Previews For You

 

NSFW Illustration

What the hell.
Something I did for kicks recently.
I hope you like it.

Tablet FTW

Recently I purchased a new tablet because I heard about a nice little app called Procreate.

Unfortunately I had to purchase an iPad 4 because it was only available in iOS.

You see, I would have much rather gotten an android tablet, such as the Nexus 10, if only because I've already invested in quite a few Android apps.  I also like that there is quite a bit more freedom in Android.

The iPad does have a really good contrast ratio though and that makes it good for this sort of thing. Though not nearly as good as a decently calibrated monitor.

At first I was worried that I wouldn't make much use of it, but fortunately, I now think it was one of the best purchases I've made in a long time.


Because now I can draw anywhere, and draw the way I want to!

Here are some quick sketches done to get a sense of the whole thing.


I did use some other apps as well.  I find that I prefer roughing things out in Brushes or Sketchbook Mobile. So I have been using those apps a lot too.

I Got Ahead of Myself

Looks like I am not going to have the first 25 pages finished as quickly as I expected to.  Things should change in the next week or two though.

1) My son starts junior kindergarten next week - so that frees up daytime hours on Thursday and Friday.

2) Maybe my daughter will start going to daycare during that time on those same days - thereby freeing up more daytime hours.

3) The above should make me less off a sleep starved and sleep obsessed person who actually does something with his time in the evenings when his kids are staying with him instead of falling immobile onto a couch.

4) I am getting a better sense of the visual direction of the book - and it has made me come up with some interesting ideas for the story having these times when I can't but can work on the book.

Basically, half my time is split taking care of my two toddlers, which is the most exhausting/rewarding/stressful/empowering/difficult/wonderful thing I have ever done!

Anyways, 6 pages are 95% complete.  Just trying to decide if I should post those for now.

Hatching a Grey Plan

So... What have I learned while making this comic?

Well I learned that I needed to set up my comic, in such a way that it would be easy and enjoyable to read.  I spent probably too much time looking for a plugin that would allow me to do that here on Blogger.  Unfortunately there isn't such a thing. At least I didn't search long and hard enough to find out if there was, and besides it looks like Wordpress is the choice for web comic publishing.

I considered setting up a Wordpress comic site using the plugin found at webcomic, but there were problems presented here that I didn't want to deal with any longer.  Primarily, creating a website and paying someone to host it, which in my opinion is a waste of money in this day and age and the free options available.  I wanted a free solution at whatever cost (go figure, and there are costs), and wanted to do it using Blogger, but soon realized that wasn't going to work out.  The images that make up your comic need to be housed somewhere, and then each page needs its own separate html link, or some kind of code that keeps track of the images to post the right one when you click the next button, or the back button, etc.

What to do?

I kept searching, I wasn't about to start dealing with html coding again.  Luckily, I stumbled pretty quickly on ComicFury.

Hallelujah!

I was worried that there would be some things that I would need to agree to that would make using a free site service like theirs unappealing.  Fortunately, so far that doesn't seem to be the case.  And, currently, I think anyone interested in creating a web comic should consider them.  They give you the free hosting, and only ask that you place their personal advertisement on your webcomic, which you don't even have to agree to do. But...  Why wouldn't you help the people helping you?

You are free to advertise there whatever you want on your pages. Obviously within acceptable limits.

I decided to use them almost instantly, and therefore knew that I needed to get my first 25 pages completed to have it up there pretty soon.  And, so I got to work. I needed a cover to place there, so viewers have something to see in the meantime, and created this after whittling down an idea into something that I could use in many ways.

I have always had the intention to print this comic sometime in the near future, and so I had a definite look that I was striving for.


However after spending some time working with a system to speed up hatching - by basically placing a hatched image into the file as a layer, and then masking it to add and remove it from portions of the page - I discovered that it looked kind of poor when shown at a decent web size with a width of 800px.  The hatching just created too many artifacts at that resolution, and these distortions were just too glaring for me. I then fooled around with line width some more and line spacing to see if it cleared it up.  But there seemed to be always problems.  I didn't want to make concessions on the hatching, which would look fine in print, but it looked like I would have to.

I could make each comic page larger, but I think it would ultimately ruin the user experience by forcing the reader to pan around too much.  If this comic were not intended for print, I would use a layout that works better with keyboard navigation, but the intent is to print later...  Anyways...

Later a decent compromise presented itself.  I decided to make the masks themselves different shades of grey and this looks great on the web.  Heck, it even looks good on paper I bet.  What this means is that I have something that looks great on a monitor, and I am sure it either looks just as good on paper and if not I can use the layers to place the hatching when I go to print.  But I am now toying with the idea of making each shade of grey a different color, because it looks great now and has opened some new possibilities.  We'll just have to see.

Here is a little taste of what I partly did to end up with the almost completed page 2 of my graphic novel 

Who Needs the Moon.

Pencilling, inking and painting in MyPaint.

Refining the image.  Once I get this process down, I hope to make better time on later pages.

GIMP for the bridge between MyPaint and Inkscape.  Please fix the GIMP.  2.8 Crashes so often on my rig.

Inkscape to prepare the final layouts and text.

MOR EGG comic - What happened?

I did the art for this book, and worked on it for an incredibly dirt cheap price. Dirt! Cheap!

MOR book 1 EGG

It was a good experience, in that it taught me about how a book needed to flow, and ways that I could plan ahead in my own personal work.

I haven't heard much about it, from the writers over the years. So I assume that it hasn't faired all that well.

I've posted some examples of the pages I illustrated without any word bubbles.

One BIG thing I learned from this, was that there is a huge amount of work that goes into pencilling, inking and colouring a book. If you go down this route on your own, you had better be prepared for a lot of time spent in front of whatever it is you'll be working with. Be it monitor, paper or... er... playdoh?

Overall, I was happy with the way my work turned out. I really tried to put in to practice many things that Scott McCloud discussed in his book Understanding Comics.

Some Old Work Back Online

The following work below was once shown online at my old site.  I abandoned the old school method of paying for a url, when I realized I was making little to no money and the blog sites were a good alternative.

I felt I needed to post some of the better work that used to be shown there.

Experiments in Design and Composition

So I am fooling around with design and composition. At the very least I am trying to wrap my head around it better.

For some reason I seem to be up against a brick wall with the Lampy short, and so I've been working on other things as an escape from the circles in my thought process.

I just can't seem to make up my mind on where to take it. I could just go ahead and create a silly action short that consists of a fight between Lampy and Bubba, but I don't feel that I would be very faithful to the world that I am trying to create for them, and I doubt anyone would even take notice.

There is a deeper experience to Lampy that I would like to bring out. It's not immediately apparent on the surface, but I think that it is worth striving towards.

As for the werewolf graphic novel(OH! hoity toity), I think these little exercises will help get me into a frame of mind over time to help me tackle that story better too.

These following two images are poster doodles. I was just blocking out strokes on the computer - hoping something interesting would pop out that I could pounce on and take somewhere.

This is what came about of that. I didn't bother with any kind of standardized poster size. Maybe these look more like old book covers. At least that is what I am starting to see while posting this.

These two "thumbnails", or at least what started out as thumbnails, were me working through the FPS ideas that have been floating around in my head for some time.

Again not really trying to do accomplish anything except rip something creative out of my head.

I stuck with gray scale in these images because I didn't really want the hassle of trying to figure out colours. To be honest I think my eye for colour can be somewhat lacking, so this was really an exercise in composition, dramatic tone and narrative.

These were all done using the super awesome, free and open source painting program called MyPaint.

Who Needs Posters

The comic book isn't dead.

However, my ideas concerning the story and anti-hero have changed.

The more I've thought about the protagonist, the more I've altered him in my mind, and I'm starting to get a clearer picture of who he is and what would make him tick.

If the kids let me, I plan on sketching things out even more.

 So... I worked on some poster ideas to get things going a few days back. I wanted something graphic and reminiscent of an older era of design.

Parental Leave

This is my best work.

While I'm not busy with them (which is usually never), I'm trying to squeeze in some time to draw something, anything really. Although I haven't found the time to do much at all. Usually, I'm exhausted and not quite feeling all that creative in the evenings when I am a little more free. During the day however my brain does wander from time to time and the stories in my mind get better and better. Here are some 30 minute sketches that I threw together in MyPaint, with maybe a little post here and there in the GIMP. The main focus was just colour and light.

Another Image Dump

This is an image dump of comic related artwork that I've created for personal projects over the last little while.