Tag: Darth Vader

El Paso Comic Con 2010

El Paso Comic Con

September 11th, I made a trip down to El Paso TX to attend the 1st annual El Paso Comic Con, EPCON 2010. El Paso is located about 40 miles from my hometown of Las Cruces. So it was a great reason to visit home as well. The EPCON was organized by Broken Tree Comics, a local independent comic book publisher in El Paso. The guest of honor was comic book artist Joe Benitez. Other artists/comic companies included Adversary Comix, 656 Comics, and Phi3 Comics. What was cool about these guys is they are all independent comic companies based out of  El Paso.

This con was very different from others I’ve been to. Every booth was either an independent comic company or a comic book artist.  It was like an artist’s alley con. I meet a lot of great artists promoting their projects. Like 7000bc, Jon Hughes, Sketch Card artist Chris Foreman and Ben Jones (an amazingly talented guy working on his own comic about Asgard)

There were a lot of people in fun Cosplay at the con too. It had a contest, and several local cosplay groups represented. I got to take a few pictures with some of them including Loki, Valkyrie, and Even Darth Vader.

The highlight of the weekend for me was watching Chris Foreman create an awesome full-color sketch card of Captain Marvel for me right in front of my eyes. (The dude’s very talented). The con was a huge success for the organizers, artists, and attendees. Plans for EPCON 2011 are already in the works and I’ll make sure to make the trip down again.
– Shazam!

This blog post was originally published on my other website Comic Book Graphic Design and has now been migrated here to RSC Arts, Ralph’s Art Blog.

Vader’s Fist – The 501st Legion – Pencil Drawing

501st by Ralph Contreras

The 501st Legion – Pencil Drawing

Here it is….my drawing of Vader’s Fist, the 501st Legion. I started drawing this picture a few weeks ago. I took a week off from drawing it and finished it this weekend. I had a lot of fun with this drawing. I usually draw comic book stuff, but I felt like changing it up. I’ve never really drawn a Stormtrooper from Star Wars before, so I decided to draw a bunch. I choose the 501 because they aren’t just any legion of Stormtroopers. They are the Elite in the Empire and Darth Vader’s personal legion and later Grand Admiral Thrawn’s too. Check out this article at Wookipedia to learn more about them.

This pencil drawing was done on 11″x17″ Bristol board paper. Comic book art paper to be exact. I used an HB woodless pencil to sketch it out, then used an HB mechanical pencil to darken the lines I liked. I used little Xs to show where the solid black area would be. When I finished with the darkening of the final lines,  I used a 4B woodless pencil to fill in the black areas. To see the beginning stages of this drawing check out my blog post ” Star Wars – Vader’s Fist – Beginning Drawing“

I’m planning on digitally inking this pencil drawing in illustrator. I like inking digitally with Illustrator because vector images are always perfect no matter how you resize them. I haven’t decided if I’m going to color it in Photoshop or in Illustrator though.

This blog post was originally published on my other website Comic Book Graphic Design and has now been migrated here to RSC Arts, Ralph’s Art Blog.