Come on give me some of that vampire money (c'mon)

This is a drawing of The Independents from back in January that I colored up this weekend. Ben Christian and I are preparing a comprehensive pitch for the series that includes scripts, a series outline, pages of roughs, character bios, a 4 page teaser/trailer comic, ideas for an ad campaign, a finished cover, and lots more. Is it too much? Probably. But we've spent the last year pouring ourselves into the project and re-tooling and re-evaluating and re-thinking how to make ANOTHER superhero comic appealing to publishers. We've gotten invaluable input and advice from several generous pros and friends. We've learned a ton, and The Independents have come out the other side 100% better for it. At this point, to put anything but our best foot forward with it wouldn't make sense.

I'm not great using color as a medium, but each time I try to use it I end up a little more comfortable with it. Yeah, I know that's how it's supposed to go. Duh. But I have such a lack of confidence in my understanding of color that I get excited when I know enough to make the sky blue and the grass green. I'm jinxing myself saying this, but I feel like I'm starting to turn a corner with my coloring skills. I'm turning it slowly, with my hand out the window to signal.

Also, this is the beginnings of my attempt to update this blog with new art more regularly. Sorry that this place currently looks like garbage. I'm in the process of developing a new look for this site which includes a new logo/header. I'm still about a week away from completing it, but last night I started playing around with the new features/templates on blogger to see what my options were and just ended up leaving the place a mess. If anything, it'll motivate me to get it all done sooner rather than later. So please bear with this eyesore until the all-new, all-different (but not really) CSMITHART.BLOGSPOT.COM goes up.

Muscle Mary page

This is a page I did for Joseph Glass, Gavin Mitchell, and Kris Carter's comic The Pride. Gavin is the regular series artist, but Joe has been having guest artists do back-up material for the book in the form of these 1-page origin stories for each of the characters.

I had a lot of fun doing it and got to try some new inking techniques in the process. I'm gonna have to try and incorporate that inkwash into some other things.

The guys have a page on Indiegogo.com and are currently accepting donations for the project, so go support them HERE. They're pretty close to their target, so help push them over the edge, why don't ya? Take it to the limit, if you will. Aw shit, now it's montage time.

My roughs and a warm-up sketch of Mary:

Sketch Card Sheet

I just wanted to see what this would look like. I'll probably make prints out of groups like these at some point. Or maybe even make a giant poster-type-thing out of all 200+ of them once they're done, but they might end up too small for it to work. Split it into 2 posters?
Decisions, decisions...