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One of my favorite pieces of fantasy art over the past decade or so is Adrian Smith's Chaos Champion for Games Workshop. It's so evil I'm not sure there are words for it, and if you uttered them your tongue would blister and fall apart like ash.

Also, I really love the designs of Korean artist Maxx.

So, I've been rewatching the Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, along with the great little making of's featuring the cutest little voice actress ever, Aya Hirano. Why is there no season 2. This thing was hugely successful, and it's been three years since it came out.

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Favorite artists this week.

My favorite representation of Hell is done by Wayne Barlowe. He's also done creature concepts for the Blade and HellBoy movies.

And from South Korea comes a guy who's done a lot of RPG work, Andrew Hou.

Watching Samurai 7 right now. I started to watch it when it first came out, but fell out of it for some reason.

I'm also reading an interesting book on the ins and outs of the anime/manga world called "Schoolgirl Milky Crisis" by Jonathan Clements. I enjoyed reading his articles in NewType USA before it went under. A note to magazine publishers. Stop putting DVD's in your magazines and charging $15 for them. Nobody wants to pay that much for a magazine. Especially when your audience is a bunch of otaku who have already downloaded the content you are putting on the disk before it even hits the stands.

Later,
Jim

Oh, yeah, as for the book all of the art and writing is done for Chapter 1, and Chris and I are well on our way to being done with Chapter 2. There will be four chapters in all, so things are looking decent for us to hit our deadline.

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Oops, I forgot to post my artists for Monday.

One of my favorite creature painters Paul Bonner.

And from Japan, for the obvious reasons, Katsuhiro Otomo.

Until next week,

Jim

Fell off my bike and broke my pencil!

Being an illustrator is sometimes like riding a bike for the first time. At first you don't succeed, try, try again. Basically the first idea isn't always the best idea (though on occasion it is). Every piece of art in Ink Bloom will have a reason it's in the book along with gobs of extra work (Concepts, Thumbnails and Sketches) that you won't see published. Jim and I have been hashing out a lot of the details of the art for IB very closely. We are in constant contact with each other through email and phone conversations weekly if not daily to push each other and explore options we, sitting in our studios alone, might not have otherwise thought of. It has been fantastic and inspirational!

Can't wait for the ramp at the end of the street!

Chris

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So, for some artists this week. Let's go with some classics. The one whose responsible for all of us being here, Frank Frazetta, and what I would describe as his Japanese counterpart, as far as being immensely influential , Yoshitako Amano.

Work's coming along nicely on the book. Chapter 1 is finished. Chris just showed me a bunch of kick ass work he's done for it. We've been pushing each other to make the book as good as possible, which means more work, but the result will be a bigger payoff for the reader.

Thanks also to Marty for kicking my ass thoroughly at Street Fighter IV today.

Been watching Speed Grapher while I'm working. Not too bad, but not great. I've also been watching a show called Mad Men, the reasons for which, besides that it's good, will become apparent once we are able to talk about Ink Bloom more.

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I would just like to echo Chris' sentiment. We are both really happy that Impact decided to stick with the Ink Bloom title.

A few other topics today. As I was sitting here writing this entry the closing theme to Cowboy Bebop came up on my iTunes, and it just added to my already good mood. I f you haven't watched the Cowboy Bebop anime TV show do yourself a favor and beg, borrow, or steal to watch it.

Now for this weeks favorite artists.

I have been playing around with some of the speed painting and brush techniques that I learned from David Levy's Gnomon video. It's impressive stuff.

From Japan, Hideaki Takamura is this weeks pick. I had the great fortune of meeting him and fellow Magic artist Ittoku when I was in Tokyo. They were really great guys, and immensly skilled.

On a final note, you will never be as cool as Spike.

Jim

It's called Ink Bloom!

Jim and I just got word from our editor for the title of our new book.  It will stay INK BLOOM!!!!!!  yeah!  We really loved the working title we came up with in the early stages of the proposal.  Thanks to everyone at Impact for keeping our idea alive!

Amber

When Chris and I had the initial spark for this idea, I thought it would be a good idea to find a model and shoot a bunch of reference photos so that we could come up with some great character studies for our proposal. I was lucky enough to come across a young woman named Amber. She was exactly what we needed to come up with the sketches seen in the header of this blog. All the best to her as she makes her way into the hallowed halls of higher education.