Oh the Horror!

To be so close, and yet so far from finishing this picture. Eagle eyed artist out there on the web, if there's something I should fix, now's the time to let me know. :)

Till tomorrow. Everyone have a good night and don't let Uncle Sam get you.

What's for Dinner

I'm exhausted. The piles of dead are proving to be a tough obstacle. How much detail is too much? What's the best brush for the job? Are the sketch lines more of a hindrance than a help. Etc. etc. I thought I'd have painting down to a science after all these years, but every picture seems like starting over. ...annoying. :p

Anyway, time to quit for the night. I'm sure things will come together once I have some time away from the drawing table. Time to clear the head.

More tomorrow.

Domo-kun, Where do the Months go?

Time flies when you're working on a comic. I look up from my desk and two months have passed. Yeesh! I guess drawing and coloring comics have relativistic effects. Time slows down for the artist, but continues at its normal pace for the rest of the world. If I could only apply this time distortion to my bills. Paying rent once every 3 months would solve many of my problems.

The comic job I'm referring to above, was a couple of chapters for Tokyopop's Domo manga . Since the company posted quite a few of the pages online, I'll just repost their link here. Please note that the first page in the set-- what I'm guessing is the cover-- was done by another artist working on the project.
http://www.tokyopop.com/Domomanga/tp_article/2759413.html

Lindsay Cibos drew the pages and I provided coloring and effects work. Having never done a color comic before, the Domo manga was a good opportunity to pick up skills along with a paycheck. I'm happy with how everything turned out. I hope that the pages look as good in print as they did in our homemade color proofs.

Looking over the blog, I see that I never posted the final art to the Box Jelly fish image. Another victim of comic relativity. Here's the finished image.


After completing the Domo project, it was back to work on portfolio pieces. I hope to land some work doing either editorial illustration or something else within publishing... Book covers would be nice.

Here's the string of four images I'll be working on over the next couple of weeks. The first one-- about people fetishizing technology-- is finished and colored. I'll post on the rest as they're completed. For now though, here's the sketches to look over.

Box Jellyfish - WIP 4

Final sketch.

Black and white lighting test.

Color concept.

Color concept without lines. (Look at that jellyfish glow.)

Box Jellyfish - Sketch3 WIP

Another day with the fish. Progress is slow but steady. How many days has it been? Just two? Seems like a week.

More tomorrow.

Box Jellyfish - Sketch2 WIP

Somewhere, deep down I hoped I could have drawn this image in one pass. It wasn't meant to be.

I have to color a comic page for a new Tokyopop project Lindsay and I are working on. This will be interesting. I've never done a color comic.

Once that's done I'll print the sketch back out and start on a second pass.

All told, I'm pretty happy with how far this picture has come in a day. I wonder how it'll look flipped? I'll probably flip it and then print it for the second pass.

Gotta keep it real. Gotta pass the flip test.

Box Jellyfish - Sketch WIP

Based on a conversation Lindsay and I had one night after watching a show about Box Jellyfish on Animal Planet. According to the show (not fact checking it right now) Box Jellies cause more human fatalities than any other animal (aside from humans, I'm assuming).

I think the show scared me a bit, which is funny because I don't live in the Box Jelly's home waters of Australia. I'm never going to have to deal with these guys. It's not like they'll float out of the ocean on an air current and be waiting from me at my second story apartment... right?