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Sibling Rivalry Finish

This was quite fun. I had to go back in and make sure the valentine heart was readable enough as a heart rather than just a big red blob.

Sibling Rivalry

This week’s Entertainment Tri-State cover is going to feature two acclaimed stage performers fighting over your attendance to their respective Valentine’s weekend shows.

Mark McVey will be performing with the West Virginia Symphony Orchestra on Friday and Saturday, Feb. 12 and 13 in Charleston. His sister, Beth McVey will be performing with the Huntington Symphony Orchestra on Saturday, Feb 13.

Here, I’ve got the ruff showing the two of them tugging on a heart. It’s a fairly straightforward composition and as always, I’m trying to keep the all-important faces large and close together.
I haven’t done Beth before but I did Mark’s about 15 years ago. I’ll dig that one out later after I’m done with this one.
This should be fun.

Symphony piece before Christmas

Meant to get this one up before Christmas, but with the other holiday events, bowl game preps and my own vacation going on, I didn’t get time. Apologies.

This one was fun with the good faces of Marina Jurica, Kimo Furumoto and especially Ryan Hardiman. I met Ryan when he was a student in my dad’s illustration class at Marshall back in the late 80s.

Chris Daughtry

I tried a little different approach as far as media on this Chris Daughtry. Rather that using straight colored markers, which has been my standard for years, I decided to mix it up a bit.
From my on-going presidential series, I relied on doing a basic pencil sketch, over which I laid heavy, bold markers – just to rough in the darkest values.
From there, I introduce pastels in pink, orange, brown and white colors from which I can blend a nice flesh tone right there on the paper. Using the side of the pastel lightly on the paper, then burnishing everything with my fingers. Burnishing this way allows me to emphasize motion and the relationship between the light areas and shadows. I then spray fix everything, then go back in with black detailing pen and colored pencil. I kept picking at it this way until satisfied. The challenge was to avoid making him look like Vin Deisel.

Bottling the Run

Having such a busy week, I waited until the last minute figuring out what I wanted to do on this.
What stood out in my mind was the memory of last year’s game. The Herd was favored, but somehow found itself in a tight battle down to the wire.
A great opportunity to put it away was foiled when mulit-threat QB Joe Webb got the crucial yardage on a fourth-and-ten play. The drive continued and the Herd lost.
This season, Webb is again tearing up the ground on teams.
Some of the ideas I had early, such as a cowboy and dragons round-up in a corral, or lassoing dragons in a rodeo, were a little too involved for a mid-Friday. So I’ve kept it simple, stuck the dragon in a bottle and gave Marco the mallet.


Secondly, here’s the image from last weeks game against WVU. Just thought I’d point out what I did in PhotoShop to pull this off. I did the image of Marco and the Mountaineer pretty much as you see it. Knowing I was going to be blurring the Mountaineer’s legs a bit, I didn’t draw them complete and the actual drawn part was not too far below where you see it. I clipped the Mountaineer portion out and pasted it on a separate page. From there I just did a simple horizontal motion blur with an 800-pixel distance. That smeared the image unrecognizable other than some color and provided a nice lightening on the ends. I copied this blur, went back to the original drawing, selected the entire background and pasted the blur inside. After positioning it to line up with the running Mountaineer, I erased the portion of the blur that extended in front of the Mountaineer. I then flattened the original and blur layers together, then smeared parts of the Mountaineer to blend the transition of the blur to him. It was a pretty easy effect.
Oh and incidentally, “speed” ended up not being much of a factor in the game.

Avoid the Wave finish

Its always fun to sketch big sweeping waves of green water.
As I was working on Tulane's homecoming queen, I'm thinking to myself "OK, how do you make a pelican look alluring?
Good luck today, Herd.

Avoid the Wave ruff

OK. So Marshall had a rough homecoming loss to defending conference champion East Carolina.
At first, I was thinking this was the time the Herd would get complacent and take it easy on a softer opponent, only to end up finding itself in a dog fight, and ultimately losing. It seemed to happen last year way too often. When you’re a team trying to earn the league’s respect, you don’t have the luxury of mailing it in — ever. The best teams never mail it in.
Anyway, I originally had Marco in a boat labeled “complacency” with the pelican riding the big green wave of confidence. Tulane had an optimistic off-season but opened with two dismal losses. It has now bounced back and is riding a two-win resurgence.

Now usually the Homecoming opponent is a mismatch and an easy contest. So here Marshall is as Tulane’s homecoming opponent.
I remember years back when Marshall was the homecoming opponent for the at-the-time lowly Buffalo Bulls. In that illustration, I had Marco running off with Buffalo’s homecoming queen ~ that was fun.
Now it’s the Herd’s turn to steal the queen from Tulane.

Ride That Float, Baby!

Snyder was fun to do although the image was a bit small and with the 3/4 angle view of his face, I couldn't really accentuate how close together his eyes are. I may do a better one later ~ just for the fun of it.
Good luck today Herd.

Ride The Float! second rough

Just an in-process rough to tighten the composition and establish some of the detail areas.

Ride The Float! rough

I was thinking about the Herd riding their momentum into today’s game against East Carolina and since its homecoming weekend, the idea of the float came quickly. It will be fun doing the decorated float, the toilet paper, etc.

At first I was going to have the flatbed by itself, getting ready to run over a Pirate, but its not so much about the Pirates as it is about Marshall being prepared to go up against the defending conference champs.
Also, the idea of a float not being towed seemed a bit awkward. So, I’ll draw a big pickup truck. Now I need a driver ... Coach Snyder.
I always thought would be kind of fun to do a caricture of him. I'll need to give myself plenty of time this week.
More later.

Finish on Memphis

Good start Herd.

Conference play begins

Now that the Herd has had a chance to work out the kinks (and there were more than previously expected), it begins conference play — which is the only thing that this season’s success or failure should be measured. Still, a two and one record is the best Marshall could have expected, so it is right where it needs to be for this conference run.
This is a pretty straight-forward concept of rolling up the sleeves and going to work — not just for a winning season, but for a conference championship. Why should they sell themselves short?

How prolific this turned out to be

Not a good thing at all. Two weeks into the season and I'm still waiting to see the defense we've heard about during the off-season. At least there wasn't significant injuries suffered.

Not an easy task

Good luck Herd. Get this season off right.