10-9 - Out Of My Depth - Complete And In The Can!

Heya kids~ School's out for the summer and this blog kinda fell by the wayside with it. Here's hoping to fix that with a little peace offering of the final letters to the 10-9 one shot 'Out Of My Depth'.

While I finished it and it was a hell of a trip I think this marks the last time I do digital for a long time. :3 Stay tuned for more~

10-9 Oneshot Now In TECHNICOLOR~

Hot off the press and distributed through the intertubes~ This oneshot is one step closer to being in the can! Monday is lettering day and I already know I have a couple panels that are going to need some editing magic.

But at least the coloring is done! :D My theory behind was the story would start out with muted tones save the red of Ahimsa's hair, then reach it's climax into high saturation and then end with muted tones again. Page four with the monochrome effect in those panels I used specifically for psychological/cinematic effect but still I'm a bit unsure if it'll fly since it's four panels of it. I like it. But we'll see how the critique goes. :D

The kitten is still The Best Thing Ever. XD She's a very curious baby!

Enjoy. :3

Feeding The Fire

I'm so happy I finally got some time to sit down and work on my Firebreather piece for the Quarter long Temple Challenge! Considering I must have thumbnailed it back in oh? Early March I think I kinda looked at my scribbles all 'What was this squiggle again? D:' I had to do a few tweaks, nail down some bits in the face construction. From the start I had planned to do this digitally since I can turn it out quickly and be satisfied with the result. Luckly for doing those 10-9 pages in taking what I learned from those and funneled it down into these MAN am I pleased. :D However there's the teeniest of tangents waiting to happen between Duncan's thigh and his BFF's knuckle. MUST FIX. >E I love that tree like crazy. @_@ I fiddled a bit to make a crunchy brush for the leaves and it TOTALLY looks dry brushed. That? Is awesome. :D

Enjoy. :3

Out Of My Depth: A 10-9 Oneshot

I can't believe I pretty much penciled all these babies in two days flat after struggling with it for WEEKS. I actually went backwards with it. Starting with Page Five and the final panel and working my way up on all the pages. :3 I feel it kept the style over all FAR more consistent. And glory be it was done 100% digital. Once I accepted my cartoony inclinations and focused on being speedy I'm super pleased with the results. :D In the end I found a completely new way of doing eyes and my own certain iconography for noses. The fact that I treat the mouths like rubber works much better in this look then my feeble attempt at being super realistic.

And yes. Ahimsa totally talks with his hips. For seriously. *dies*

The kitten is the best part in the history of ever. The End.

The lettering won't happen until the 26th, so for now I hope the story's clear enough. :3

Enjoy. :3

Triple A Bonanza!

I realized I hadn't stuck any Trials of Triple A up here in a long time. And since I know quite a few out there that forget to grab the Connector from week to week I give you the whole enchilada to date. :D The last strip actually hits stands this Friday but when has anyone been against a sneak peek? :3 A Hint: It's actually a three part story in the works~

Irony out of doing this babies all quarter from switching up ways I do them from digital, to hand drawn, to inking with nibs and brush, to technical pens looking for just the right line quality... In the end hand drawn on Copic Multiliners are the way to go. It's almost like coming full circle since that's how they started. Oh irony. :D

Enjoy. :3

The Sun King

Take Two on my Temple submission for this week. Nolan I suggested I draw something Authority flavored and my brain went three places instantly: Apollo, Midnighter, or Jack Hawksmoor. Only because I was determined to get some better sense of anatomy in and Middy and Jack are both wearing too many clothes at any given time. :/

At the cumulative advice/kicks in the head this week from Shawn and Nolan which lead me to raid the school library for every Bridgeman and Loomis book on the shelf, as well as let go of these hard ideals that I need to draw super naturalistic and beat myself up every time when it doesn't look right.

Personally I will confess male torsos at a certain angle have always been a weak point for me, I thought I'd give it a go again but I'm fairly certain I'm missing a muscle group or two in there. Just gotta keep trying! :D

Enjoy. :3

Failure To Communicate

Second Page of the 10-9 Oneshot 'Out Of My Depth'. Trying out some different things and making my way! :D Noel Sickles' inking style has been a BIG inspiration for me for this project and while this page doesn't look like it has a direct influence I'm still working on getting similar marks. Done with a Kolinsky brush to carve out my blacks and a Nikko School Nib which is crazy stiff and can easily scratch the paper I'm begining to get some flex out of it. :3 Also more and more I'm really loving on the Bombay ink I've been using. Dare I say I might like it more than the Holbien. :O

There's actually three errors on this page that I'll need to edit. Likewise beef up that lining of the balloons. :3

Enjoy. :3

The Slave That Became A Gladiator

The Temple challenge this week was to draw a character from a comic we're currently reading. A staffer of mine on the Connector learned of my fondness for a certain terribly lame Liefield creation and loaned me the comics where he first appeared. So yes. I tried to draw Shatterstar. I tried to make him look somewhat cool only to think... nope... nope... there's no way ANYONE can salvage ol' Opie the Hun. I just instead concentrated on making him awfully purty. XD

Enjoy. :3

Growing Up

Next story beat for Materials and Techniques. This time rendered completely in dry brush. While I'm iffy on how Iris himself came out over all I think this is a FAR CRY better than what I had been stumbling around in the dark doing. I used the same brush for every single mark, using the quality of the mark describe the surfaces and textures of the environment. Even if in some places it almost looks like your own monitor is blurry. *laughs*

I hope it's clear this time what's being depicted. :3 Enjoy.

One Tin Soldier

Finally the first page to Out Of My Depth is OUT OF THE GATE. After all of my fussing with Digital versus Traditional the only thing that WAS Digital in the end was the page sketch. I tried to ink this baby three different ways and finally settled on this one with a quite Noel Sickles but still me flavor. I love me some Sickles something fierce. I'm so deserate to get my hands on the new compilation book of his work.

Now I just need to color this brat of a page. And the four pages following. D: Editor's Day here I come! >E

A Dame To Kill For

An exercise in dry brush. Can I just say I've NEVER tried dry brush before? I'm highly impressed at myself and I'm trying not to come off as an arrogant jerk on the subject. D: I dunno... ever get that 'magic feeling' when you KNOW you've done a damn fine job? :3

Here's hoping it goes over well in the crit tomorrow. :D

Wish me luck! :D

Learn To Grow

Presenting the first three panels for my Materials and Techniques Class based (Loosely I may add) around a prose novel of mine in the works called 'Grow'. The concept of Grow in 25 words or less is one boy's coming of age from a meek prude to world changing revolutionist. And his name is Iris.

Yes. XD

If the crazy vegitation hasn't given it away Grow is based in a nature type setting and everyone is a literal and a metaphorical representation of a flower. It's a weird little thing I do. :3

As for the art here:

Panel 1 at the top is a study done in Copic Multiliners. I discovered I love Copics a little too much. About ten hours of work went into that baby where I pretended I was a wannabe Berni Wrightson and.... kinda pulled it off.

Panel 2 was done with a G Pen nib and Dr. Martin's Bombay India Ink. I took what I learned from the OMG overload of Panel 1 and tried to pair it down in Panel 2. This is also a reattempt at from what I handed in last week and even if Shawn didn't tell me to redo the old one yet I thought I'd beat him to it. Also a reason for the Bombay ink is I happened to find I had some sitting around from at LEAST two years ago and I collect bottles of ink like people collect teacups y'know? I mentioned it to Roy today that I had some-- TWO bottles in fact! And he positively gushed at how awesome that stuff is so I thought I'd give it a go. :D It did not dissappoint! *O*

Panel 3 was done with a Kolinsky brush and more Bombay. I am seriously dissapointed in this one because ONCE I got my brush trained enough it decided it wasn't going to do all the things I learned to do with it anymore. D: Shawn has a really slick ink style that I really like. Annnnnnnnnnnnd obviously that didn't happen here. D: Though.... I kinda do like the composition. I think looking at the hardcopy in front of me I see the gallon of whiteout I spilled on this thing to fix it and it.... kinda scanned pretty nice. :o I'm impressed at the superpowers of my scanner. :o

Enjoy. :3

Letters From The Front!

More progress on my Editor's Day/Comp Color Final the 10-9 short 'Out Of My Depth'.... Irony is I never realized how somewhat autobiographical such a title would become with this thing. @_@ I seriously feel almost out of my depth with pushing new things.

Up at the top check out the VAST difference between the Ahimsa on Bristol and the Ahimsa done in straight Photoshop. Welcome to my madness. @_@ A good friend actually nailed my problem between the two mediums on the head: The tools. A stylus is made to go any number of directions with a flick of the wrist. A pen and brush can only go one way and you pull your arm. I keep treating traditional tools like they're meant for a digital media when they don't do that. EUREKA. I hope this is the 'switch' I needed to flip in my brain. @_@

Below is the sketch of Page 1 which as giving me pure caniptions forever. Once I figured out what I needed to do and employed the Work Smarter Not Harder attitude from Dianna and Brent I realized that many of the shots on this page called for the same angle, or the same composition. So TAH-DAH. Cut and paste time and just redraw the proper parts! I hope I can have this baby at final digital pencil tomorrow. >E

Oh and pretend there are pinetrees in that first panel. I had actually painted them in and deleted the layer because I didn't need them at the time. XD

Give It Up For The Apocalipstix!

Colored to demonstrate first the proper method to use, then emotional content, and last the passage of time. I experimented a bit with the 'Crunchy Brush' thing Nolan told us about but used it extremely sparingly. Even had to track down Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome screencaps to make swatches. Now all I can think of was how awesome Tina Turner was in chainmail. Oh my childhood I miss you. T_T

Enjoy. :3

How Crazy Is This?!

Context: For Editor's Day here in ATL and in Savannah I'm doing a five page flashback story to 10-9 of Ahimsa's days as a fresh faced private before he became the royal badass captain of his own task force with emotional constipation.


Futher Context: It's also my final project to Computer Coloring.


NO PRESSURE.


Considering this pretty much is the quater I have to do things three times over before getting it right and I have 20 days to get this baby done give or take a day or two it's time to kick it into high gear.


As you can see the top was a study I spit out today that was completely digital the bottom being three panels I attempted to draw and ink by hand. Isn't the style deviation rediculous? @_@ It's just something I do completely naturally. Put a stylus in my hand and I rock out, put a pencil in my hand and I'm like a five year old with crayolas. It even befuddled Nolan a bit when I showed him the side by side comparison.


Unless I'm mimicing a simple style you can pretty much kiss anything uber complicated goodbye when I'm using traditional media. It's been explained to me that my hand 'gets shy' on paper and the second I screw up that's the end of it, however when I work digital it's only a matter of deleting the layer and going again. Likewise the difference is time. Traditionally easily takes me four times as long to do anything, Digitally on the other hand is a fraction of that. The speed between the two is rediculous.

Obviously I'm going to need to get advice on how to make the Uber Pretty on my paper and not be shy about it.


Is it considered somewhat creepy if I mention how awesomely hot Ahimsa came out in the digital study? The poor lamb and his shorn noggin. XD Rock that uniform Private!