Percy?! What kinda name is that?!?

Harry Potter never grabbed my interest enough and Twilight just isn't my cup of tea. My wife has read both series in their entirety and loved them both. Seeing her get so deep into both series re-ignited my hunger to read a novel series, myself. After seeing the trailers and getting very caught up in them, I chose to start reading Percy Jackson: The Lightning Thief.... and I am loving it! I don't have a lot of time to sit and read everyday, though. I usually do so when I can't draw and I have only gotten to chapter 2. Can't wait to get further along!

So, Percy is the subject of today's blog sketch. Hope you guys dig it!

On a work related note...I got TONS of work to finish this week and I have been excited to get right into the thick of it. Haven't felt this good about work since Spider-Man Family. Hope I can keep up this momentum for the next 5-6 months, though.

:)

*Note: If you haven't noticed already, I am setting up most of my sketches to color later when my schedule opens up more. Anyone else who is interested in coloring any of these pieces feel free to email me and ask for the hi-res.

ICONS in Love

YEAH!! Starting my daily blog sketches today!!

Well, in the upcoming theme of Valentine's Day I whipped up this piece showing Lucas "Reyven" Blackthorne and Trea "Probe" Clarke out of costume. Yup...Definitely a love story going on there. Just a hint at some of the things going on in ICONS.


I'll be coloring this up once I can sneak in some more time!

As the Queen song Says..

..Under pressure! HAHAHA!

I've been under some serious stress the past couple of weeks because things have been hitting me from all sides. Work, family, and personal concerns. I guess we're all dealing with some kind of stress these days, right? It's all good, though. I'll get through it as I always have before. Feel stupid even thinking about my issues when folks around the world are dealing with so much worse.

So, I've actually started to make some progress as far as getting some relief from it all. Part of that progress began when I started doodling freely while I read emails or what not. It felt so nice that I think I'm going to keep that up by starting to post a sketch a day here. Free sketching always has a way of making me feel really relaxed. If any of you guys have any ideas on topics to sketch I would love to hear them. It would really help me loosen up for my daily work and keep my stress level down.

Back to work!!
-Ray

Let's Speed Things Up A Bit

With great things on the horizon this year for me there are also weaknesses that I a determined to iron out. One of them being speed. It’s not that I can’t produce quickly, because I have done so on several occasions in the past. It’s just that the last couple of years I have been putting a lot of my focus on making my finished work look clean and tight with an emphasis on slick shadow and rendering. The folks viewing my work seemed to really like the results of my efforts and although I think I’ve done a pretty good job of creating a clean, tight, and fully rendered finished style….My speed and fluidity have suffered GREATLY! Also, the process of creating those pieces in that style can sometime yield stiff, rigid and lifeless figures.

Luckily, most of the folks who’ve worked with me the in last couple of years have been patient and seem to really like the finished product. I just know that I could have knocked the work out in less than half the time and that it would have had more energy than the current way I do things...IF...I had just loosened up and stopped trying to make things perfect. So, as far as my art goes for this year, I am going to relearn how to relax and loosen up on the pencils. I’m going to replace my more rendered style with a more open style. One that does more hinting at a shape with simple lines than fully rendering it. The “less is more” approach, if you will. By the end of the year I want to have produced about 250 sequential pages. A lofty goal, but I would rather reach for the stars and possibly hit the moon than to do the minimum and settle for that.

Above shows a page from Noble Causes #25 that I did in July of 2006. Not my best work, but this page was done in about 4 hours from start to finish. I did 7 pages in 3 days just by relaxing, loosening up on rendering and tightening the pencils, and using a more open style. The Spider-Man sketch I did in 5 minutes just today as a loosening and relaxation exercise. If I spent another 10 more minutes to figure out the perspective in the background real quick and what buildings to draw (maybe use reference), and just another 15 minutes to light box it using the open style, this could be a finished splash panel or even a pinup. That would just be a total of 30 minutes.

I guess it’s time to put my money where my mouth is, huh?

My Theme for 2010

Inspired by Drake's song of the same name. My plans for 2010 is to capitalize on the things I've built for myself in 2009. Most people measure success as the sum of one's net worth or the position you may hold, but not me. To me, success is attaining what you're most passionate about in life no matter what the outside world thinks or how many times you get knocked down. You get up, stay on your grind, and make (sh)it happen.

Expect a lot from me this year, peeps. I'm about to make it happen.

-Ray

R-E-S-P-E-C-T!!

Most (comic book) artists work from home. WORK from home!!! For us, that usually comes with a 10-12 hour work day and a hard and fast deadline that's usually hot on our asses. Not to mention those of us who are "Married with Children" who have an entirely separate list of responsibilities to deal with during the time we're supposed to be...wait for it...WORKING at home!!!!

So, please don't take offense if we don't answer your phone calls, decline offers to hang out, haven't spoken to you in awhile, forget to do some errand on the list, help you do something, or take too long to respond to your emails. It's not that we're being rude on purpose. We just have a lot of work to do and when we stop working in order to do what YOU want us to do, it interrupts that process. Which interrupts our ability to meet deadlines. Which makes our clients upset. Which interrupts our cash flow. Unlike most 'regular' jobs, if we don't work we don't get paid. There is no sick leave or vacation pay. We only ask you to think about that before you find yourselves getting ticked off at one of us. Would you want your doctor to stop operating on you during surgery for an hour to start talking on the phone about video games? Or go pick up his dry cleaning?

We just want people to respect our jobs just as much as you would like others to respect yours.

Thanks.


*About the picture: I sculpted this version of Reyven about 8yrs. ago. I ended up giving it to my cousin Savoy. I think it broke. LOL!
-Ray

RAHeight.com is BACK!!

All new and improved RAHeight.com blog!!! I deleted every other blog I had and combined all the posts from those and added them to this one. That way we aren't missing any previous content and I can just concentrate on the new posts.

Anything and everything I have going on is all centralized right here. My MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, and Deviantart accounts/pages can all be accessed from here. So, anyone who's either looking to contact me, searching for some of my work, or just plain happens to be wandering over to this page from surfing the net will discover they have all the info they need know what's going on with me. Later today I'll be adding the link to my Comicvine profile, too. There they have a growing list of my comic book credits. I really love the guys over at Comicvine. They have an amazing database and friendly comics community there that seems to get better every week.

I'll be back in a few days to post some sketch or something. It's such a great feeling to FINALLY have this blog done the way I always wanted to. I hope you guys enjoy it, too! Gotta get back to work!

-Ray