Joe Kubert's School of Cartooning and Comic Book Illustration

I am going to go back to school and get my official degree in Comic Book Illustration, I want to go pro in this genre and this school is the best there is!
I will still be living in SLC but doing correspondence classes from the school which is based in New Jersey. Wish me luck, I will start posting my art as I progress through the classes. Nuff' said!

Toy Hunter / Wolverine

With the new Wolverine movie coming out I designed my Toy Hunter logo around the movie logo, which is directly below.

Stones.

One of my hardest challenges and also one of my favorite projects here at OC was to recreate our stone library to make it look more realistic. I took photos off the internet and used them to recreate all our stone, and there are a lot..these are only a few.

Pearls

Ruby's and Garnets

Princess Cut Diamonds

and of course regular Round Diamonds

Here are some of the old stones and the new stones I have created, mind you these are all vector images that have been created in illustrator. The entire stone library I created (over 20 stones )
took close to a year to perfect, and in my opinion I can probably build them a little tighter.

What I do everyday.

I have never blogged about what I do here at OC.I develop processes for new illustration, and continue to improve current processes we currently have. I find new ways to illustrate our product for a WOW effect to dazzle the client. Here are some examples of my work here at OC.

The top illustration is the old way of showing artwork to clients when I arrived here and it was my job to develop new ways of displaying artwork, so the one below it is the new process I developed using Illustrator and Photoshop to create the effect I needed.

The next couple images are recreating how we do 3-D illustration, they used to do flat 3-D and I have helped develop a Photo-realistic effect to make our illustration look great.

So that is what I do 8 hours a day..oh and I go to a lot of meetings and put out a ton of fires, and every now and then I help the artists here do some creative work.

Artchive

So we try to have as much creativity as possible at the OC and so we recently renamed our Art Storage folder on our server to Artchive..kinda witty.
So we had a small contest to come up with ideas for an illustration for the folder..my ideas are here..if you don't "get" the second one it is an Art-C-Hive (Artsy-Hive) get it...
Pencil on paper.

Cows with a new perspective

So the sales office like the cow drawing I did but wanted a new perspective on the cows so you could see them eating each others grass..so I redrew the image and it turned out a little better...I okayed the original sketch and inked it this time, so I think it looked a little bit sharper.

Sales Cartoon 2

The sales team asked me to do another cartoon..now this one I know I have seen this one before , but hey they ask me to produce..I produce.
Pencil sketch colored in photoshop

Sales Cartoon

I did this cartoon for one of our sales staff, it is a remake of one he had seen before but it was fun drawing.

New Toyhunter name

So a new name to match a new movie..this one did not take as much time or effort, but it looks fun.

Portraits of The Crew

At my work I have a group of artists that I pal around with and as a art project we decided to do stylized portraits of each other. I did mine on Watercolor paper with ink and watercolor wash @ 8"x10".

Punisher Toy Hunter Title

There is a new Marvel movie coming out called Punisher:War Zone, I am very excited about this movie and in honor of it I have made a new Toy Hunter Title and I am going to change my page to reflectthe new movie...check it out. toyhunter.blogspot.com

Art from the San Diego Comic Convention 2008 #1

Well the San Diego Comic Convention ended last week and it was a blast. I went for 5 days, I went for business and pleasure I got both. I went to the portfolio review booths and showed my work to professional and I had such good feedback I was reviewed by Hasbro and Dark Horse Comics and they both were so kind and had great words about my art they took my sample books and gave me great tips to work on so maybe I can get some professional work. Here I am at the Dark Horse review with Chris Warner senior editor, he liked my work but wanted to see a more variety in my people and city scenes..I am going to do some work and go again next year.





Below is the pleasure part of of the Con, I got ot meet several professionals that I have wanted to meet for a long time...check out the next few entries below for details.

Art from the San Diego Comic Convention 2008 #2

Here is one of my favorite comic book artists Travis Charest, he is a genius, his attention to detail and his line work is simply beautiful, he signed my Wild C.A.T.S #1 and he was selling a small book that he signed also.


Here is David Finch his artwork is simply crazy he is wild in his line form but he can put so much in one frame and still make it look so tight! He was really nice and he signed a book of his sketches I bought also, great guy. He also signed my Aphrodite 9 #1 & #2.

Art from the San Diego Comic Convention 2008 #3

This is J. Scott Campbell who I have admired since his first full book Gen13. He was great and very personable, he looked at my sample book said he liked a lot of the illustrations. He signed my Gen13 #1 and Spider-Man #30.


Here is Darwyn Cooke a great artist who illustrates in a classic style of the 40's and 50's he waas really nice also talk to me for a few minutes. He signed my Catwoman #1.

Michael Turner / R.I.P.

Michael Turner was a great artist and storyteller, I idolized his career and his success and I wanted to meet him on a professional level some day. I met him at the San Diego Comic Con a long time ago and he was such a wonderful guy. Good-Bye fellow artist, you will be missed.

A new Toy Hunter name/ IRON Toy HUnter

A new logo to reflect the Iron Man movie that is coming out next week
and to reflect my Toy Hunter blog theme.

Superman

I was asked to draw Superman for a client in pencil..so I did, I didn't take to much time (the budget was very low) maybe a hour or so. After I got done I wanted to see what it looked like colored so I took it into Photoshop and colored it up...it was a fun afternoon.

Epic Property Managment

I was hired by J&D Property Management to create a logo for their new name Epic Property Management.
I did this logo in Adobe Illustrator.

Guitar Hero Sign / Finishing

Here are a couple of pictures of me in my studio working on this sign. The first pictures are the painting before the black is added. The black makes the painting pop! The three holes in the bottom are being filled with color Gels and strobes to give the Guitar Hero effect. This painting was done with Liquitex laytex paints.