I’m taking a moment from the schedule to catch you up on some of the many projects that I’m tackling these days while I await the arrival of issue 1 of SKY SHARKS REMASTERED from the printer.

There’s a BUNCH of images in this post, so it may cut off in your email. So if you want to see everything you’ll likely have to visit this post on the substack app or page.

June was filled with wrapping up the coloring on SKY SHARKS REMASTERED #1, and I’m pleased with the improvements that came with the work.

For those who may have only recently came across my page, SKY SHARKS was my very first creator-owned comic that was released 15 years ago. And recently, thanks to supporters like those here on the BLAST, my last Kickstarter campaign was successful and has allowed the opportunity to spruce up the coloring and details in the lettering, and most of all reprint the sold out series.

Beyond SKY SHARKS, I’ve been handling multiple new cover assignments for people. I continue to do work with my great friend Billy Tucci, and have currently began working with COFFIN COMICS. There’s also new projects lining up with Izik Bell and I am starting a piece with another new artist that I’ve not worked with before and am a fan of.

The downside of these coloring jobs, I’m never quite sure what I can and can’t show since I don’t control announcements or reveals. I look forward to sharing some of this work with you soon though.

Beyond that, I am trying to secure new cover art for Savage Sasquanaut issue 7 and more, and I hope to begin putting some new pages together for SKY SHARKS REMASTERED #2 and also GRAVEYARD ORBIT #1.

SKY SHARKS will feature another “classic” cover remastered, and once more I’ve asked my good friend WILLIAM WOLFORD to ink the cover as I was absolutely ecstatic with the last cover he helped.

Look how pretty those lines are!

I’ve never actually seen artist Fred Perry inked by someone else, that I can recall. And since this cover no longer had any line art that existed on its own, William stepped in, and together we managed to recreate the line art for me to work from for the Classic Remastered cover for issue 1.

All the other Sky Sharks covers have the line art available, but I really wanted to see more of these lovely lines married with Fred’s amazing art and William agreed. I’m looking forward to those coming in soon.

During our time in Arizona, I had the opportunity to hand color a piece of art that my friend Jay Gillespie drew at a con a few years ago. He graciously allowed me to take the piece and use traditional media like markers and paint to turn his pencil drawing into a fully colored piece.

You’ll have to forgive me, these are all just quick snapshots with my phone and there are some pretty significant glares here and there and I only did a quick contrast to help show up here.

Previously, I’ve only ever colored my own sketch cards that I mediocrely draw. This was my first time working over someone else’s art, which I admit to being intimidated by. Who wants to be responsible for screwing up someone’s original artwork? So I am very grateful to Jay to let me play with this piece and risk screwing it up. But I’m happy with the results and can’t wait to do it again.

This piece includes a combination of Copic Markers and other assorted brands of alcohol based markers, Prismacolor colored pencils, paint pens, and brush tip pens.

I will admit, once I had done Geralt’s armor, I was not happy with it. I went too dark and buried Jay’s pencil lines and I should have gone lighter on the brown to not bury the lines. I learned a lot working on this piece, but I decided early on that I would likely have to ink part of this, if not the whole thing.

I’m not an inker, so that was even more nerve-wracking than coloring the line art.

Knowing my limitations with inking, I wanted to keep as light of hand on it as possible, but I also was feeling “saucy.”

If you haven’t seen Marc Silvestri’s art on the most recent Batman mini-series he wrote and drew, you really should. It is astonishing and part of the beauty, in my opinion, was his inking.

There weren’t any solid blacks in the book. But every shape that would usually be interpreted as a solid was made up of numerous lines to build up the darkness of the area, but it never went full black.

I’m NO Marc Silvestri, but I thought I’d try to do my version of that look so as not to go to heavy-handed. I’ve seen some wonderful pencil drawings that I felt were destroyed when the solid blacks were introduced, and so I wanted to try to avoid making that mistake.

I’m especially happy with the effect I managed to pull off on Yennifer’s pink/magenta magic. That just kind of worked out without much of a plan.

I had wanted to try and watercolor the background space since it was rather large but I had forgotten to include them in my supplies. So, I did the best I could trying to give some “smoke like” vibes in the background with gray markers and tones.

This was a fantastic learning experience for me. I learned what I would and wouldn’t do again. I definitely bit off more than I probably should have for a first time, and overall this took me longer than expected. I probably couldn’t charge base on the amount of time it took me as no one would pay that, so again it’s a learning process and future pieces will likely be easier (1 character) to speed it along.

You can find me at the end of this month at CORPUS CHRISTI COMIC CON, so if you happen to be at the show, please come find me and say “hey!”

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