Yesterday I got my Pentel Pocket Brush Pen in the mail. Having never used one before I was super excited to finally have a chance to try it out. Have to say it was pretty awesome. I have a shaky hand and with a brush my line tends to waiver quite a bit but the pen calmed that down a good amount. After fooling around in my sketch book I attacked some of these figures I had sketched up for a comic I'll be working on in the near future.
I did it. Once again I have survived the beach. As always my family took a trip down to Duck, NC with additional family and family friends for the week. I went along with them for five days along with my girlfriend who absolutely loves the beach. The people that know me know I can't stand the beach. It's sunny and sandy and sticky and sweaty and salty and hot. I am also terrified of sharks.
For the most part I think it's a good start. I was able to control the brush for the most part and it was certainly quicker than the micron process despite how slowly I had to move to maintain control. I think it's lacking a real style but I imagine that will come as I get more comfortable with the brush. There were also minor details I struggled with and some shaky lines where I got nervous (his nose). The brush is also pretty old and I should really upgrade the ink but it's silly to think that materials would really improve my skills all that much. Once I get more practice and more comfortable then I can upgrade, after all there's no point in buying a Ferrari if you can't drive stick.
I colored it in quickly just because. While coloring it in I struggled to find a reason why I chose Crack as my onomatopoeia, especially in the place I originally put it. I moved it to somewhere that made at least a little bit of sense but whatever. Some good practice but I definitely need some more. When I can find time from Matt's Monsters that is.
And here are the pencils for the second page. As you can see here I'm a little more careful. I do a more detailed sketch/design with a blue col-erase pencil, then make my final pencil marks with a 4H pencil. These usually stick through the inking process but sometimes I'll go back and change things before or during inking. 
Finished penciling page 4 tonight, one more to go, then to finish inking and coloring. I'm getting more and more excited. Page 4 might be my favorite so far. Stay tuned. 
When I first started working on the project, I had thought about using watercolors and inks, but because I haven't had enough practice with it, and a tight deadline, I decided against throwing a lot of time into something that may not work. Below is one of the tests I did in watercolor and ink on the demon character.
Here's the digitally colored version. The final comic will probably have some traditional elements textured in so it has a more natural look but for the purpose of a study I was happy with this.
Below is a sketch of the first page in the five page story. This was part of the series of sketches (along with the character designs and script) that I turned into Jason Minor (the project leader) for consideration. While I see the value in planning and sketching out scenes, I must admit I'm not a big fan of doing really elaborate sketches (and yes, for me this is an elaborate planning sketch). I like to use sketching to place my characters and do a bit of composition work but I usually just do it with a stick figure and a few lines. Working as a part of someone else's project however, it was important to have legible and cohesive sketches so I took them a bit further than I normally would. In my next post i'll put up the final sketches I did for myself so you can see how primitive they are (they're in ball point pen so they don't scan very well but whatever).
After reviewing the email packet I sent, Jason has some great ideas which I happily took. After doing the aforementioned ball point penned planning I got to work on the actually pages. Below is the final inked first page awaiting coloring. So far I've penciled in 3.3/5 pages and inked the one. It's not unsual for me to ink in a page or two even before I finished penciling. Probably not the best practice but I can't help myself. enjoy and please check out the project on Facebook and if you follow for continuous updates and other artist's work.
Did some flat colors on it to give an idea how it would look finalized. Colors really aren't my strong suit but I learn a little more every time.
Step 2: Put the black lines on a separate layer and color in the lines on various different layers.
Step 3: Select the black lines using channel select and color in the lines on separate layers:
Step 4: Over lay watercolor wash textures I've made and scanned in on various layers
Step 5: Shade in the flats on all the various flat layers.
and that's how I color in each of my spreads and why it takes so so long. Each page ends up having somewhere around 30-60 layers. fun fun fun. I'm about half way done on the inner pages and will have to complete the cover and some spot illustrations after. just keep swimming.
Who doesn't like justice? One of my favorite moments in the Order of the Phoenix is when Ron, Hermoine, and Harry are in the Infirmary making the horse hoove (how do you spell that?) noises to freak out the mis-fortunate Dolores Umbridge. 
Luke Skywalker drawing I colored in quickly. Might work on it a little more, might not. I'm getting really into quill tip pens as I work on my comic so I'm doing some work with those. And of course, still working away at coloring in my Children's Book.
To ease my mind I drew this, it's not really related to this blog post's story line so skip ahead and come back later.
After thinking about it intensely for a few days I turned to two of the artists I admire most and looked at their work. Bill Watterson of Calvin and Hobbes, and more importantly for the purposes of my comic Warwick John Cadwell's Jungle which you can see on his flicker here: http://drawn.ca/archive/warwick-cadwells-100-panel-gungle/ . Right now Mr. Cadwell is my favorite artist on the planet and it's because of the way he manages density, shape, detail, figures, focal points, white space, space in general; his characters poses; the mood of his scenses, ah just everything I think he's golden. So anyway while looking at his work I saw that mine was seriously lacking a sense of depth, space, and shape and that my characters poses were hardly engaging (that I picked up from both WC and Watterson), so anyway I took a shot at what I wanted to be my opening page to my short comic. I will have to do it again because this was drawn in my sketchbook and not on comic book paper. (I took a picture of this instead of scanning it in so it's a little blurry. When I scan it it'll have to be in pieces so I figured I'd finish it first before I tackle that headache):
I was very very happy with this. You can see I borrowed alot of elements that Cadwell uses in his working and tried as much as possible to blend it in with my own work. As I continue to practice I hope they mesh more. I am currently in the process of adding line weight. I cannot wait to color it in.
The poses are kind of boring but this is an iguanadon character I came up with for Charlie Ironpaw.
More sketches for Charlie Ironpaw. I've been writing the first book and these two are bad guys who appear pretty early.
Here it is in color. I've been doing a lot of sketches for Ironpaw recently, I'll try and put some more up later this week. For now, back to work on Matt's Monsters.
I'm still working steadily away on my children's book. It's coming along slowly, very slowly, but surely. I did this to break up the monotony of working on the kid's book. It's Charlie Marsh taking a hit with style from a larger dino. Hopefully i'll find a little more time to color this.
I'm thinking about starting a webcomic for Woomba as a way for me to blow off artistic steam. This is the header i came up with. Not completely finished yet and not totally satisfied with version of the logo coloring.
So lately i've been pretty busy working on a children's book and haven't had a whole lot of time for additional things. I kinda promised myself I wouldn't be distracted by extra little side projects and such but lately that's been failing so hopefully these will get it out of my system and I can go back to focusing on the book.
