Welcome to my sketch blog!

I am a cartoonist, illustrator, designer, and painter. I'd like to say a professional one, but I'm still working on that. Welcome to Step One of that process: my own personal sketch blog! Its purpose: to keep me drawing, and hopefully, to provide art for others to enjoy. Please feel free to leave comments- I appreciate any critiquing of my work. Just try not to completely tear me a new one. Also, I do commissioned projects! If interested, contact me at tonyaros1@gmail.com. As you can see I draw comic characters a lot, but I also paint and draw just about anything so hit me with your ideas!

Sunday, May 26, 2013

Green Lantern: Emerald Ensemble




Here are my designs for Project Rooftop's Emerald Ensemble contest, in which they challenged artists to redesign Green Lantern (any incarnation).  Being indecisive, I decided (yay!) to redesign 4 different incarnations: Alan Scott, the Silver Age Green Lantern, Hal Jordan, who I consider to be the definitive Green Lantern, John Stewart (military man & architect) and Kyle Rayner (artist).  I came up with several different sketches for these but the following are my finished designs:


For Alan I wanted to give him a more regal, almost formal look.  I pictured him as the older mentor of the group, and wanted to reflect that in his costume.  I kept the red and green from his original look but ditched the yellow and the crazy disco color in favor of black and a more armored-looking collar.  I also loved how in the comic book "The Golden Age", they talked about Alan as this great powerhouse, so I hoped to convey some of that power here.


For Hal's look I stuck pretty close to his original design, but tweaked/simplified his lantern logo a little bit, and added some geometric shapes to break up the large areas of green.  I originally wanted to put him in his Air Force jacket, but I didn't want it to cover up too much of his costume and skipped it. 


 For John's look, I wanted to reflect his history as an architect, so I gave him a black bodysuit with green lines reminiscent of blueprints.  So, greenprints?  I don't know.  Anyway, I liked in Geoff Johns' run on Green Lantern how he described the different personalities of the various Green Lanterns and how it affected how they looked/what constructs they created.  Kyle created monsters and abstract things, Hal created simple fists and hammers, and John created complex, detailed constructs.  That always stuck with me as a cool concept.


While designing Kyle I wanted to keep his trademark mask, but other than that I figured as an artist he would try to streamline and simplify his costume.  I always thought the large area of white on his chest looked pretty striking, so I went with that, turning it into an abstract representation of a lantern.  I ditched the gauntlets and boots though- I thought they were too clunky.


And here's my group shot of all 4 Green Lanterns!  I'm pretty happy with how they turned out.

 
And a line-up of their different costumes that I used while initially designing them:

 
Also, here's actually my first take on Hal, done fairly quickly right at the start.  I at first pictured him as more of an astronaut, and gave him a streamlined space suit.  I like it for its simplicity and sleekness, but went with the group take instead.


And here's some bonus prelim sketches


Let me know what you think of my Green Lanterns!