henriksahlstrom

Giant robot and girl

henriksahlstrom — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 09:28:01 +0000

A friend of mine, Axel Torvenius (you can find a link to his stuff in my link section to the right on the blog so gogogo!), made a sketch of a girl with a big robot and it somehow turned into me having to do one as well as some weird challenge thing that really isn´t a challenge… Anyway here it is.

Fun theme, I might do more on it later.

Conan

henriksahlstrom — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 20:29:06 +0000

I´m not a big fan of the new movie or even Arnold´s slaughter of the classic character by Robert E Howard. However I am a big fan of the old covers Frazetta did for the Conan books and I love the comics published by Marvel in the 70´s (especially the ones drawn by John Buscema) so when a friend of mine sent me a link to a community challenge to draw Conan I got inspired and hammered these out.

The main one:

And a couple more I squeesed out just because it was to much fun:

No.1R

henriksahlstrom — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 19:55:09 +0000

So this time around I´ll show of one of my very own characters.

I was ordering some Ashley Wood-books on amazon while going through old film noir-images as I was sketching and one thing led to another. One tiny doodle, while being extremely rough, sparked my interest, so I turned to a fresh sheet of paper and refined it into this character I like to call Number 1R. Or No.1R for short. A bit obvious but I never claimed to be a clever guy.

I also did a quick backview of the character but the paper was acting like a total douchebag and wouldn´t take the ink properly so it´s a bit smudged and washed out in places. I´ve bought new paper as well as new pens after this, purely out of frustration.

And here´s the forementioned doodle that started it off.

Might do more with this character down the line.

Dune book cover

henriksahlstrom — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 13:09:55 +0000

This is a piece I did a while back now. The main reason I did it was that two friends of mine named Andreas and Brad, who don´t know eachother, separately told me they wanted to see my take on a Dune image. So one sunday as I was suffering from a hangover (don´t drink, kids) I decided to take them up on their challenge and this here is what came out on that afternoon.

I posted the image on a community (deviantART) and after a while I got contacted by a publisher, namely Gollancz, an imprint of Orion books,wanting to use the image as the cover for their new printing of the book. Ofcourse I accepted. They wanted to adjust it a bit to go with their artdirection and I, not feeling comfortable leaving it in the hands of others, did the changes for them. The publisher was really easy to work with btw, always a pleasure when that happens. Anyways, up to now I haven´t shown the adjusted version online but here it is.

Yesterday I got my grubby little hands on the book and could check out the final result. I think it worked out really well in the end.

So that´s the story of how a piece of fan art went to being an official cover for the very thing it was meant to tribute.

Axe Cop

henriksahlstrom — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 12:42:41 +0000

Some fan art for the comic Axe Cop by Malachai and Ethan Nicolle. It´s brilliant. If you haven´t read it or don´t even know what it is you should check it out at http://axecop.com/

For this first one I wanted to do something kind of funnybooky, over the top and really campy. A bit of He-Man´esque sillyness to it.

As for the second one I wanted more of a sense of the character being to serious. So I tried making him a bit Dirty Harry-ish.

-I know what you’re thinking. “Did he chop six times or only five?” Well, to tell you the truth, in all this excitement I kind of lost track myself. But being as this is a fireaxe, the most powerful weapon in the world, and would chop your head clean off, you’ve got to ask yourself one question: Do I feel lucky? Well, do ya, badguy?

That´s all for this time!

Lobster Johnson

henriksahlstrom — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 13:06:50 +0000

Was bored out of my mind yesterday evening so I started drawing some Lobster Johnson (created by the great Mike Mignola). He´s, if not the best, one of the best comicbook characters ever. Putting down “mad dogs” left and right. Hundreds of them.

Here´s the initial doodle to the above image:

And then I had an hour to spare (really, I got bored again) so I scanned a sketch from my sketchbook and threw some simple colors on it.

Speed paintings

henriksahlstrom — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 17:48:21 +0000

I do warm ups at work in the form of 20 minute long speed painting sessions. Haven´t done them in quite some time now really so I´m a bit rusty at the moment but I thought I´d share a few of the ones I´ve done. So here they are.

TMNT

henriksahlstrom — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 18:49:47 +0000

These were actually drawn before the The Marquis image but who needs continuity when dealing with things like this? Not me!

And that´s a (ninja) rap!

First post (and some Marquis fan art!).

henriksahlstrom — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 09:36:13 +0000

Hello world!

I´m trying my hand at this here blog thing here.

So this is my first post and I thought I´d start it off with some fan art of one the greatest comics ever, The Marquis by the awesome Guy Davis. If you´ve never heard of it check out the blog here: http://www.themarquisinferno.blogspot.com/

Then go buy the comic.

My friend and colleague Brad Wright did an awesome fan art on his own as well. Check his stuff out here: http://bradleywright.wordpress.com/2011/12/21/the-marquis/

I have never been much for posting my sketches really, but I thought it would be nice to switch that around now for the blog, so here´s a select few of the sketches I did in my sketchbook while thinking about the above image and what I wanted to do for it.