May 2012 Covers

Here's some of the raw artwork for covers I colored up last month! Each of these covers was kinda' dark and ink-heavy, which was a pretty neat exercise in keeping it simple to let the inking set the tone and do the heavy-lifting.

LEFT: Sonic the Hedgehog #237, penciled by Tracy Yardley with inks by the legendary Terry Austin, is an awesome and bold design. Tracy, as always, is spot-on perfect in his rendering of these characters. The bold design and the strong black on our protagonists really let me keep the colors on the characters simple.

MIDDLE: Mega Man #14, penciled and inked by Patrick Spaziante. Now this one definitely required a bit more planning. The design concept here came in part from an illustration by Hitoshi Ariga (the acclaimed author of Japan's Rockman MegaMix manga) featuring Wily and his massive army of Robot Masters. (This illo is featured in the Mega Man: Official Complete Works art book from Udon, by the way - a must-have for any Mega Man fan and quite possibly my favorite-est business expense ever!) It's very silhouette heavy with alot of great crimson-tones to it, making this quite possibly the most determined and bad-ass we've yet to see of Mega Man! (And Rush looks pissed.)

RIGHT: Stan Lee & The Mighty 7, artwork by Alex Saviuk. I'd had the honor of doing some concept art colors for a number of Stan Lee related projects in 2010/2011, so I was thrilled to get to help out with this cover! Alex's artwork is a huge departure from the more cartoony styles featured in Sonic and Mega Man, so it was alot of fun to work outside my comfort zone with a more traditional comic book super hero aesthetic.