Friday 30 March 2012

I've got the blog covered!

Howdy pardners!

No new sculpts or paints this week, but I have some final upcoming covers and figurine images (slightly different angles than you may have seen before) Enjoy:

Final coloured Terrax cover: ON SALE 7th June!!!



















Have a mighty fine weekend.

Dan.

Friday 23 March 2012

It's cosmic man!

Been busy this week trying to catch up/get ahead before Easter. So haven't been able to read your comments.

Got a few images for you this week...


Painted Moonstone:
Nice and subtle paint job, loving the plasticy-gold colour.






Firelord (Redone):
Had real trouble getting Marvel to approve our original Firelord (they twice rejected it), and as much as we were all happy with it, we made the decision to start again with a different sculptor but using the same pose. For those who liked the original I think this re-do has all the best bits of the original plus a better overall anatomy.






Terrax Special wraparound cover:
Wow, I do love a bit of old school inking!
Fine job by Steven Butler, should get the final coloured version by next week.









That's all for now folks!

Friday 16 March 2012

Day in the life of a CMFC drone...

Gets into office 6.30 (itchy chin):

1. Does some amazing design (well -).



2. Has a dig through the ever increasing pile of figurines under desk.




3. Poses for cover commission of J.Jonah Jameson.




4. They are ignored and Richard Elson supplies far superior rendition.



With more anger...



Pete Hutchins rounds off the day with his stunnning sculpt of Wiccan!













The drone's job is done. He may now return to his recuperation pod...

Friday 9 March 2012

CMFC #2099

Hi True Believers, this one will be fairly brief so let's get straight into it...

SPIDEY 2099:

Dene Mason supplies the skills, lovely detail and a dynamic pose make this a 'future' classic.












Wolfsbane paint 3:

After last weeks darker brown paint job, we still felt it wasn't quite right, so we went through tons of reference material (comics) and came up with this slightly less dark and less yellowy brown shade - I think this is the best compromise for a character that has a different shade of brown in nearly every appearance!




Secrets of comic art reconstruction:


I'm always thinking of different stuff to show you guys, so as I was painstakingly rebuilding this image from Avengers #239, I thought why not show the stages of reconstruction. What seems such a simple thing when you see it in print is actually a process which takes some time, effort and a little skill to do.

Firstly you have to do the research and find/buy/steal all the comics that the particular character is in (in this case Mockingbird). Then you have to identify the cool or important images to be used, I thought this image nicely sums up the original love and marriage between Hawkeye and Mockingbird.



I thought it would be best (and economical in terms of space) to have it as a cut out, so I did a quick clip to remove the unwanted areas of the picture. I also did a little colour correcting (trying to clean up the whites, darken the black and brighten the other colours).



It's not always the case, but this image was very badly printed the blacks were thin and washed out and the other colours were similarly bad. So I decided to isolate the black line art (or inks) from the colours, et voila after some photoshop trickery (which I won't go into here) You have your fairly clean black line art ready for a new application of colour. (this stage was also where I removed every bit of background art that wasn't needed and zoomed right in to redraw/smooth out some areas that were missing or badly reproduced - also a lot of unwanted black dots and ink marks need to be carefully removed)...



Then it's just a matter of filling in the areas with colour on a layer underneath the black line. After about 2 hours of solid work you get this... (then you ask yourself was it worth it?)



And here's the final image in situ.



So next time you flip through the issue, spare a thought for the poor sucker (me) slaveing away to bring you the wonders of the Marvel Universe!

Have a grand weekend!

Right where's that John Buscema Tiger Shark comic....