Eric Canete Brings the Fury!

Those of you who are not familiar with Eric Canete by name have undoubtedly seen his work. He's done everything from storyboards to comic books; i.e. Aeon Flux, Dark Fury, Superman: Doomsday, Cybernary, and Iron Man: Enter the Mandarin, just to name a few. This guy is pound for pound one of the best (if not just the plain ol' best) artists working in the industry, and he has been kind enough to contribute a monster of a Dark Knight piece. His work is absolutely worth checking out. Just follow the link. Here's what he had to say in a blog post entitled "Madmen."

"More 'Dark Knight' as requested by Eric Jimenez and his Compatriots. He asked if I could stay in the Batman frame of mind after my previous post and after visiting their Dark Knight tribute blog, I thought it'd be fun to have a say. But as most memorable and obvious scenes in the movie were already spoken for, I was at a loss as to what to do. So I decided to take on this little ditty - I thought it'd be a great exercise in how to render something in black and white (Batman and the Batpod, both being completely matte black, are practically silhouettes throughout the entire chase and showdown) and still have it be semi-legible, and also how to represent speed in a still image (they're zipping around at full-tilt speeds though Gotham - especially when he tries to run down The Joker after the semi flips over).So I thought, "Well... that seems easy enough." Heh. Then I start to draw the thing and I think, "Crimeny! This is a lot tougher than I thought!" That and because of the angle I chose, the compostion, and stuff like that, I had to draw Batman's butt sticking up into the air like that. That's just bad planning, man! This one took less than 90 because I didn't have to render too many elements - just a ton of black areas. The only hold up was the fact that I had to find reference on the Batpod. Speaking of which, have you guys seen the thing running? I somehow remember seeing clips of it zooming about with a guy in a red and white jumpsuit riding it. Point being, the sucker works! How awesome is that?!"--Eric Canete