Drew this up while watching Ugly Betty and surfing Apartment Therapy’s annual color contest. Yay for color!

One of these days I’m going to have to start actually inking my drawing in Photoshop instead of just darkening my pencil lines.

Some people may have already heard about the great PAX flu of 2009. If you haven’t, what transpired was half of the world’s web comic artists went to a convention and came back with a flu so bad they couldn’t draw their own strips.

The upside of their misery is that the guest strips done to fill the content void have introduced me to a bunch of new artists. One of my favorites so far is Ramon Perez’s PvP strip.

His own comic Kukuburi is now on my favorites list. I like it so much I drew this little fan art homage:

Over time I’ve come around in my thinking about comic/manga fan art. I used to avoid doing it because I saw too many fan art makers that couldn’t draw without the crutch of the source material. They had gotten locked into bad habits and styles that weren’t their own without learning the theory & practice that was the basis of the art they were copying. However, now that I’m a little more confident in my own drafting abilities, I can see how much I can learn from the getting inside another artist’s thought process by copying. Plus, it’s relaxing to draw within constraints; a blank page can be such a scary thing!

I’ve had this image kicking around my desktop for over a year now. Benton Jew posted it on his blog with a request for people to color it in for him, and I just never got around to it. Well today was the day I did get around to it, and it gave me an opportunity to test out some things I have recently learned about Photoshop’s color dynamics brush feature. Since I had the benefit of seeing what everyone else had done, I decided to go a more noir-ish direction than anybody had tried.