FASTBREAK NYC!!!!

So a little while ago, Ren Hsieh of Fast Break NYC had asked me to do a tshirt for his basketball league. First of all, Ren is a great guy and is doing great things with his league.
Anyway, he was telling me about how he has basically two mascots that represent his league. One is a Dragon and one is a Tiger. I figured I’d start off with the Dragon, as atleast for me visually, it was easier to sink my teeth into.

So my thoughts on this tee was to NOT do a typical Chinese Dragon swimming around a basketball. That just seemed way too typical to me. So I thought of making a Chinese Opera Dragon mask of sorts. And I figured I’d make it out of little basketballs.

I hope all the guys at the league like the design and especially Ren. I mean…he was patient enough to wait way longer than I had ever imagined to design this tee.
Check out the site and order it here!

Build A Hero





So I had a chance to draw a Angry Asian Man Build A Hero Contest Winner recently.


And now, The Sneak. We really liked the idea of a B-boy hero, and thought Kevin did a good job of establishing the character; the main things that we felt needed tweaking here involved tightening up the origin story (originally Richie just finds his super-powered sneakers in an alley–gotta amp up the drama a little more than that!) and shaping the powers a little. In Kevin’s submission, Richie’s powers involved transmuting and manipulating surrounding objects based on his emotions; we changed them to blades that project Richie’s emotions into similar kinds of energy (anger generates heat, etc.). The energy blades also tie back to Richie’s B-boy name, SAM or Samurai.

Meanwhile, SECRET IDENTITIES art director Jerry volunteered to bring The Sneak to life as soon as he saw the outline. Here are his own thoughts on the hero:

“As a big fan of Planet B-Boy and America’s Best Dance Crew, I really wanted to draw this character—especially since I’m actually working on my own B-Boy type of comic as well right now. Unfortunately I’m NOT a graffiti artist…which should be painfully obvious here. But I thought it was necessary for the character to have a ’street’ type of logo. So whenever The Sneak becomes big time, he can get a real street artist to redo that for me. Maybe my boy John Franzese (artist for the story MEET JOE in SI) would like to take a stab at that, eh? Lastly, I thought after watching Planet B-Boy again to get into the mood for this drawing, that the ‘big’ hair was like…necessary. And since he’s dubbed ‘Sam,’ I thought it’d be cool if he wore one of my samurai tshirts. Hope this sketch captures what Kevin had in mind when writing up this character!”

EDITED DESCRIPTION

The Sneak by Kevin Cheung

It’s the early Eighties, and while the suits and labels haven’t discovered it, the underground hip-hop movement is going strong. Richie Leung, an incoming freshman at the University of New York, encounters this rich new culture by accident, when he — literally — runs into a B-boy in performing his moves for a small crowd on the sidewalk in front of his dorm; accepting the awestruck Richie’s apology, the B-boy invites him to a jam in the South Bronx, where he watches a dominating crew known as The Fresh Ones crush the competition. After the battle, he asks to join the crew and learn their moves. They reluctantly agree, giving him the B-boy name “Samurai” — or SAM for short.

A few years later, Richie has become one of the crew’s leaders, having spent all of his spare time learning, practicing and creating innovative moves. His passion has made him a master, but it’s also led to his flunking out of UNY.

When his perfectionist immigrant father discovers that Richie has been spending his time dancing rather than studying, he calls his son home for an epic confrontation. During the fight, his father takes the shoes Richie removed before coming into the apartment — at least there’s one Chinese tradition Richie has continued to follow — and hurls them out the window, telling him he’s ashamed of him, and disowning him from the family. Richie tells him he doesn’t care; he has a new family anyway: his brothers in the crew.

But as Richie seeks out his fellow Fresh Ones at their respective homes and hangouts, hoping for somewhere to stay — and to borrow a fresh pair of shoes — he’s horrified to find each of them dead… murdered, without a clue or explanation as to why. Is it jealousy? Revenge? Something else? All Richie knows is that he’s the sole survivor of his brothers — and he’ll only stay that way if he can keep one step ahead of whoever’s been hunting them down.

And then, Richie finds himself attacked by dark, faceless figures. Fighting them off with modified B-boy moves, he races through the city, using his skills to dodge and acrobatically avoid his pursuers. Then he makes one bad move — running down a treacherous blind alley into a dead end. His feet are bloodied by the full speed chase; the alley is full of broken glass and jagged pieces of metal, and the sound of his hunters is growing louder. That’s when he notices shadowy figure before him, standing in the buzzing glow of an overhead neon light. As Richie watches, his heart pounding, the figure kneels down on one knee and lays out a pair of sneakers — a brand new pair of Jags, with emblems on the side that he’s never seen before. And then the figure fades into the shadows. Just before his mysterious benefactor disappears, Richie catches a glimpse of his face. He could swear that he looks just like the B-boy who’d invited him to his first jam.

Richie pulls the kicks on, just as his attackers pour into the alley. As they swarm him from all directions, he feels fear in his heart — and there’s a flash as the emblems on his shoes glow with a sudden light, and a pair of dull green blades appear in his hands, which when he swings them against his attackers seems to paralyze them, sending them stumbling to the ground. His fear turns to excitement, and the emblems on his shoes and the blades in his hands turn yellow, and strike now with a shocking electrical charge. As his confidence grows, the excitement turns to anger — and the blades glow red with searing heat.

The attackers flee before Richie’s newfound ability to turn his emotions into energy. Now, as B-boy Sam turned superpowered street samurai The Sneak, Richie decides to turn the tables, tracking down his attackers, uncovering why they’ve targeted him and his brothers — and getting his revenge.

The Larry Hama Experiment…Part 3.

So this is the final sketch that I’ll be inking and coloring of Larry Hama’s. Just to give a little background on how this all came to be. We(Keith Chow, Alex Tarampi, John Franzese, myself and Larry Hama) were sitting in the GEPPI Museum signing some books. These signings are hit or miss. So sometimes, you can be sitting there for a few minutes with nothing to do. Even when you have Larry Hama with you.
Anyway, I’m sitting next to Larry…and I just whisper in his ear, “you know you have to draw me a Snake Eyes, right?”. He looks at me and just smiles. Then I’m like, “and you know…you’re going to have to do 3 more once these guys see you draw one for me”. He just laughs…and begins sketching.
Now…lemme tell you about what makes this particular sketch so cool. Usually when artists give out sketches at cons or signings…they’re generally just a head shot…or a drawing of the guys upper body. And they are almost never action poses. So when Larry sketched this Snake Eyes leaping in the air ready to chop somebody in half with his sword…I was like…frothing at the mouth.
I chose to ink and color this one last, because it was simply the hardest one out of the batch that I have to do. Trying to keep the dynamic energy that Larry captured in his pencils…and trying to not stiffen the drawing up was really difficult.

Again…I hope I didn’t ruin this drawing. I had a blast doing these…and learned a lot. Especially on how Larry uses his light source to create such a dramatic pose. Seriously, inking his sketches was worth a year or two in college.

-jerry

Here are my inks over Larry’s pencils…

The original pencils that Larry Hama did.

BURN

So it has been a looonnnggg time since I’ve drawn anything BURN related. At this years San Diego Comic Con, I was approached about possibly using the BURN characters for cellphone background imgs. Unfortunately when I got my new imac, I lost all my BURN artwork from the series. Smart me, right?

But in a weird way this was good for me. It forced me to go back and draw the characters again. The following image is just a practice drawing really. Just to give me a better idea of how to approach this project and see if this is the right direction to take it. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to have guns blazing for this stuff…since…now that I have nephews, I’m so much more aware of showing violence in my work.

Anyway, hope this drawing is ok….honestly, it’s been so long since I’ve drawn BURN…..I’m not sure if I “got” it or not.

Also, if you were interested in finding out more of the comic, you can get more info here.
-jerry

Hey everyone, I’ve just partnered up with Ho Chie Tsai who runs taiwaneseamerican.org. He is running a fundraiser to help victims of the typhoon in Taiwan right now.

When Jason Lee of Turtlist Media told me about this, I had to do what I can to help out.

So from now until the end of this month, anybody that purchases a tee shirt off my site…any shirt, and writes “taiwan” in the special instructions, will not only get some extra free stuff from me, but will know that $5 of each shirt purchased will be donated to this cause.

So please find it withing your hearts to help out, and hopefully get some cool stuff in return.

And of course, I’ll donate some of my own money as well.  I’ll do my best to match whatever is the amount from the sales.

For more info on this fundraiser, you can go here.
And to begin shopping you can go here.
Hope to be giving away lots of free stuff for the rest of this month.
-jerry

ImaginAsian Art Fund Raiser

Hey everyone. So Kate Agathon of Purdue University has asked me to do some drawings that will hopefully raise some money for the Asian American Studies collection at Purdue and Indiana University.

I was a bit worried that my drawings alone wouldn’t make enough…or really any money at all for her. So what we came up with, was that I would do some drawings of The Angry Asian Man. And after I’m done with the drawings, Phil Yu(the angryasian man himself) will also sign the drawings. So that they’ll be worth something.
haha

So if you have ever been to Phil’s site, you would immediately know that he has a strong passion for Bruce Lee and Quick Kick. Which is why I chose to draw those two characters.
I chose to draw this particular image of Bruce, just cuz if you’ve ever seen the movie “Way of The Dragon”, when Bruce is in his hotel room and doing some stretches…he flashes his lats…and when I first saw that…I never imagined any human being that jacked. It was such a memorable image to me, and I always wanted to draw that image. But was always a bit intimidated from it, cuz he looks SO much like a comic book drawing in that pose…I didn’t know how to do it without it looking too forced.
So I hope I was able to draw it where it somewhat resembles the man himself.

Then…I HAD to draw Quick Kick with his barefoot being exposed. I mean…here we are…with a group of undercover GI’s…and we got this one asian guy running around barefoot…bringing a pare of chucks and a sword to a gunfight.
sheesh.
Drawing the bare foot…was soooo much harder than one can imagine. I think this might have been like…one of the only times I’ve ever drawn a barefoot.

Anyway…here are the two drawings. I will post more info on this fund raiser as it draws closer in time.
And hopefully….they’ll help raise some money for a good cause.

thanks
-jerry

So let me explain a little bit about this particular sketch that Larry Hama drew.  When we were sitting at the GEPPI Museum a few weeks ago and I had asked him to draw me Snake Eyes.  He had this sketch literally just tucked away in his sketchbook.  He didn’t want anybody to see it because he thought the proportions were all off and that in general it was a bad drawing.  I just started laughing….I mean…if this was considered “bad”…I really don’t ever want him to see any of my work.

But I basically was able to convince him into giving me his “mistake” of a drawing.  And…I mean…I love it.  And couldn’t wait to ink and color it.

Now keep in mind, I’m not inking or coloring any of the originals.  The originals are now hanging up on my wall in my apartment.  But I am learning sooooo much from just inking his work.

This has been an honor for me to do.  And I just hope I’m not f’ing them all up like I think I am.

Anyway, this is the 2nd piece out of 3 that I’ll be doing.  Hope you guys enjoy watching this process half as much as I am doing them.

Again, I’m trying my hardest to keep the integrity of the pencils.  So I’m using a very “sketchy hand” when I ink and color these pieces.

And here are my inks over it….