Wild West Iron Man: A variant cover

I snapped an iPhone pic of the work in progress on my cintiq. Pencil illustration finished off in Photoshop.

Outlaw Metal. Joe Quesada and I almost worked on an feature a long time ago but it was not meant to be. Flash forward to Marvel being part of Disney and I get the call from Joe asking if I would be interested in doing an Iron Man cover. How fast could I say, "YES!"without tripping over myself? I mean, ol' Shell-head was THE very first super hero I ever drew as a kid (hey, no human features to stumble over like eyes, ears and such). And I am still a huge Iron Man fan (though don't ask me what happened to Tony in the last decade or so. Love the Gene Colan and Don Heck illustrated ones). So, not only, yeah, but HECK YEAH!

Those of you who are old enough can see the homage right away. Yup, "Wild Wild West" was a TV show I grew up with and loved the characters. Sure, it's silly but the opening titles looked awesome. Like an animated comic book page. They did their titles right back then.

I wanted to show the mask as it might be fashioned with the tools of the time, rivets and screws, so I needed the head to be big. It made for a more movie poster approach for the design.



If you like to see more check out Bill Presing's WWII Iron Man. It is a study in grace and metal. Check out his post in Daily Peril, his blog. My cover will be a variant for Invincible Iron Man #27, goes on sale June 9. Bill Presing's variant for Iron Man: Legacy #3 hits stores on June 23.

Marvel Sneak Peek

Tirade Oekaki has moved! Not too far.

Keeping limber with a fashion illustration exercise and a poster study. Both illustrations based on images found at The World of Kane

Whole lotta moving going on. The Tirade oekaki board has been around for a long time and a favored stop for those who tire of Photoshop (after all, a lot of you already have that as your default drawing program). The simple java applet provides a more casual tool to use even as it mimics the basic Photoshop tools. For some, like Claudio Acciari, it appears to rival Photoshop for that favored default spot.

Well, the folks responsible for hosting our board are moving servers and gave us an alert to say that they are moving the address to here.

Please make a note of it. It's all there and nothing has changed. I always make a habit of grabbing my finished image onto my personal files because the gallery holds only a fixed number and the drawings fall off as it makes room for new ones. That is, they disappear. Don't wait too long after you finish drawing and posting. Keep a copy for yourself, if you care. I have a folder of Claudio and others somewhere in my work or home machines.


A Nina lost in the scary dark dreamscape. There is also a blue study in the oekaki board.

The banner to the right has the link to the oekaki board's new location (the headline above as well). Oh, and if you want to start your very own board you can check out how here.


Tirade Oekaki
Claudio Acciari
The World of Kane

Oekaki BBS

TIRADE has MOVED! To here, actually.

iPhone snap of a doodle yesterday from a meeting. I just made the connection as I write this post. I had moving on the brain.

PANIC! I've settled with my frantic life and near impenetrable proclivity to procrastinate. So, the fact that the May 1st deadline to migrate Tirade off of FTP publishing was coming was not going to be an exception. Except it was. April 30, yesterday, evening: searching the web for a way to backup my blog. Found many clunkers, downloaded a few. I really should have just looked into what Blogger had set up. Which I eventually did.

To my relief they had it all figured out. It went rather smoothly. Had a near panic that comments seemed to have not migrated along with my ur-blog posts. But that got resolved after I got to the last step. Then there was the forwarding post to relay people from the old address to here. It was only showing up...here--where it would be useless. That fixed itself after re-uploading the entire thing again.

Whew. So it was a dread panic and would have required industrial grade sedatives after the cataclysm of losing all these years of posts. It all turned out okay.

Pass the beer and let's post something.

________________________________________



Here's an image uploading test. My home Photoshop in on the fritz.