A is for Aquaman

Today begins a 26-part series of blog posts that will take us all the way through the alphabet using superheroes. This project began nearly a year ago when my friends Trey & Alyssa called me up and asked me to create some superhero flash cards for their newborn son, Liam. They wanted to use them to teach him his ABC's when he got a little older. I said yes, and immediately started making a list of characters to use. The only rule was to use all heroes, as using villains seems like an odd way to teach children how to spell. "J is for Joker. Who will murder you with a smile on his face!" Anyway, this made it fairly difficult on a few letters but luckily I'm a colossal nerd, so I persevered. I also have some alternate art for a couple of letters because the original characters that I drew weren't so much superheroes as characters from movies or pop-culture, and decided to change them at the last minute (I'll include the art for those along with the the letters that they correspond to).

Another thing of note is that most of these letters were colored by my lovely wife, Brandy.She did a great job and I'm really proud of her. (Any art that was colored by me will be noted, otherwise, just assume that she colored them.) That's enough talking, let's move on to today's letter, which is of course:

To those of you who say Aquaman is lame...well, okay, you're somewhat right. HOWEVER the current Aquaman book by Geoff Johns & Ivan Reis is a lot of fun. One of my friends asked me why I didn't use Ant-Man instead, which is also a good choice, and I guess my main reason is because I feel like Aquaman is more popular in the zeitgeist, even if it's because "he's lame because he talks to fish." Also, I had never drawn Aquaman before and it seemed like fun, which it was.

See you guys tomorrow!
--Brent

Spider-Man

I know it's been a while since I've updated this blog, but that will change now. I've been busy working on various art projects and have somehow managed to finish a few of them so I'll begin showcasing them here beginning with today's post.

A couple of months back, a friend of mine contacted me on Twitter (@BrentHibbard) to see if I could do a Spider-Man piece for her friend's birthday. I said yes because I love drawing Spider-Man, even though I was already pretty busy with other art projects. I figured I'd spend a couple of hours penciling and inking a simple Spidey sketch and be done with it. Well, one thing lead to another and about 10 hours worth of work later, I ended up with this:

 (Spider-Man Pencils)

(Spider-man Inks)

(Digitally enhanced Spider-Man)

I have to say...this is probably my favorite Spider-Man that I've ever drawn, and also the best. My wife asked me if I would be sad to give it away, but I wasn't because I had intended to give it away from the beginning, and therefore wasn't as attached as I would have been if someone had asked for an existing piece of artwork of mine. 

That's all for today. Stay tuned because I have more artwork for you tomorrow!

--Brent

Swagzilla Art

To round out my posts involving music, I give you the Swagzilla logo. (Swagzilla is a band I play in with my friends Ross Lickteig, Adam Karleskint, and Mike Dee. Go Like our Facebook page:
Facebook.com/SwagzillaBand)

It took us forever to come up with a band name, and once we did, we wanted a logo to throw up on our Facebook page. I remember putting way too much thought into it one weekend but couldn't come up with anything good. Then out of nowhere, the idea came to me in the shower (like all great ideas). As soon as I dried off, I ran to my art table and sketched out a rough version of it. Later on, I would go through to tighten up the linework and color it...and I kind of fell in love with it (which means a lot because I normally hate my art). I love circle logos, so was very happy with this particular design. I sent it to the other guys in the band and they seemed to like it, too.

And that's how Lil' Swaggy was born.

Here are a couple other versions of the logo that I did for fun. (And yes the pixelated version was made PIXEL BY PIXEL.)

 

Math Rock Flyer

Here's a flyer I made up for my pal Jacob Kern of the math-rock band Sometimes Mongoose. He said that he liked my Super Cute art and wanted me to work on a flyer for him, which I gladly accepted. He said that he wanted to incorporate the themes of math-rock and Valentine's Day. I racked by brain forever, and this is the best that I could come up with: A girl calculator swooning over a rock-god calculator.

 
The design is alright, I guess, but it would have looked better in full-color (I kept it in grayscale with a little bit of pink so that it wouldn't use a lot of ink if Jacob needed to print them up and hand them out).

This flyer was really challenging to do because I wasn't exactly sure how he wanted the text laid out. In the end I ended up using black bars at the top and bottom for the text so it wouldn't obscure the art.

All in all, I think this fell a little flat, though I'd like to try another flyer in the future just to see if I could figure it out.

The Synergy

Here's another piece of album art that I've done. This was for another local Tulsa rapper named Sur'ron the 7th. (This was actually done months before Mike Dee asked me to do his album art. It was the first album art I had ever done, now that I think about it.) Anyway, Sur'ron contacted me and asked me to work something up for him. He wanted to see a giant broken light bulbs with many smaller (non-broken) light bulbs spilling out of it.He also wanted me to use purple neon lights for the text on the front. It took a few tries, but I finally came up with this:

I think it looks okay as far as design goes, but the bulbs look super flat because I'm stupid and don't know how to color. Anyway, by the time I saw the artwork listed with his music, it was altered slightly to this:

As you can tell, the text has been entirely changed and there's now some texture to the background that kind of looks like bricks. I think most artists would be mad that someone had changed their artwork (especially since we both agreed on the previous image), but I think it actually looks better. Besides, once I turn the artwork over to him, it's his to do with as he wishes (at least in this case).

Anyway, Sur'ron is awesome. Go check out his music for free at: http://surronthe7th.bandcamp.com/

The Sound of Redemption

Here is some artwork that I did for Tulsa rapper (and my own bandmate) Mike Dee! He was putting together an EP and asked me to do some cover art for him. I sketched up a design and he seemed to dig it, so away I went. This was actually my first attempt at using color in my artwork, so it's pretty significant to me. The head of the microphone looks kind of dumb, but I'm pleased with the way everything else turned out.

Oh, and the best part? My art is on iTunes!

Take a minute and go check out Mike Dee's "The Sound of Redemption". It's 6 tracks of pure awesome! I promise that you'll be impressed! (Fellow nerds: The first track kicks off with a sample from the '300' movie!) Also check out his Bandcamp site for some free tracks: http://mikedee85.bandcamp.com/

Quick digital parrot painting

My wife and I volunteer at Safari Joe's Reptile World in Adair, OK on the weekends. Along with the various reptiles they house there, there are also several exotic birds. We had a little downtime so I made this quick digital painting of one of the birds. I completely skipped the drawing stage and went right into the color artwork. I feel like I'm starting to understand how to work with color, but I know that I have a long, loooooooong way to go. Still, it's not half bad, considering that I made it with my finger and my iPhone.