Alex's Room pt 2

Ok, well, we're almost done!!! So, here's the new picts... Hulk's pretty much done, got little touch ups to do, but still have a lot of little windows to paint for the city.

Alex's Room

So, some of you know, I'm child free for a month (actually for the last 2 weeks, got 11 more days til' they get home). So my wife and I thought it'd be a great time to start painting the kids rooms. We wanted to start with Alex's room, since it was going to take the longest. So here's a little step by step of what we've done so far.

1. Stripped the Wall paper.
When we moved in to our new house we knew his room was going to be a problem. The walls were covered in a gross wallpaper, with rips and holes in it. It was a dull grey (who knows what color it used to be) and it smelled of smoke. Stripping the wall paper off the wall has been the longest part of the entire process. It took about 5 or 6 days of on and off work. Once the wall paper came off, it's like it separated from a thin layer of sticky paper... so we had to get that off, just to find that the room was not made of drywall, it had wood panels... woo hoo! (that was sarcastic, if you couldn't tell) Once the wall was stripped, Melis did all the patching where the panels met... that's the pinkish stripes on the wall.

2. Optimus Prime!
Next came the priming of the wall... mostly my job as Melis finished the patching. We finished it (2 or 3 coats) with 3 gallons of paint. We've still got some trim work to do, to cover up the ugly green, but the big stuff is done. We must have bought 20 brushes and 10 rollers, ended up just using one roller, but we're ready if we ever have a painting party.



3. Light Show!
Sorry Wyman, no puppets. After I did a quick sketch of the Hulk, I put it into my fancy futuristic light device that magically projects images from my mind onto the wall! It's kinda hard to see in this pict.






4. Drawin's what I do!
So while my fancy light thing was projecting images from my mind onto the wall, I grabbed a sharpie and traced the outline of the Hulk onto the nicely primed white wall. Man, it was cool to draw on the wall! Now I want to draw on all of our walls!






5. Welcome to the City!
After I sketched the Hulk out, I masked out the city scape. The idea is that the entire room is looking out on a silhouette of a city, and the Hulks runnin' around lookin' for something to smash! I figure that'll teach the boy a little geography and I'm sure at night, he'll be mighty afraid of the green guy runnin' after him :-)




6. Paintin' time!
Now comes the fun part, I just got done putting the first coat of green paint on the Hulk, I say it's fun, cause it's the part I'm pretty sure I'm going to screw up. That's it for now, I'm going to be painting all week, so I'll try to update as I go.

Double Danger Tales Cover

Thought I'd show some of the process I'm going through w/ my first real painting... usually I do all my painting on the computer, but I figured what the heck, I'll just go for it, and learn as I go... so, first is the thumbnail I worked out with a quick sketch and text layout.

Then I started the painting... I really suck at painting, and I'm really not patient when it comes to learning things, I usually just jump in and see what works, painting was no different... things I've learned... 1. I don't need to paint on canvas. That's for fancy people who think they're painters, apparently you can paint on anything if you know what you're doing, I don't. 2. mixing acrylic paints dries fast :-) It does, trust me... I had a bunch of flesh tone, um... now I just have a flesh colored rubber thing sitting on my desk. 3. I need to work out my layout a bit more before painting, after I started, I realized I could make the Black Bat a lot bigger... Oh well, that's what Photoshop's for. I'll post the final illustration when I'm done. Hopefully I don't screw it up to much!

The Black Bat

So along w/ Dr.Satan, the Black Bat is going to be in the new pulp novel I'm illustrating, here's the first Black Bat illustration.