Die Hard 2 Preview

The fine folks at Comic Book Resources have put up a lettered preview of Die Hard issue two here. That is all.

Die Hard 1 preview

There's a nice chunk of Die Hard 1 up on CBR here. Hat's off to colourist Matthew Wilson who really made the finished product look good. Issue 1 is out tomorrow in the States and Thursday over here.

Line sketches

Some sketches done with a dead line marker tool in Manga Studio. I was trying to push the cartoony design of the faces but I think I fell back on old habits pretty quickly here. It's hard to break away from a lifetime of stock faces.

Experiments

I was dicking around with Manga Studio, experimenting a little and seeing what came out of it. I had been playing with a story that'd be set in two different times and thought it'd be good to try and visually separate them a little. So the first panel is drawn only with the marker tools which give you a really dead line, kind of like you'd get with felt tip pens. The second one is drawn with the 'maru' tool, which emulates a type of Japanese dip-pen nib. Gives you much more thick-to-thin variation. Both of them are tied together with some screen tone goodness.

Girl-face

I usually have to work up a sketch at the eleventh hour for the Eclectic Micks sketchblog every Thursday morning, so I was pretty happy when I did this while doodling for fun today. Grand, I thought, all set for Thursday four days in advance. Then I realised I'd drawn yet another headshot. Considering about seventeen of my twenty four posts on Micks have also been headshots I thought I should just stick this up here and start over. I'll probably leave it until Thursday morning.

What's Chaykin...

Comic book resources has a good meaty interview with Howard Chaykin about Die Hard: Year One here. No interior preview art yet but there are a few covers and I get a nice mention at the end. 

Die Hard, BOOM!

So the news is out now, BOOM! are releasing a Die Hard: Year One book. Howard Chaykin is writing it and I'm drawing it. Covers are being provided by Dave Johnson, Jock and JP Leon. It follows John McClane during his rookie year as a New York cop in 1976. I dashed off this sketch when I first got the job, just to try and get a feel for drawing Mr. Willis, with some 70's style hair for good measure.