Enter: THE PHOENIX!

As I mentioned in the last post, I have a few projects I've been working on both for myself and for a couple contests (not unlike the previous Florence + the Machine album cover contest, but hopefully with better results).

This is my entry for the first of the two contests I am submitting stuff for within the next few weeks. The contest is through a website called We Love Fine, and the guidelines were to create a t-shirt design using villains from Marvel Comics (there was a specified list of 100 you had to choose from). The winner gets prize money and their design is used as official Marvel merchandise.

The character I choose is Dark Phoenix, ripped straight from the pages of my favorite comic series -- X-Men. Long story short, the Phoenix is an intergalactic being that possesses the body of Jean Grey, a telekinetic telepath, turning her into an insanely unstable planet-destroying entity of near-unrivaled power.

One of my main goals was to make her look a little gaunt, creepy, and dangerous to emphasize the character's ruthless/villainous nature and play down the spine-breakingly 'sexy' poses a lot of artists like to depict her in. The Phoenix formed by Jean's fire-y hair is an attempt to show the a more direct union of the two rather than Jean being enveloped in a giant flaming bird like in the comics.

The contest voting was supposed to go live on July 6th, but then it got pushed back to the 10th, then today, and now it's been pushed back again to the 19th. I was going to post this to coincide with the start of voting...but it's moved around so much, I figured I would just post it now and let you guys know when it goes up for real. You can visit this link to view my entry on the site.

As for the next contest I'm working on, I'm just gonna tease you with this:

Six Women Who Could Kick Your Teeth In (a.k.a. a 'Brendan's Ideal Woman' post)

So yeah. When I logged onto Facebook this morning, it informed me that exactly one year ago today, I said this:

"So, Annelise Capossela, Brendan Regulinski, Christina Fulton, and I have a group blog, but they've been total stinkbutts about updating it lately. You should visit it, love it, and relentlessly pressure them into updating it more frequently. Especially Brendan. That kid's a real rapscallion."

Kids, a whole year has passed and we have only become slightly less stinkbutt-y about putting things on here. SO. I propose a project: each of us should design a Souper Collective banner for the top of the blog. Once you're done, post it and we can vote on which one we like the most and use it. Heck, we could even cycle through all four of them periodically (since it's a safe bet that they'd all be rad). Let me know what you think.

Anyway, onward to the aforementioned ladies. For some reason, I've been really into drawing superheroes this past summer. Particularly X-Men characters. I think I must be regressing into a pimply-faced high schooler.

This is just a sketchbook doodle that kinda got out of control, but I thought it would be worth sharing. This drawing depicts six of my favorite X-Ladies: Rogue, Storm, Shadowcat, Marrow, Emma Frost, and Psylocke. I also wanted to include Jubilee, but I ran out of space. I sorta have a vendetta against working digitally again, so this is done in Prismacolor markers and pencils.

I have been working on a bunch of random stuff as well as just drawing for the heck of it, so expect more work and unnecessarily wordy and long-titled posts on the horizon.