Jason Millet

Colonial corner...

2012-01-30T21:58:00.001-06:00

Photoshop with just a bit of Painter here and there-

This month's painting- session 2

2012-01-27T17:20:00.000-06:00

The painting dried more thoroughly this past week and I could get a decent scan. I'll have to refine and soften the features (particularly the far edge of the nose) and work out the hat but I should have plenty of time to wrap this up tomorrow...

Painted digital quick sketch

2012-01-24T16:09:00.002-06:00

This is a part of a character design for a job I'm working on- I can't say too much at this point. Since I find process stuff interesting, I thought I'd include the reference photo I used. You can see where I took my cues for lighting direction and structure and also where I went pretty far afield with color, hair and the shape of the features--

Last Saturday...

2012-01-20T10:52:00.000-06:00

Here's my start from last Saturday. All of that white in the headband prevented a fully dry piece even at this point (Friday), so I was unable to scan it. Instead, here a couple of shots under two different lights- one warm and one cool. It's amazing how different a painting's color can look under different lights...

Another toned drawing...

2012-01-11T11:28:00.000-06:00

I've been getting a bit lazy, but I'll get some color work up sometime soon...

Another drawing from class

2011-12-09T17:01:00.000-06:00

I'm happy enough with this one, but we'll see how the oil painting goes tomorrow. Sometimes I wonder why I bother- there's something just perfect about black and white with a range of grays. Ahh, color- thou art a temptress!

Drawing of Laura

2011-11-18T17:44:00.002-06:00

I recently bought some Ritmo charcoal pencils and used them for my darks in this drawing. I really like the effect and plan to keep on using 'em...

Last Saturday's class

2011-10-13T15:58:00.000-05:00

This is the head I painted last Saturday in class. The rest of the torso extends beyond my scanner bed, but that's what I'll be painting next Saturday...

A new blog!

2011-10-06T22:16:00.001-05:00

So I'm hoping to clear up the hodge-podge of various endeavors that seems to be my career and just have a place for comics work that I'm coloring or have colored- http://jasonmilletcolors.blogspot.com/

A new comic short...

2011-09-14T09:30:00.001-05:00

... from a recent educational project...

Digital paints

2011-08-31T21:04:00.000-05:00

I tried to get something suggestive of the dirt and sweat I remember the original Star Wars movies having. Frail human beings held alive within giant scraps of metal and rust. Striving for the contrast of fragile flesh and unforgiving steel. My attempt here was to cartoon a real human being - not a slick, pretty pin-up- maybe reflecting on a moment of insight, vulnerability, or just doubt.

I think I'll come back to this character somehow.

Some sketchbook stuff

2011-08-23T18:17:00.001-05:00

Just foolin' around! Drawn a few months back; scanned today...

Summer Workshop

2011-08-17T22:09:00.000-05:00

We had a nice turn out for the summer figure workshop at the Halstead School. Unfortunately we got hit with a micro-burst an hour before class the first day and lost our power for almost the whole week. We opened up the windows to try to curb the heat and pulled back the blinds for light (our east facing classroom being less than ideal). Power came back ten minutes before class started Friday.

Anyway, I worked pretty large and don't want to take the time it would take to piece multiple scans together, so the full figure is a photo taken here at the home studio. It's far warmer than the actual painting, but I've also included a scan showing our model's head and shoulders that's a bit more accurate.

Off for the summer (sort of)

2011-06-28T23:27:00.000-05:00

We had Chicago modeling legend John Rihach sitting for us this month at the Halstead School. John's always a pro- on time, in shape and sits like a rock (but in more interesting poses than your average rock!)
The school's Saturday and Thursday class schedules finish up this week until Sept., but we will be offering two week long workshops
The Human Figure (July 11 - 15)
The Portrait (July 18 - 22)
I'll be monitoring the figure class- http://www.halsteadportraits.com/portraitschool/index.html

A drawing from last week's class...

2011-06-10T17:44:00.001-05:00

Drawing from life, memory, imagination (and a little reference)

2011-06-03T22:30:00.000-05:00

At the end of last year and the start of this one, I set the paint brushes down for a handful of months and just focused on my drawing. It feels like I could work on drawing forever without getting what I want to get ... so much so, that sometimes I wonder why I should ever bother painting again? Of course, painting (and ADD) always bring me back to dabbling with paint in class again eventually.
In this given month in class, our lovely model had donned a costume that could be interpreted as either gypsy or pirate. I chose gypsy. By the third and final week of the pose, I had drawn her half a dozen times and decided to have a bit of fun with our set-up. I transferred a drawing from a previous week, idealized the model a bit and roughed in a general background/scenario and found some appropriate reference to help me hopefully pull it together.
I was unusually happy with the drawing and scanned it in to play around with some watercolor and marker brushes in Painter and I really liked the effect.The line was doing most of the hard work and I could just play around with color and texture.
So, anyway, I took it all in a rather nympho fairytale-esque direction, for whatever reason-- and here are the results!
Class, for anyone wondering, is at the Halstead School of Portrait and Figure Art

Back in the saddle again-- brushes in hand...

2011-06-02T19:22:00.000-05:00

Not a lot to say after a long absence... I know I've made this promise before, but I'm going to try to post stuff more often( let's see how long it takes me to prove myself a liar : ) )
This is a recent one day class painting. I'm still pretty happy with the color and the freshness of paint in this one, I have to say! ... you can see some earlier drawings of the same model down below...

Growing Up Enchanted

2011-03-24T11:39:00.000-05:00

Any time that I get the chance to work with the man who goes by the name "Alex Sera" it's a thrill. A whole bunch of new work from the two of us should be coming to the internet near you in the not-too-distant future!

A couple of recent life drawings

2011-03-16T22:10:00.000-05:00

I've been playing around with graphite and white color pencil on toned paper. I'm enjoying it so far!

Game cover

2011-02-15T16:55:00.000-06:00

A job like this takes me back to my youth ... drawing cartoon animals for sports Tshirts!

Drawings

2011-01-18T14:57:00.001-06:00

These are from the last month or so...

Playing with my Cintiq!!!

2011-01-05T23:35:00.000-06:00

I've been playing on my Cintiq a bit and am fairly happy (with the experience, if not the results!).

Here are a couple of things I've done... one's a copy of a Clint Eastwood, black and white photo and the other's a fantasy sample piece. My goal going into the Clint piece was to just directly copy the photo and add my own color, but I wound up really pushing a subtle bit of lighting in the photo toward a very dramatic side light. I like it compositionally, but it made it a lot tougher to get a likeness-- sigh.

Gypsy Robin

2010-12-17T15:33:00.000-06:00

... and the Caravan is on its way- our Saturday model is either a gypsy or a pirate. I've decided gypsy-

Season's Greetings

2010-12-15T16:27:00.000-06:00

I personally don't know anyone who puts down a more perfect ink line than Andrew Pepoy. I've seen him ink giant robots freehand with a brush, fer cryin' out loud! It's always fun to work with him and we should have a lot of stuff coming out soon from one of the better-known publishers. I've got my fingers crossed!

a couple of life drawings

2010-11-14T13:49:00.000-06:00

Just going through some drawings done over the past year and liked these enough to post...

Sneak peek

2010-10-27T17:49:00.001-05:00

Saturday Class Sketches

2010-10-07T11:57:00.000-05:00

Here are a couple of drawings in graphite from class last Saturday. It's always a pleasure to work with DeLawn Simpson- one of Chicago's best models...

And now for something completely different...

2010-09-27T17:48:00.000-05:00

Can't say too much about this, but it's almost finished...
and will be published...

The final version of this image can be seen here-
http://jasonmillet.com/Illustration/il02.html

Character Designs

2010-09-26T11:55:00.000-05:00

Just the tiniest start of a project Steve Bryant and I will be working on together. I love Steve's writing and ideas and I can't wait to have the time to really get this started!

Another fun advertising comp

2010-09-23T23:56:00.000-05:00

Sometimes you show up at a client's place of work and they give you something to draw that's squarely in your wheelhouse. I wish everything I got to do in advertising was this much fun!

House of Usher

2010-09-08T18:57:00.000-05:00

A page from an adaptation of "Fall of the House of Usher". Anyone wanna hire me to do this : ) ?

the Warlord

2010-08-25T15:17:00.000-05:00

I didn't spend much time at Wizard World 's Chicago Comicon this past weekend, but easily the highlight for me was getting to meet in person and spend some time with Mike Grell.
I just finished up coloring over Mr. Grell's pencils on this 2-page spread of his famous character the Warlord, Travis Morgan. I took a different approach to this sample when compared to how I've colored Grell's work on the Pilgrim (hopefully more on that subject later). This is done 90% in Painter with marker, pen and watercolor brushes while keeping Grell's own painting palette in mind.

Conan and Zombies

2010-08-11T11:17:00.001-05:00

This will probably get a few tweaks still, but it's close to done...

Surreal advertising

2010-07-30T10:40:00.001-05:00

Every now and then I get hired to do a comp that looks like it could have come out of a comic book. This was a lot of fun!

Finding a style...

2010-07-25T16:23:00.000-05:00

... for doing full art work on sequentials has been an ongoing problem for me. I realized at a certain point that the line would have to carry whatever I do in comics and storyboards, but I've struggled to find the type of line that would work for me. As much as I love traditional comic book art, the usual thick to thin brush line doesn't come naturally to me and, often, in the fight to find the single perfect line, I lose the energy of the gesture that can (sometimes) be a strength in my work. I recently completed a sample piece in which I re-worked a page from a comic book that I had illustrated on the life of Joan of Arc. I focused on getting a looser, sketchier line with the idea of suggesting more than actually stating. I then went into it with my favorite tools in Painter for rendering storyboard frames (a mixture of marker brushes, watercolor, chalks and blenders) and concentrated on making a strong, bold color statement.
In an all-too- rare moment, I found myself really happy with the results which, also happily, came about fairly quickly-

So, now that I may have found a work-able, practical style, I need a lot more samples that utilize this approach to put up on the website. As always, it's tough to sneak in time to do samples, but it's absolutely necessary even if there's paying work on the board/lightbox/monitor and I hope to get to finishing another sample sometime in the next couple of weeks. This time, I've gone for something a bit different (and more fun)- Conan taking on Zombies!

Progress...

2010-07-12T21:22:00.000-05:00

I had some down time today and switched back and forth between two samples. One is a sequential piece and the other a single image. I'm approaching the sequential piece as tight storyboard frames, letting the line do the most of the work and am fairly happy with the progress. On the other hand, the single image has some rough drawing problems and my attempt at working a bit more improvisationally over a looser study has been pretty frustrating. I think that I'm going to go the other direction and work much tighter in my preparatory drawings and studies in the future.

Playing with my friends

2010-07-05T17:27:00.000-05:00

It's fun to collaborate with some of my very talented friends. In this case, Mr. Gary Carbon . Gary does wonderfully atmospheric black and white work and it's a real challenge to both add color to his paintings and not lose that essential feeling that's in the original.
This one's a bit more successful than the last one I tried, but there are at least a dozen things that I would have done differently if I had it to start over again.

Advertising comps

2010-06-29T19:41:00.000-05:00

I recently completed some color comps for a handful of print ads that was fairly happy with, so I thought I'd post. I've included the rough sketch the art director provided for each idea as well as one of the pencils I submitted for approval(for some ideas one was enough; for others, more permutations were needed) and then my finished color comprehensive...

Canterville Ghost - Last page

2010-06-25T15:39:00.000-05:00

I still have seven more pages to color, but I couldn't resist jumping ahead to this last page penciled and inked by Steve Bryant. I was trying to evoke NC Wyeth with the sky.

Some pencils with a touch of "ink"

2010-06-18T00:22:00.000-05:00

Here's the start of a comic page. I pencil it out on paper and then digitally spot blacks.

Dino test

2010-06-13T16:52:00.000-05:00

This was a quick style style test for an ad agency looking to sell a drug to treat psoriasis who wanted to represent a claymation (a la Land of the Lost) look in a set of storyboards. It was felt that typical line and wash would read traditional animation to the client and they really wanted to sell the idea of claymation for their dyno-psoriasis spot.
In the end the spot died because it was felt that it would aim too much to the "kid" demographic... ah well.

A little fun...

2010-06-08T19:32:00.000-05:00

Between deadlines, I like to color over line art by some of the comics greats. I've digitally approached Neal Adams several times and I'm always amazed at how much information for color he gets into his black and white drawing. There are all kinds of tics, light lines and fields of hatching that end at precise plane changes so that everything is really all set up for the colorist-- and yet his drawings still look totally complete without the color. The same Neal Adams drawing in black and white or in color can look like a completely finished product.

Anyway, this time I thought it would be fun to color over Adams' pencils and I found a nice piece in my copy of Neal's New heroes portfolio from the late 70s.

Canterville Ghost

2010-06-06T12:55:00.000-05:00

My good friend Steve Bryant has penciled and inked around 115 pages of art for Classical Comics and I hope to be wrapping up the colors on it later this month. Here's a recent page. Steve's line art and my colors...

Starting up a new piece

2010-06-05T07:11:00.000-05:00

Photoshop and Painter block-in over a pencil sketch...

Back on track...

2010-05-31T16:07:00.000-05:00

These are three recent class studies done in oil. It occurred to me a few Saturdays back that noses are like little shoulders. In rendering both, you have to be very smart about placing and shaping highlights, but if you get the highpoint right and then can find the low point (in both noses and shoulders, not far from the highpoint), while keeping it fairly soft, it usually all works out pretty well.

Digital Underdrawings...

2009-01-27T09:38:00.000-06:00

Here are a couple of drawings that I'll be digitally painting in between jobs. The first is based on one of the Iron Man roughs down below. I scanned in the rough and draw in Painter correcting as I go. I prefer the drawing tools in Painter and also like the convenience of being able to rotate my drawing canvas as I work. You can see the finish here- http://www.jasonmillet.com/Illustration/il16.html
This next image is a sample that I hope will help me get a bit more interesting fantasy work. Here, I scanned in a number of older drawings and corrected a lot of the drawing in Painter. You can see the finish here- http://www.jasonmillet.com/Illustration/il09.html

2009-01-09T17:12:00.000-06:00

Just some longer life drawings done in graphite--

Ironman sketches

2009-01-07T18:04:00.000-06:00

These roughs are from a recent commercial job that wound up not happening. The client decided to go in a photographic direction instead of opting for the "comicbook-y" look shown in these drawings. You can see my searching for the right composition and form to different levels of refinement in pencil, prismacolor and ink. Pretty scattershot, technique-wise, but also typical of my roughs.
I still like 'em enough that I'd like to finish at least one, if not both, off for a portfolio piece-

Just a couple of sketchbook pieces...

2009-01-07T17:07:00.000-06:00

I hope to get in a lot more quick gesture studies this upcoming year. There's nothing like having a limited time in which to react to and record the miracle of the human figure stretching and pushing before you. I also enjoy longer studies and learning about the nuances of form, but 3-5 minute gestures are like a good workout at the gym!

Hey, look! I've got a blog!

2009-01-05T10:12:00.000-06:00

So-- I've finally got my very own blog on which to publicly navel gaze. I hope to use this space to post some process stuff on recent, forthcoming and current projects ('cause that's the stuff I enjoy looking at in the blogosphere) as well as some of my life drawings, paintings, class work and other stuff that has no business up on my professional portfolio ( http://jasonmillet.com/ )

To that end, let's get started with a pencil drawing and oil painting that I recently worked on in Richard Halstead's ( http://www.halsteadportraits.com/ ) wonderful class up in Evanston, IL -