Galactus and the Herald

This is my first master study I chose to go with a comic from the 60s. The main purpose of this was to go through the motions of comic book inking, and one of my favorite eras was the 1960s with their rich usage of heavy usage of black. The original was Joe Sinnott’s inks over Jack Kirby’s pencils from the cover of Fantastic Four #46. I chose it for several reasons one was the usage of negative shapes the other was what the industry refers to as feathered lines but mostly I love the Silver Surfer and Galactus.


I didn’t try to conform exactly to the ink lines my goal was to develop a good sense of how to create the different line weights. I used a Raphael Kolinsky sable #2 brush to ink the image; a kolinsky sable has an extremely delicate feel to it, and can be used to get a wide variety of lines. I hope to do more of these and take what I learn and apply it to my comic book.

Field Officiate

This is a character concept sketch for a political officer in my story. The officiates are members of the New World Empire (the bad guys) who are responsible for assisting the field agents in carrying out missions dictated by the high command and upholding loyalty to the party. She’s armed with propaganda and a recoilless auto sub-machine pistol.

I scanned in a pencil drawing and laid colors beneath it and added shading in a more painterly method.

Concept Sketches

Here are some of the concept sketches I’ve been doing to help get an idea of the world I want to create for this story. These are some vehicles used by the resistance that have been refitted with various weapons systems.

Nightmare World

This semester I wanted to get back into doing comic book art, I used to love comics but some how over the course of college classes I got more caught up in fine art. I have been working on a story dealing with a post-apocalyptic future where the global economy has collapsed, wide spread war has broken out; plagues and bio engineered diseases have swept the globe. Society has broken down and what is left of civilization has held together in the form of militant tribal societies. The story will take place in what was once the United States that has fractured off into separate regions governed by unions of the state republics. The antagonist in this story is a group of social engineers who are trying to unite the world under their scientific dictatorship using military force.

This is a double spread splash page that I penciled and inked using a pen and brush. I scanned it into Photoshop as a B/W image, cut and pasted back into the image so it would be on the upper layer then cut out the white pixels. I then used the pencil tool to separate the areas into their local colors. After that was done I used the Magic wand tool to go back and grab selections and add shading with various different brushes. I’m going to do a series of pages in this sequence that will hopefully explain what’s going on here.