Once Upon a Time in Vegas #10

Hi everyone! Sorry this is a little late. I was working a convention the weekend this episode came out, and I am just now crawling out from the rock I was hiding under post-con.

This is my first cover for Vegas, although it's not my first Pendant work. I also did the promotional poster for Dixie Stenberg. Both Dixie and this Vegas cover are done in Copic marker on Bristol board.

Anyways! The lovely ladies behind Vegas requested a pulp novel look, which got me really excited. I love vintage art, and pulp novels are no different. I used a lot more blacks and greys than normal in order to emulate the cheap printing method of old pulp novels. This cover also had a lot of Photoshoppin' done to it; some of the markers I was using up and died on me and so I Photoshopped in some of the background. I'm not telling where!

After I finished the main art, I needed to age the cover. Bright clean marker colors aren't very convincing as a 50-year-old book. I used some stock textures and Photoshop brushes to beat up the image a bit.

One more thing I worked on was aging the logo. Paper tends to yellow over time, and inks fade. I putzed around a bit until the logo looked as old and yellow as the rest of the image.

Finally, I dug up a font that had some of the vintage look of pulp novels. The cover uses a slightly tweaked Gill Sans Condensed. I crossed my fingers that Jeffrey wouldn't kill me for being so picky and was done! Here's the end result.

I had a lot of fun working on this cover. I'm looking forward to blabbing about the next one!

Superman: The Last Son of Krypton, Issue 41

How's it goin' everybody? Issue 41 is up and running. You can hear my commentary for this cover here. I really enjoyed this cover. It's got a nice, sinister feel to it. Enjoy!

Two, count 'em, TWO new artists!

We're growing so much, you'd think we're on HGH (we're not, LOL)! Please join us all in welcoming Rebecca Hicks (yeah, I'm a little late on that, I suck) whom is doing the cover work for Star Wars: Blue Harvest, and Loran Skinkis whose art debuts with Seminar this Friday. Look forward to seeing their artwork displayed here along with their commentaries.

Welcome aboard!

Yet, another new member!

Please join me in welcoming Julie Lindsey to the Pendant Artists family! Julie is the artist for Once Upon A Time In Vegas, with her newest cover premiering with Vegas #10 tomorrow! Keep checking back with us as she will be posting her artwork and providing commentary.

Welcome aboard, Julie!

Site Maintenance

If some of you were on here earlier today, you may have noticed the banner was replaced with a black rectangle for a short period. I was checking size ratios for the new banner I was working on.

I decided to reconstruct the banner for a few reasons.

a.) I felt the image sizes were too small.
b.) I decided to put the images in reverse chronological order [oldest release image on your left, to newest release image to your right].
c.) We will be welcoming aboard a few new artists in the near future (more on that soon) and at the current size, I couldn't fit any more on there, so rotating the images chronologically made sense to me.

It's all finished now. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Batman: The Ace of Detectives, Issue 28!

Greetings again, all. Been a while since I made a post, I know, but there isn't a whole lot one can do on this blog in between covers that won't invoke the wrath of the Spoiler Dahaka (even worse than the Assassins!). To that end, here's the cover for 28, before it got all Pendantized:


Commentary, as always, is available, and can be found at the following address: http://www.zshare.net/audio/11992353e418721a/

I'll have something to show you again—hopefully, sooner rather than later this time.

~ Harley says hi. ~

Dixie 22!

I suppose I should talk about this, ne? I drew the thumbnail for this while at work, which was really just a scribble of robot zooming out of a triangle that had an arrow pointing to it which said "Why are you yet again drawing modes of transportation? You suck at drawing modes of transportation." And dont say that I dont. If you see a large inanimate object drawn by me, there is a very good chance that it's been drawn from a reference, or sometimes even outline traced. I'll do my own detail work once I have the general shape of it, though.

So, this cover. I did the thumbnail at work a week ago. Figured "I'll do it when I get home" then it slipped my mind. Time passes. I'm sitting on my couch Sunday (the day before release) going "What do I want to do today? I know! I can go see Iron Man again!" then I remember "Crap... I have a Dixie cover due!!" So I start hunting online to find a sutible war era allied submarine that I can reference. I found one, got it all drawn and it looked AWESOME. Really clean lines. Drew Robot, who I actualy dont need a reference for as there is an easy trick with her since she's so geometric. All her detail looked awesome, I positioned her where I wanted her to be to look like she was being torpedoed, I went to merge the Sub line art and the Robot line art AND....

I hit Control + W instead of Control + E. When it popped up asking if I really wanted to close the window, my cursor happened to be over the "no, dont save changes" button and.... Bye bye robot and sub. ::SIGH:: So I started all over, and I didnt spend as much time because at this point it was 10:30 at night. So where before I might have spent an hour on making sure all the lines were strait on Robot and the sub, I spent about 20 minutes just to get it on the page. Coloring on both Robot and the Sub were done using a nifty effect, which I tend to use anytime I need to draw metal, that uses feathering and levels and layer effect embossing. I then did my super secret under water effect (ok, I randomly drew lighter blue streaks coming down from the top of the screen, then did dodges to put in lighter streaks and put the streaking layer infront of the sub but behind Robot.) I've spent a fair amount of time under water (SCUBA!) so I know how light works filtered through 100 feet of ocean. Paint in some bubbles for motion, then all that was left was to put the Umket add together, position the episode title and credits so that they arent in the way of the art, then ship it off to Jeffrey. I finished at about 2 in the morning, but I'll admit that I was heavily distracted, as well, by people IMing me.

The Kingery season 2 episode 1

First post jitters so please forgive me. I don't really have much to say about this one. I had fun getting to paint Madeleine for the first time and designing the uniforms of the officers. Other than that, I tried a different approach to this painting than I have used on the previous ones. For this one I tried to pretty much wing it as I went along and keep it loose. I learned a few more things about digital painting in the process, but i doubt that I'll work this way again on future episodes.

A new member of the blog!

Please join us in welcoming Nick Hadley to The Art of Pendant blog. Nick has been the artist on The Kingery since the beginning of the show, and will post his final piece for today's release in the near future.

You'll find a smaller version of his work in the banner on the far right.

Welcome aboard, Nick.