Cowabunga Dude!

Post time!

This time Raph gets his second post here on the blog. I did a version of him a good while back now, and I wasn't quite satisfied with that piece. I had been thinking about doing another turtle piece and this one happened by accident. Raph here started out as simple sketch for this week, but he slowly morphed into a finished piece. I think the coloring turned out pretty good, and it was a good rendering experiment if nothing else.

Air-Heart is still coming along for those of you wondering. That's about all too report for this week, I hope you enjoy the turtle action. Until next time...

New Stuffs!

Hey there peoples! Here are a couple of pieces I've done since the last time I posted. The first is my homage to the awesome series, Avatar: The Last Airbender. Never mind the doofy movie, the series was wonderful and you should definitely check it out. The second piece is of a character that I thought up after hearing about a place called Thrasher's fries. He's a surfing mystery solving beach dude.

Concerning Air-Heart I've been working on pages and making good headway. Its coming along well and I've also come up with some great ideas for the next few stories. I'm also contemplating how long I want to make the book. I had originally decided that I was only going to have four stories total but now I'm thinking it may be fun to wait just a bit longer and have ten stories or so. I have to think it over but I think it would be neat to have a bigger book. We'll see how it shakes out. For now I'll leave you with these two pieces. Until next week homies!

Breakn' It Down

Ok now! So its time for kind of a crazy post! Sorry that its up late but I really wanted to make it as awesome as possible.

I thought it would be fun to do the breakdown of a piece. I always think its interesting to see how different artists go about working on something, so here's a glimpse into how I do it.

1. The Sketch - For me the first step is to sketch out the idea. I don't normally do thumbnails unless I'm really confused about how I want a piece to go together. My main focus in the sketch is to resolve anatomy issues and such. I make sure to draw through overlapping areas so I know how the forms should be.

2. Blueline - The next step for me is to bring the image into photoshop and do some messing around. First I work on croppping the image until its more to my liking. My second goal is to blueline the image - Blue-lining allows me to have a nice solid sketch on my page for the inking stage that I can get rid of easily.

3. Inking - This one is pretty self explanitory. Using the blueline sketch underneath as a reference I ink the piece. I make sure to take into consideration any changes I feel are neccesary and include details I may have overlooked.

4. The Flats - My least favorite part of the process is flatting. This is where I bring the finished inks back into photoshop to be colored. I love the coloring process but I sometimes find this step tedious. In this step the focus is to get it colored, and to chose the right color tempratures so everything still reads well.

5. The Shades - One of my favorite steps in the process, this is where everything rounds out. In this step my focus is to give another more rounded dimension to the drawing.

6. The Final - At long last it all comes together. In between the shades and the final are a bunch of color tweaks and such to get everything looking just right. This step is where I make the final decisions on how I want the piece to be. Noteably for me, I have come to learn that my color pallette tends to be very crayola: that is, very primary colored. So an important part of this last step for me is to get the saturation of the colors looking right.

And there you have it! That's how I roll...err something. Anyways, that's the way I break down a piece when I'm going from a sketch to the final. I hope it was fun to get a glimpse at the way I work. And I hope it was informative for you artists out there. Oke, well that's it for this week. Catch you later!

Derik Diaz's Devastatingly Dangerous Double Duck Post

A double post this week! I've just finished moving myself in to my new home in Atlanta. As such I've been at home working on looking for a job and I've had a ton of time on my hands. That being said you won't be surprised that I was busy getting caught up on my old school toons. I was inspired to do two "duck universe" pieces this week. The first is Gizmo Duck in all of his awesomeness kicking some butt. The second is none other than the masked mallard himself, Darkwing Duck. I'm pretty sure I've never drawn either of these guys because I probably found the task too daunting when I was just a little dude. Not anymore however! I hope you enjoy. In other news, Air-Heart is still plugging along although I got a little behind since I took about a week off for the move. But no worries! I'm back to action... Until next week my friends.