The Magic of Drawing

Today's bargain find: The Magic of Drawing by Cliff Wright

While I believe a person can never have enough books about the topic they love, I was a bit hesitant to buy this. The clincher? Cliff Wright illustrated two UK versions of the Harry Potter books. Shallow reason, yes. But as I skimmed through the book, I realized that it has a lot of great information that I can use.

It's a secondhand book, so the price was good. I look forward to really read this book. It was published in 2008.

Marvel gives each NBA team a comic book cover

For the NBA season this year, Marvel and ESPN teams up to give each NBA team their own comic book style cover. Basketball fans will enjoy seeing their sports idols depicted as super heroes (which they are, I suppose, in a way), but what about the comic book fans who aren't that into basketball?

They still may want to take a look, as these covers --- a total of thirty for the two conferences (15 for the Eastern conference, 15 for the Western conference) --- were created by well known comic book artists including J. Scott Campbell, Olivier Coipel, Terry Dodson, Leinil Francis Yu, John Romita Sr., Kaare Andrews, and Marvel Editor-In-Chief, Joe Quesada.

I'm especially excited for two names: J. Scott Campbell, who made the awesome and sexy Fairy Tale Fantasies; and Leinil Francis Yu, a Filipino comic book artist who has been with Marvel for quite some time now.

It's interesting to look at the covers, and figuring out the story behind it. Some are similar to previous comic covers (like the one with LeBron mocking a 1967 Spiderman cover) or an artist's take on the teams they're illustrating.

Here's a few of covers. The rest can be found at the ESPN site. You can also look at the sketches gallery. All images belong to Marvel, NBA and their respective artists.