I mentioned the Sinestro Corps War recently. Holy crap, this is cool:

While searching for places to post my Green Lantern stuff, I was pointed to the Crit Forum at ComicBloc, where I stumbled up on this excellent illustration from Dan Schoening and Mike Jungbluth.

DZ: Your work on the characters starts off as simple pencil work, correct? What application do you polish the “statues” up in?

DS: They all start off as rough pencil sketches. Depending on how comfortable I am with it at that stage I may either clean it up with a 2b pencil or scan it. The next step is to import it to Flash. There I use the line tool to “outline” the designs. After I’ve outlined the character, I’ll start coloring it up. After the colors are laid down, I’ll erase all the lines and I’m left with the finished piece. The idea behind this coloring process is to use color to define shape and volume, instead of black (or colored) lines. After the character is colored, I’ll toss it in Photoshop and add any slight shadows or special f/x. - From an interview with Dan at The ComicBloc.

I think his use of Flash as an illustration tool is an efficient way to achieve the shape-based art. I still think Flash has the most intuitive drawing tools of any vector-based app.

Looking at his art (and he’s posted a lot of it out there, lucky for us,) you really have to ask yourself, “do I really need all those black lines complicating things?”