOR" button to go back to color. If you really like the piece, click zoom on the bottom left to see a bigger version! Under the "About" section, you will find links to follow me in all areas of social media as well as an RSS feed so you'll have up to date info on my goings on.

I really hope you all like it!

Guy
www.guyallencreative.com

L8r 2k10. I hate you. ~ Hi 2k11! I love you.

Been a while, y'all.

The end of 2k10 has kinda kicked my ass. Been sick 3 times in the last 6 months. Working too late at night. 15-16 hr. days non stop. Too hard for my own good. No breaks. Blah, blah, blah. Boohoo.

But it's all good.
Happy to work.
Still riding the chillwave.

Did some Gutters work, some sample pages for SEVERAL different properties (Can't say/show. Lame, I know.) and am trying to write my own comic. Not to mention my normal day job has been busy as heck.

Got on some peep's radars in 2k10, so that's cool.

Really looking forward to some major progress in 2k11 and for some "things" to finally be seen. I guarantee that 2k11 will be one of the greatest years of my life. I just know it!

In the meantime, below are some things that I CAN show you!

The first is a short story written by up and coming writer Ryan L. Schrodt It was done as a submission for Clint Magazine's Space Odditites. You can check that out right.. aboooouut..... here. This was a super fun story to illustrate.







I was recently asked to do samples for some possible upcoming Godzilla work. This is what I did. Again, super fun to work on. I hate doing pages for free, but on a job like this you can't say no!







That reminds me: My 2k11 resolution is to try and stay away from doing free art. Oops! Too bad I broke that resolution, like, 2 days into the new year. Oh well. It's being reinstated from here on out! I'm serious!

Happy New Year
G

Quick Update!

Hey everyone! Here's a real quick update cuz I have no time right now for a good one! I want to apologize for the infrequency of posts lately, but I want everyone to know that I haven't fallen off. I've just been super busy. I've been working on wrapping up Barbaric (with Dennis Hopeless) as well as moving houses, all the while trying to stuff in a freelance job and doing my regular 9-5. Then my relatives from CA decided to come and visit! As of right now we're living with my in-laws and are between residences, so every aspect of my life is kinda hectic and up in the air. Thank goodness I have amazing friends and family who have been helping through all of this.

On the future front: I have received several offers from writers on upcoming projects, which is very exciting. Two of them are kinda high-profile jobs (for me at least :) ), but I don't know for sure which one is going to happen or what is coming up next. Super optimistic though!!!! I will tell you more about these as things develop.

In the meantime, I just wanted to say hi and let you all know what I've been up to. Sadly, no major images to post, just a couple snippets of some random things. Can't really show anything else right now. Here's a good idea though: While you're waiting for me to post something else, go and visit Kevin Douglas' blog here. Kevin's got all of the comic insight you'll ever need, and he's local, so that's awesome!

Talk to ya soon!
G

Page Process

I'm gonna start this off just like every other blog I read and say that it's been a long time since the last post. I know. I've been mega-busy. I'm married now. I'm a much wiser man than the guy in my last post. Been half way around the world. Got tons of stuff in the works that should be surfacing pretty soon, but that's another post. So onto the task at hand...

Someone requested me to do this. I feel like I am still learning all the time and am by no means an authority on anything, but here it goes: my process for quick coloring in comic books. I hope it can shed a little insight on someone else.

Step 1:
To begin, I loosely sketch out a thumbnail at about 2 or 3 inches in height which I use for the page layout. Here I include notes for myself as to what I might want to change, colors I have in mind, etc. Once it's done, I blow it up to full page size and use it as an underlay; often moving things around through out the process. As you can see, I ended up moving around the three panels at the bottom into a more dynamic arrangement.




Step 2:
I pretty much go right into finished lines from my thumbnail. This is probably a horrible idea, but it's just how I work. I will do a more detailed underlay though, if I have a crazy perspective shot or a close up on faces or hands... anything really difficult.




Step 3:
Here I start flatting out the piece. This consists of basically coloring in the lines. I isolate forms/ objects of importance where I don't want the color going into an object next to it. For instance, the girl in the second frame is all blue on it's own layer. The coffee table underneath is a peach color on the layer below her. Basically I am separating objects by using color. In the image below, I have 4 different layers that I am isolating with; each layer holding a different color. Then I hit the "Preserve Transparency" button and now I can't color outside of those color fields.




The rest is pretty basic rendering techniques really. Unfortunately, I don't do tonal underlays like the good painters do. I only do that if I am actually painting with brushes. Here I will go straight into color.

Step 4:
Now I start laying in basic tones of how I want the piece to feel and start setting the mood with color. I am trying to establishing the local color for every item in the image. I am making the important items in the frame stand out by their colors. Pushing and pulling things until a hierarchy is formed by the colors. Remember this needs to read quickly. The viewer needs to see first what you want them to see first. One way to accomplish that is through color choices.




Step 5:
For the girl, I begin by establishing her main flesh tone. Once that's in, I start in on either the darks or the lights, depends on the mood. If I start in on the darks first, I will start with her main value and then go a little bit darker in all of the areas I want dark. Then I go a bit darker the farther I go out, in order to fully express the volume. Then darker and so on, until I hit the darkest value that I want for her shadows to be. Then I do the opposite for the lights. It's all about light source, intensity, value and temperatures.




Step 6;
Once the flesh is done, I start on the dress and do the exact same thing. Now I am also making sure that these colors all look like they go together and blend.




Step 7:
Step back. Change some things. Notice I made a color shift in the wall at this stage. Something just wasn't feeling right to me overall so I had to change it. Add the highlights only on the important things. Put the icing on the cake. Done.




Again, this isn't the best way to do it; it's just the way I am working at the moment. I hope it helps!
g


PS_My equipment is a 2.16 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo iMac running Mac OS X v. 10.5.8 (Gonna get Snow Leopard in a couple days) Work in Corel Painter 9.5 and PS3. I've found both programs to be better at certain tasks than the other. This piece was done entirely in Painter. I use this tablet.

Wow. Just... wow

Speechless... Amazing.

Sequential Question

Ok, I was playing around with this sequence here on Friday, and originally I had Spiderman's head going from right to left in the inset, even though the rest of the image is moving from left to right.  I know that this is supposed to be a cardinal rule that I shouldn't break, but I just feel that there is more tension and action with the inset going from right to left. I think it has to do with the feeling that I wanted him to be almost "smashing into a wall" when he gets hit and I feel that this inset, combined with the Spidey on the left, create an ensuing impact-type of tension. However, I do know that this kind of kills the flow from left to right. I know it's small potatoes, but what do you guys think?

I don't know.  Maybe I should just stick to the rules.

Thanks,

g

WOW. I am a busy person.

Been a looooong time since I've posted.  I have been working at a ridiculous level lately. We were extremely slow for about 3 months at work and then it all came crashing down upon us 2 Tuesday's ago. Ever since then I have been working literally 18 hours every day. It is craziness.  

It's not even so much the hours that is the bad part, it's the frantic pace at which we have had to work. It really doesn't come as a surprise to me, as everything in the commercial world is a rush, but this last couple of weeks has been insane.

On a side note, during this frantic 2 weeks, things slowed down for a few hours on sunday so I had a small window of time to drop by the Motor City Comic Con. The actual con was kinda lame, but I got to meet and have a real nice discussion with artist David Finch. He was super cool and extremely nice and helpful. Meeting him was a breath of fresh air during the shitstorm that was coming down all around me at work. It was awesome! He is an amazing artist.

Anyways, I just wrapped up my last board for this project (knock on wood) and I am completely tired. I need sleep. Since I can't show anything cool or recent, here's some old stuff!  Weeeee!

I did the wizard art for Alltel a while back. It's been in a ton of commercials and they even took the wizard I designed and turned him into a live action character in the spots. That's kinda cool I guess. I feel bad for the poor chap who has to wear that getup! I did it in Photoshop and Painter and they just added it to the van in post.




Here is a cover I did for Detroiter magazine. I designed the three characters and rendered them a la Cheeks. Thanks Cheeks.

I'm Brian Fellow!

Haven't posted in a while... been super busy.

Here are some faces that I painted at work. They wanted to have *"comp style" faces that were painted *"loose" and *"fun" but still looked convincing. It was fun trying to put as much color as I could get away with in these pieces; and it's ALWAYS fun when you get to paint Tracy Morgan and Snoop. I love Tracy Morgan. He kills me.

Each one was cool to do. I got the linework from someone else at work. I think it was traced. The painting is real though.

g

*These are all words that art directors and art reps say to me that make me sick.

Sons of Hal!

My friend and I have recently become enthralled in the world of comic books once again. It all spawned from our need to draw. Both of us are too cheap to pay for figure classes to keep fresh, so we started making trips to Xhedos in Ferndale so that we could draw in there at night. One night four of us were up there and I started doing a drawing of Colossus from the X-men. They noticed what I was working on and then we got into this discussion about Colossus and how utterly awesome he is. What a sweet character, and he's so fun to draw. Well, needless to say, everyone drew their own Colossus that night and Colossus Club was born. Our plan was to meet up and just draw a bunch of Colossus' all the time. Yeah, I know. It's nerdy and stupid, but guess what?... It was frickin' hilarious.

Needless to say, this went on for some time. Xhedos ended up closing and we moved diggs to the Borders on Woodward. They have a giant graphic novel section damn it! Well, with all of these books around us, ZERO drawing was getting done. We were just looking at the graphic novels every time we went up there. This lead to a great discovery though; by us always looking at the books, we stumbled upon a character that we all had a greater common love for than any other character... even Colossus. THE GREEN LANTERN! He's such a bad mother fucker! We are obsessed with all of them. I went as Guy Gardner for HAL-loween, although now I am telling everyone I went as Hal Jordan. We are obsessed. This whole Sinestro Corps War didn't help either. It was so cool. I may have subconsciously chosen the color palette for this blog based on the Green Lantern now that I think about it... yep, I did.

Anyways, we realized that Colossus had been eclipsed and that a new name for our drawing club was in order. We started thinking of names right away. It had to be something funny, yet so nerdy that no ordinary person would know what we were talking about. Here are just a few ideas:

The Order of Oa

Guy's Gardners

Sons of Hal

There were a few others but they have all escaped me now. Sons of Hal is my favorite. I think it is frickin' hilarious!!! I chuckle every time I think of it! I have no idea why I told you all this story...

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