Hard Boyle'd Imperfection

Another DC character that's high on my list of favorites is Bizarro. He seems to be pretty open to individual artists' interpretations these days. Eric Powell draws him like a mindless zombie, Ed McGuinness draws him like a beefy, chalky version of Supes. Honestly, I love seeing all the different variations of the big lug. But when it comes down to it, I prefer Curt Swan's classic vision of him, looking like he's chiseled out of stone and sporting some crazy bed-head. And that's what I was going for here. I'm pretty happy with how this sketch came out, though when I do a final full-body piece, I think I'll go a little more nuts with his hair...
Here's the blue line sketch:

And the color rough:

  

Hard Boyle'd Witch Boy

I've been a little obsessed with Klarion the Witch Boy lately. Oddly, I never paid too much attention to him until Grant Morrison's Seven Soldiers series that he did for DC a few years back. And I've been a big fan ever since. He was recently in a really cute Valentine's Day issue of Batgirl, and in last week's episode of Young Justice. Then I looked up some of his original appearances in Jack Kirby's The Demon series. After all that, I just had to do a sketch of him. It's just a head shot, but now I'm dying to do a full-body illo with him and his cat Teekl. Hopefully soon...
Here's the blue line sketch and the color rough:

Hard Boyle'd Interdimensional Imp

I guess I have a thing for imps. Bat-Mite is kinda like a cross between The Breakfast Monkey and Batman. He's such a fun character, and I've always wanted to do my take on the lil' fella. So here he is. Again, I'm posting the blue line cleanup and the color rough. I can't wait to do the final version. I'm thinking some kind of pop art-ish background might look cool...

Hard Boyle'd Self Portrait

So I was looking at my little photo icon, and I thought what kind of cartoonist has a photo icon?? So I did a quick sketch of cartoon  me. It was fairly easy to do, since I'd recently drawn a toon version of my son Griffin. Since we have the same shape face, I already had a head shape to work with, and Voilà! Here is the blue line cleanup of my sketch and the color rough:

  
I'll do a nice clean final version of this as soon as I catch up on my freelance work, but this will do for now. Oh -- Here's the sketch and color rough of Griff with his friend Zoe:

I'll be posting some finished art on here soon, but I only have time for sketches and color roughs right now. Personally, I love seeing the process and evolution of a sketch to the final product. Don't you?

Welcome to the BOYLE-ing Point!

Okay okay, that's the last of the Boyle puns. I think.


WELCOME to my blog! This is my first official post on my blog. I promise it will get a lot prettier around here. Or at least more interesting. So let's start with some new Breakfast Monkey art, since BM fans are what have inspired me to plaster myself all over the internet. I'll spare you the long-winded explanation. If you really want to hear me ramble on endlessly, go to my Youtube page. So here is my updated version of the Monkey:

Much cleaner, much more stylized, and much more ready for animation. And I gave him thumbs, so now he has "mitten hands" instead of "flipper hands". I even went a step further and gave him little fingers, as another possibility.

I'm just not sure which way to go, but this is why I'm posting these here. Since I'm doing all this just for the BM fans, I want to know what YOU think! And just for fun, here's a sketch of the lil' guy dreaming of becoming a lumberjack, just like his old man (a re-design of a panel from that old animatic). This is why I gave him thumbs, so he can do this:

Next up on my cartoon operating table is Crazy Boy (I might be changing his name to Sugar Ray). I really love how he came out.

Tinkle Fish is on my drawing table at the moment, but he'll have to wait til next time. In the meantime, I'd love to know your thoughts on this stuff so far...