The new season has officially started for me. I’m now working on season one of the new season. I was helping out on a show doing layout last week and earlier this week. I actually find that it helps to switch between the two jobs. In one job I get to draw a bit tighter and have a bit more control over the scenes I’m working on. In the other job I find the drawings are more loose and less on model but there is a very satisfying feeling of creating the initial look the show will take on later.
In more exciting work related news, I was called in to the producer’s office Tuesday night and was asked if I would be interested in taking over the revisionist spot that had just recently been vacated. It seems a few people had brought my name up for the job. I was very glad to have been asked and so I accepted.
Next month they’re going to try me out for the spot. If things don’t work out, I’ll go back to doing story reel work. Otherwise, I’d have a new official position on the show. I’m very excited. It’s really tough to get a board position on this show. There are some really good board artists here that do an incredible job.
I after finishing up the last of the scenes on the show I was working on, I began helping out on another show. I’ll begin working on the first show of next season sometime next week.
FAMILY
Happy Easter! I’m so glad that Easter finally came. Lent is always a tough time to live through.
For Easter, we got together with the family at an Easter party at my aunt’s house. The kids had a great time, looking for eggs and eating candy.
I had a good time because there was some very yummy food.
He is risen!
MY WEB COMIC
I’m almost done so I’m posting up the first three pages and will continue to post the rest of it in the next three weeks. I hope you like it:
To be continued next week…
What have I learned from this so far? Quite a bit actually, but the biggest thing I’ve learned so far is that coloring a comic is really tedious and time consuming. It’s very doubtful that I’ll do another one in color any time soon. I’ll leave it in black and white.
VIDEOS/ART
These videos by Mike McDonnell on Warm Up Sketching are really helpful. I’m going to try putting the advise into practice when I go into figure drawing for now on. Check them out:
VIDEOS
Reading comics on the iPad? What’s that look like? Here’s a review of the Marvel Comic reader app for the iPad:
Now I just have to figure out how to put my comic up on the iPad.
BLOGS
You will notice that I now have a new page up on my blog called, “My Stories and Comics“. From now on, whenever I complete a comic, story, or drawings with a theme, I’m going to be creating a special page for those things so you can read them all in one sitting instead of having to search through the blog looking for all the parts.
I will be working on it to try to make it look nicer than what I have now. For now, it’s just functional. Take a look and let me know what you think.
VIDEO
Yet another funny review. This time it’s a video review of STAR WARS: ATTACK OF THE CLONES
Warning, the video is very funny but has some bad language:
If you like what you read, please consider signing up to my rss feed.
…and that’s IT. That’s all I wrote. There isn’t anymore. It took, off and on, about three years to do this much. Mostly because I was trying to redesign the comic and recompose the pages. As well as trying to adjust this first part of the story so that it really grabbed you. This only caused me to burn out on it and I ended up abandoning the comic in the end. Should I have? I really didn’t want to redraw 22 pages again after all that time.
Biggest problem I had with the comic? I took it waaaaay to seriously.
Below I have included the original ending to comic I had written. It’s actually a really bad ending, now that I look at it again. I’m VERY glad I changed it. The comic that followed that ending was actually going to begin with the three main characters sitting around a table, drinking tea as the Golem explained what was going on. Very dull with a lot of exposition. The new ending I ended up going with, in contrast, was going to lead the characters, in the next comic, right to the “meat” of the story and was going to push the character to make some difficult choices right off the bat. That was going to be far more interesting:
See what I mean? Really bad ending. It’s also very unclear if Angie is sick and has something wrong with her, which was NOT my intent.
Well, anyway, what do you think? Did you like it? Didn’t like it? Are you disappointed that there isn’t anymore? Was it not that good to begin with? Would you have payed money for it had I finished it?
I’m really curious. If you really liked it please tell me. If you didn’t like it, please tell me that too. It won’t hurt my feelings or anything. I’m MUCH more critical about this story than I think you will ever be. You may just confirm my suspicions by telling me what you didn’t like. If you DID like it, please tell me why as well. Especially since there are things I think are really working in the story. In any case, depending on the reaction, I may or may not continue the story. I mean, if no one likes it enough for me to continue, it’s not like I was going to anyway, but if suddenly, I get thousands of people wanting more…
For now, I’ve got tons of other ideas to attempt.
Next week, THE BLACK TERROR KID.
FAMILY
My Abuelita is not doing very well lately. I would appreciate any prayers you can send her way and our families way. Thanks.
WRITING
Because I’ve been trying to come up with a fun, SHORT, story or skit for my next project, I’ve been rereading my books on story theory lately. I’ve decided that I was going to try to structure whatever story I ended up telling “properly”, or at the very least, as well as I can.
Part of the reason for this is that I’m having trouble putting the idea I have together into something, ANYTHING, remotely entertaining. I have and idea and can’t seem to actually execute it so it’s kinda driving me nuts.
The first book I decided to reread was:
STORY: SUBSTANCE, STRUCTURE STYLE, AND THE PRINCIPLES OF SCREENWRITING by Robert Mckee.
This book actually helped out a lot. It’s a very popular book on the Three Act Structure Theory of writing. It’s good, even if you’re not writing a screenplay.
I’m avoiding the “Heroes Journey” Theory of story right now, mainly because I find it annoying at the moment. Nothing wrong with it or anything, it just reminds me of Joseph Campbell and I find him annoying right now so I kinda want to avoid the theory for that completely subjective reason.
The other book I re-familiarizing myself with is:
DRAMATICA: A NEW THEORY OF STORY by Melanie Anne Phillips & Chris Huntley.
I’ve never tried this theory out myself but it really makes a lot of sense to me. It’s a very deep and intense theory that puts forth the proposition that all stories are grand arguments about a specific subject, that must include all sides of a given argument in order to feel complete. Kinda like St. Thomas Aquina‘s Summa Theologica only in story form. I think it’s a very clever theory but overwhelmingly cumbersome. That said, it’s VERY helpful if you’re in the place I’m at right now where you’re not sure which way to go. It gives you enough structure from the get go so you can start building a workable story that will hopefully trigger the inspiration to get you what you want. It’s also a good theory to use to double check the integrity of a story you’ve written by checking if it’s well balanced.
It’s an article about Christianity in Science Fiction stories and it’s really great. It opened my eyes to a LOT of really interesting Science Fiction stories that have very positive Catholic elements that I didn’t really know where out there. I highly recommend reading the article.
ROLE PLAYING GAMES/VIDEO
In case you ever wondered what a game of DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS looked like as it’s being played, here’s a fun video of the writers of the animated show ROBOT CHICKEN, playing a game:
Came back on the show this week and it was as if I’d never left. I was handed 32 scenes to finish by the end of the week (yikes!) and I’m off and running. Time to earn my keep.
FAMILY
We had a baby shower this weekend. Lot’s of family and friends showed up. We received many helpful gifts. The shower itself was really nice and the food was fantastic.
I did my typical anti-social thing. I really don’t know why but I’m getting worse about hanging around people. When my brother and his wife Deborah showed up, I spent my time with them, but that was mainly because they came over and sat down where I was at (and also asked to play a game with me). After talking for an hour or so, I took out two board games that I had brought and played it. I’ll write about that another day. I enjoyed myself. They left early and I sat by myself thinking about stories and my next project. A few people came by, sat down and talked to me for a few minutes but it wasn’t long before I was alone again thinking.
Later, Angelita, one of my cousin’s daughters, asked me if I wanted to play the board game TROUBLE (it’s that, LUDO/SORRY type game with the “Pop-O-Matic Bubble” that rolls the die for you). There where four of us playing, my three year old daughter was one and my two year old son was another. My son lost interest quickly and Carolina (my cousin’s eldest daughter) took his place.
That game is awful. It’s such a bad game. We all thought so. You can’t leave the your “Home” base and start moving your pieces around the board unless roll a six. Which you have no control over and if you manage to do so, if someone lands on your piece, you get that piece sent “Home” again. It was such a bad game though, that it was actually fun. We enjoyed making fun of it as we played and didn’t take it seriously at all since it was so luck driven. I think, the best part about playing the game was that my daughter ended up winning. She trounced us all. She rolled so many sixes it was crazy.
Thanks you all for giving us such a good and memorable baby shower.
BOARD GAMES\VIDEO GAMES
I was listening to the Dice Tower Podcast Tuesday and I was made aware of a Carcassonne site that had all kinds of variant rules and printable tiles for the game. If you like Carcassonne and you want to try new and fun ways to play it, I highly recommend it:
The Art Center Blog is fast becoming one of my favorite art drawing blogs to read. There are a ton of great tips and drawing advice worth reading about there.
One of the article that I really enjoyed recently has been some videos they’ve put up on the merits of warm up sketching during figure drawing.
I highly recommend the article. To read it, CLICK HERE.
VIDEOS
So before I started back at work, I discovered and got addicted to watching yet another anime cartoon. This time it’s a series sequel to one of my favorite animes SUPER DIMENSION FORTRESS MACROSS (the first part of what was called ROBOTECH in the U.S. which I wrote about show a few weeks back). The sequel I’m now watching is called MACROSS FRONTIER. It aired in Japan in 2008 and has not yet seen a U.S. release.
When I became aware of this show, I thought I’d give it a look because I’ve been recently re-watching the original 1980s MACROSS. I wasn’t really expecting to like it much. Mostly because I haven’t really gotten into too many anime cartoons in years. Also, because the last two MACROSS shows I’d seen, didn’t really blow me away either. Namely, MACROSS 2 (which was pretty bad), MACROSS PLUS Vol. 1-4 (which looked fantastic and were fun to watch but the story didn’t blow me away) and MACROSS 7 (which was a sequel series to the original MACROSS, that was just plain dumb). This one though, knocked my socks off. It had enough call backs and archetypes from the original MACROSS show to make it feel familiar, but at the same time, they changed things enough so that it’s new. In fact, if you’re familiar with the original show, there is a type of inside joke fake out that they do all the way through the series where you think they’re writing the same story and then turn you’re expectations on their heads. It’s great.
Besides, I just can’t help watching cool robots fighting aliens. Especially when the robots transform from jets into robots. The effects on the robots and vehicles are mostly CG.
MACROSS is known for one of the female protagonists who ends up becoming a famous pop singer. This meant the show had a singing component in it that sometimes made it a very lite musical. This version follows the tradition only I actually like the music for once and don’t find it annoying.
I’m also a big sucker for love triangles in my anime (as you can see from my own comic above) and this one has that too.
This is a fun cartoon to watch if you’re a MACROSS fan like me. Best MACROSS since the original. I’m not sure if the show will have the same impact on someone who hasn’t seen the original version but you might enjoy it anyway. Give it a shot if you can find it online.
Well, it looks like I’m going back to work a week early, which is awesome. I’ve managed to NOT worry about money these last few weeks by avoiding spending any money (aside from bills) and NOT looking at my bank account. Still, I know I need to start earning, we didn’t have a cushion when I left work.
I WAS enjoying having the time to work on my comic though. It’s not like I can’t continue working on it once I’m back at work.
I also didn’t make it to figure drawing this week, to my great disappointment. Alesha was REALLY not feeling good and I needed to be home to take care of the kids while she tried to recover and rest. I had a good time with the kids though. I’m planning on going to figure drawing from now on, even when I’m back at work next week.
“Microcapitalism is a an economic system based on small property and small government, about keeping productive property – capital – in the hands of as many private citizens as possible.”
The idea of Microcapitalism is not exactly new. Nowak writes:
“Despite the integral nature of microcapitalism, it was not formalized as a socio-economic theory until the early twentieth century, when Hillaire Belloc and G.K. Chesterton began to promote the idea as “Distributism,” a counter to socialism and big-business capitalism that were unraveling the backbone of society. “
Something that seems very relevant to us today.
He’s planning on releasing the book for the kindle on April 15th but he wants to also raise the capital to publish it as a physical book. To this end he’s sent out a call of assistance by asking for sponsors and donor at the Microcapitalism page in KICKSTART.
If you’re interested please check out how you can help. For more information, there is a video at the KICKSTART site as well as a clearer explanation of the book in question.
I’ve recently come across an Anime about drawing “Do it yourself Comics” (DIY). It’s called Comic Party and I really enjoyed watching it. It’s about a guy who gets manipulated by his crazy friend into writing, creating, publishing and selling his own comic. It’s really funny and “educational”. It was originally a Manga. I thought the idea to make a comic or an animated cartoon focused on making comics was a great one. They did a fantastic job of making a very emotional story out of it.
If you ever get a chance to watch this anime, you ought to give it a shot.
Second week of my hiatus, three weeks to go. I must say, it’s going pretty fast. There’s a small chance that work will turn up from the studio but it’s not very high.
I went to the studio Tuesday night because we have figure drawing every Tuesday there. I hadn’t gone in years. I was talking to a friend at work about going. I wasn’t able to last week because I was taking care of Dante who was sick but now that he’s better I went. I’m glad I did. It was fun even though I was really rusty. I felt that I was really getting something out of it. Even though it was painful to be so bad at it. I’m hoping that the more I go the better I’ll get and the more I’ll learn.
BOARDGAMES
I haven’t written about a board game in a while. Mostly because, as much as I like them, I get to play them as much as I usually do, which is to say, just about never. That said, I have recently gotten a hold of a really cool game that kinda hits on a lot of things I like in a board game. Uncle Chestnut’s Table Gype:
It’s a little bit like Chinese Checkers and a little bit like chess without quite feeling like either one and the pieces are DICE. I read the rules but I still haven’t played it. The point of the game is to take your pieces and move them into the home row across from you. Pieces are not captured but you can jump over them. When a piece is jumped over, it must be re-rolled, resulting in a different face appearing on the die. Since each face moves a different way, this causes the game to constantly change. It’s definitely one of those rules that are so obvious and yet new. Familiar and yet original. It’s seems like a very cool, very family friendly game. Just enough thinking without it hurting your head. I played a few solo rounds and I was like, “Woah this is cool.”
As soon as I get to play a few games, I’m definitely going to go deeper into writing my thoughts on it. I just wanted to make you aware of it for now. Check it out. Uncle Chestnut’s Table Gype.
This comic idea started twelve years ago when I felt the itch to make my own comic. I didn’t really know what I wanted to do so I just started drawing. I drew a girl a boy and a little dog. I stared at them a while and started coming up with their relationship to each other. Little by little things began to change a bit, but I still didn’t know what the story was. I then just decided, to start writing dialogue. I wrote for a while but it didn’t go anywhere, so I started over and over and over. Eventually something started to form. Then I went back and started writing along the lines that started forming. I had hit something and it started to work for me. I went back to the beginning and plugged in what was working and the comic was born. It was titled: The Seven Impossible Tasks.
I meant this comic to be drawn simply. In my big head style. That way I would be able to get it done. I drew the pages rough so that later I would be able to put a sheet of paper over the roughs and start drawing things better. I just wanted to get the pages laid out first. Thing is, as I drew the roughs, I was also experimenting with the look of the characters. Since the pages where roughs, I didn’t feel the need for the characters to look consistent through out. I was trying to find the style I was going to use in the end.
After I finished the first 22 pages of story, I passed out copies of my roughs to friends and family to get their opinions about whether they thought it was a fun compelling read. Most of the feedback was positive. The only thing people said was that it needed an establishing shot at the beginning. Then, one day, I showed the pages to Richie Chavez (art Director of Dreamwork’s Prince of Egypt movie) . He took one look at the pages and without reading them told me the panel layout was boring. He thought they needed to be more dynamic. That I need to use the comic medium to it’s best advantage. This made me rethink all my pages. He was right. My mistake was to try to fix what I had already done. On hindsight I should have just finished the pages as they were and laid out out the next part of the story in a much better way.
The thing is, by the time Richie had given me his critique, I had already started established the character designs, the background designs and I had started finishing up the pages. Not only that, but around that time, I had started reading some books on writing. This had made me rethink some of the structure, or lack there of, of my story. I started having second thoughts as to how I ought to present the story. I rewrote the first to pages and compressed them into one. I rewrote the ending to be more compelling and I just generally thought about the comic’s story a lot. Little by little, the comic started to become a burden and it began to lose it’s fun.
There came a point, after reading a lot of books on story and story structure, that I contemplated rewriting it all from scratch. Part of the reason for this was that I didn’t really have a solid, locked down idea for the direction the story was going to go. I had the jist of where it was going to go, what the arch of the character’s would be but that was all. It also didn’t help that I was planning to write a long “epic” story. In the end, after a year (or maybe even two) of working on it, I just got burned out.
Looking back on it after all this time, I find that it wasn’t horrible. It could have been better, yes, but it’s readable. Some dialogue is a bit redundant but I think, if I had stuck to it, I might have been able to get better at writing and I might have been able to do something with this.
So here, for the first time ever, I present to you my failed attempt at my first comic. None of it has any finished art (except for two of the “deleted scenes”), all of it is rough and the character’s designs change from page to page. Oh, and the character Paul, is suppose to have a Spanish accent so the way things are spelled in his word balloons are weird. Just thought I’d give you a heads up.
Here are the first 6 pages of 21. Let me know hat you think. CLICK ON THE IMAGE TO ENLARGE:
Below are the “deleted scenes”. I’ve posted up the original first page, along with the cleaned up dialogue.
The page below is the final art version of the page above:
The page below is the original page 2 that I cut completely after drawing the new page one. I thought this page was bit redundant and it didn’t really move the story along.
The page below is a partially finished version of the page above:
As you can see in the page above, I still hadn’t made up my mind as to the proportions of the characters that I wanted to have.
Looking back, I’m pretty sure I’ve improved enough now to be able to do an overall better job if I was to try it again.
So the schedule changed and I’ve gone on hiatus a week early. It was a bit unexpected but it’s okay. I’m still off for the same amount of time. I managed to finish the scenes I was given in the last show I was at. I plan to go into the studio on Tuesday nights in order to go figure drawing. Unless of course, something comes up like it did this week. See below…
FAMILY
Dante came down with a terrible cold last weekend. It was bad enough so that he stayed home with me and didn’t go to daycare like we had planned on Monday. Since we are paying for daycare whether the kids go or not, we thought it would be best to have them continue to go. Besides, they learn a lot there and they have fun with the other kids. It will also give me a chance to work on my personal projects.
Dante was in terrible shape Monday. I felt so bad for him. He hardly eat. He slept most of the day, while I worked on my comic. He got very happy when “Sissa” (his name for his big sister) and Mommy came home. He ate the most that night at dinner.
On Tuesday, if anything, he seemed worse. I considered it MY fault. I don’t think he slept as much as he should have the day before, nor did he drink as many fluids as he should have. I remedied that immediately that day. He was up, maybe five hours the whole day and the rest he was in bed. He also didn’t go five minutes without me putting his orange juice filled sippy cup in his mouth while he was awake.
My efforts bore fruit. Wednesday he woke up in much better shape. He had a bit more energy and he didn’t have temperature, the way he had on the other two days. I’m thinking of keeping him home one more day so he can improve more. Maybe even just for the rest of the week, just to be safe.
ART
So I thought it would be fun if I was to go back in time and show you my history with drawing comics. Why? Is it because I was such a master artist from the get go? On the contrary, it’s because I was so average. A lot of the time people say, “You’re so talented”. This phrase while, often used as a compliment, actually under minds the years of hard work I’ve put into my craft. My view of talent is this:
“Talent is only good for making you want to continue doing a thing. It doesn’t make you good at it.”
What makes you good at it is doing it over and over and over. Practice and hard work make you better at something. I know of artists who were less “talented” then me who are now much better artists because they worked harder than I did at getting that way. Sometimes, “talent” is a draw back. If you rely on it too much, you might not improve as fast as you could.
One day, on the way home from school I got an idea for a comic strip. Unfortunately, I don’t remember how old I was when this happened. It also may have happened at night as I was going to sleep. I was either in 3rd, 4th or 5th grade at the time. This would make me about, 8, 9, or 10 years old. The strip I came up with was this one:
This was the strip that started it all. I didn’t stop after that. I kept all my strips from that time in my life in a scrapbook so I have all of my early strips. It’s interesting to see the development of the jokes and the clarity of the art as well as the development of the designs and the draftsmanship. I will take the time to note now, that while I drew these comics, I also did a lot of non-comic related drawings. The comics where just one of the many things I drew growing up. I bring this up so that you don’t think I only got better at drawing from drawing comics.
80 comics (I counted them) and about two to three years later, when I was 12 or 13ish, my style had gone through nice jump:
Like many artists, I was under the impression that style was everything. I know now that style gets you noticed, but good draftsmanship comes first. It’s like being a writer who knows his grammar, and writing principles. He can communicate his ideas much better than a writer who has a unique writing style and good ideas but can’t spell, can’t write clear sentences, or good paragraphs. How is anyone going to understand what he writes?
My parents gave me ink and a crow quill that year, so I began to experiment with my first “grown up” art supplies. Somehow the tools didn’t magically make my stuff look any more professional:
My comic was originally called, Johny and his Gang but then I realized that the Bazooka Joe comics where called Bazooka Joe and his Gang. Not only that, but Bazooka Joe wore a hat and so did my character Johny. I thought I was going to make a living off of my comic (I was in Junior High and delusional) so I changed the name of the comic to Johnny B. Goode.
I drew a dozen or so of the Johnny comics after that and kinda retired the character. Still in Junior High (about 13 years old) I started some new comic ideas. This was one of them:
The drawing above was colored in marker. I had found my dad’s markers and started using them to color my drawings. The comic didn’t go anywhere. I think I only did two comics strips with both those characters. I drew a lot during this time but I don’t think I drew very many comics.
As a freshman in High school (about 14 years old), I got the itch to do more strips, which I thankfully dated. I took the sidekick character from the strip above, because I liked writing him, and made him the lead of my new comic strip:
And so my Paul comics began. This would be the character I would draw comic strips of for the rest of High school (sorta). I got rid of the markers (which I couldn’t control) and replaced them with colored pencils.
I still used a quill to ink the drawings. I did a LOT of experimenting too.
By my sophomore year (about 16 years old), I had graduated to using a brush to ink my strips.
I drew about thirty to forty strips with my character Paul in total. Somewhere along the way I just kinda ran out of juice. I was trying to develop my drawing in other ways. I had a good art class that opened my eyes to other things. Not only that but once I hit senior year, I was studying animation and that took all my creative energy. Below is one of the last comics I drew in my senior year (I was 18). It was a remake of a strip I drew when I was a 15 years old, which is why it has two dates:
I began work on The Simpsons the year I drew the strip above.
Since my life had changed so much, I didn’t really have time for creating comics. My skills were not up to the level I needed them to be in order to keep my job at the studio and I had to get my skills up fast (for more on THAT story, I wrote about it on another post HERE).
Five years later, in 1998 I attempted to draw my own comic for the first time in a long time. This time instead of just a comic strip I was going to attempt a comic book story. By this time I had a few Simpson Comics under my belt and I just wanted to try my hand at doing my own. I drew a 21 page rough of my story, fully intending to do another pass to flesh out the character designs and the drawings. I just wanted to run it by some people to see if it was “working”. I decided to use my character Paul from my comic strips only redesigned and all “grown up”:
I didn’t finish it. For the full story at to why, as well as a chance to read what I DID do, wait till next week. I’ll put up the rough pages of that comic, with more legible digital lettering.
The year is now 2010. Twelve years after my last attempt, here’s another preview of the comic I’m working on right now. Coming to this blog soon in full color:
The irony is that The Black Terror Kid looks a lot like that original version of Paul I did when I was 13. I’ve come a long way and yet I’m still drawing the same stuff in the same way. I don’t know whether I should laugh or cry.
VIDEOS
Two weeks ago, I about how much the Macross version of Robotech influence me. This last couple of days I’ve actually been watching Robotech the New Generation on Hulu. The main reason is that I never really saw it when it first came out. I watched the first episode and I was hooked. It really holds up after all these years. It has some really bad dialogue and narration but nothing so bad that it ruins the drama of the series. How can you not like a show where the character ride around on motorcycle that becomes Iron Man style mecha armor. That’s just darn COOL! It also feels very much like a western at times. Highly recommend it.
BLOG
Just became aware of this Catholic Blog written by Catholic convert Andy Beeler. It’s a great read, I highly recommend it:
My first week back on layout was a bit rocky. It took me a while to get used to doing it again. By Friday I was really grooving though. I was going through scenes at the speed I’m meant to go. I’ve been able to continue holding up that pace so far. I glad.
ART
I’ve been showing off a bit of my extra curricular Simpsons work for the last couple of weeks. This will be the last of it for now.
This is some work I did for a Lisa Simpson Book. Similar to the Krusty one I wrote about last week. One of the running gags of the book was a Lisa comic done in the style of the Rex Morgan M.D. comic strip. It featured Lisa and Milhouse all grown up solving medical problems. It was fun to do because it was so melodramatic. I had worked on the show “Lisa’s Wedding” which takes place in the future and Lisa is grown up through most of the show. I remembered what Lisa looked like in that show and I drew her in the same way, with slightly stylized wavy hair:
It’s funny to note, now that I see all strips together, that almost all the strips end with a close up of a character or a dramatic up shot. Sometimes, even the exact SAME dramatic upshot as a different strip.
You will also note that, in the roughs I posted, I didn’t really put in any perspective grids like I usually do. Looking through the roughs I DIDN’T post, I see that they are missing in those as well. I “eye balled” the perspective on all of these strips. Granted, I didn’t really put in all that many backgrounds either. These strips allowed me to experiment with doing “short hand” backgrounds.
Above is a rough that I didn’t post the clean up for…for some reason.
Above here’s the rough of the strip below.
It was fun to have Milhouse totally start crying just for the melodrama of it all. I don’t think that was in the script.
Above is the rough of the strip below. The note from the art director was not to have Milhouse come in running on panel 3.
I didn’t post all the strips. Just a few.
Yet again, I didn’t receive a copy of this book so I don’t know what the final version of these strips look like. I’ll need to track this books down so I can check it out:
What do you think?
MY WEEK
I turned 35 last Saturday. The kids, Alesha took me out to eat sushi. Something I really enjoy doing. We then went back home and my parents came over to visit later in the evening. The best part of the day, (besides spending time with my family) was getting time to work on my comic.
Sunday we were invited to my in-law’s house. My mother in law made enchiladas for lunch. It was yummy. Later we drove to my parent’s house were my mother there was a steak dinner waiting for me along with my brother, Deborah his wife, my cousin and her family. We got there late, which was embarrassing since they were there for me. Still, it I had a good time.
It’s odd, even on my birthday, if I’m not playing a board game, I still feel awkward about being around a lot of people. I think it’s gotten worse since I started working my projects.
MY WEB COMIC
Speaking of projects…I’m very close to finishing the inking process of my web comic. I’m very surprised at how much fun I’m having working on this thing. It also has me very frustrated. Mostly because I’m not as happy about the way it’s turning out as I’d like to be. The reason for this, is my fault. I wanted to draw the comic without making it to be too much work. Usually, as you’ve seen from my comic book making process post, I draw one page three times before it’s finalized. If I was to ink the page, it would be four times. Well, in order to speed things up, I decided that I was only going to draw each page twice. I was going to draw the final penciled page and then ink it. No rough plot, no tighter rough, no clean up page. I was going straight to a tight rough and then to ink. This has actually caused a lot of problems because my abilities are NOT such that I can just get everything right the first time. I really needed to take one more step before I got to the inking. Still, I’m learning, so I’ll know what I’ll do different next time.
I’ve also rediscovered that I have lousy lettering, so I’m going to have digital lettering through out the comic and I think even the sound effects I’ve put into the pages will need to be reworked digitally. It’s okay though, practice makes perfect. The comic is still perfectly readable and I’m still planning on finishing it. It’s going to be in color and since I’ve never colored a comic before, I don’t know how long that’s going to take me. Hopefully, not very much time.
And while I’m on the subject of projects…
GHETTOMATION
I’m slowly making headway into the writing and creating of my next Pulp serial ghettomated project. I think I’ve finally nailed down what it’s all going to be about, who the main characters are and what their motivation is. Now, I just have to come up with a quick story to put them in so I can really begin. That, and the fact that I have to work out the look and style of the cartoon.
I’ll write about the process when it really starts getting into gear.
Finished with the last show I’m going to be doing Story Reel work on. I have now officially been moved to doing layout. I was so rusty I didn’t really know where to start and how to do it. Fortunately I started remembering it all and things started moving faster as I went. Now I just have to be able to get the scenes out on time.
ART
So before I had created my blog, but after I had done the Trip to Italy sketch diary, hired to draw some pages for a small The Krusty Book. The best thing about one of the assignments I had gotten was that I was asked to draw a comic strip of Krusty the Clown only small called Li’l Krusty (ala. Peanuts or Little Lulu). I couldn’t believe it. I was going to get paid to draw Krusty cute. I jumped on the opportunity to draw Krusty in the cute style I like to use. Which is the style I use on my blog and in my Italy trip journal.
I don’t have a copy of the finished pages, just the roughs. So here are my rough pages of the strips I did. Oh, and I didn’t actually write the gags for these cartoons. I just drew them.
Lot’s of tracing back drawings in these.
Had fun drawing does big eyes.
In the final pass, they had me round out the eyes more when Krusty was in profile and they had me take off the clown shoes.
Chibi Sideshow Bobby was fun.
There came a point with the Sideshow Bobby strips, where the set up no longer needed new artwork so I just photo copied the first few panels and drew the punchline as new art.
In the final art, they also had me shrink Krusty’s ears.
As you can see below, the last panel on the strip above, was changed a bit to end with the monkey more centered:
I never received an actual copy of the book so I don’t even know how the comics turned out. I DID look in Amazon and found that their preview of the book actually featured a strip.
VIDEOS
Growing up, in order to get my brother and I from spending all our time in front of the TV, my parents only allowed us one hour of TV a day. This meant that I had to make the difficult decision of choosing a show to watch. I wasn’t allowed to watch G.I. Joe because, even though my mom never watched it, she thought it was too violent. So I watched another show, Robotech. A show that appealed to me much more anyway and ironically, was far more violent than G.I. Joe ever was.
In G.I. Joe the Joes and Cobra used to shoot at each other with laser guns and never actually hit each other, EVER. In Robotech the protagonists where at war with an alien race and quite a few of them died horrible on screen deaths. One of the main characters even bled to death after a battle. It was a very powerful very dramatic show. It influenced me quite a bit. As a kid, it actually forced me to deal with death and loss. It also showed by example, the difference between infatuation and sacrificial romantic love. I grew up with and matured with Rick Hunter/Hikaru. It was one of the four Japanese shows I watched in my early years that ruined me to the watered down preachy cartoon shows of the 80s. Shows I found annoying because I felt talked down to.
Hulu has recently released Super Dimension Fortress Macross (a.k.a. Robotech). Macross is the original version of Robotech as it was shown on Japanese TV. The version on Hulu is a new dubbed version of the show. It’s great to see the show this way. The new dub is pretty good and actually makes it less cheesy than the original dub.
I highly recommend this show. Though I remember that the art quality starts getting worse as the show goes along. I’m not sure why.
PODCASTS
The Cartoonistas have a podcast now. Cartoonista Radio. Find out the inside scoop on all the Cartoonistas.
I’ve started inking my comic finally. I really screwed up page 4 the other day. I had to do a patch job on some panels and on a character. I’ve also decided that I’m going to use computer fonts since my writing and sound effects came out looking really awful.I’m learning a lot and enjoying myself though. I’ve learned that I’m NOT good at drawing with a brush. It’s much better to have a drawing better worked out before I start inking it. Maybe someday I’ll be able to, but not yet. I’ve also learned that I should be watching anything new on a monitor or on DVD while I work. I get too distracted and I don’t pay enough attention to my inking and it all comes out looking lousy.
Once I’m done inking the pages I’ll scan them all in, re-letter them all and begin coloring it.
Overtime week this week. We’re getting President’s day off so we have to make up the hours.
This is good news for me since I just found out when I’m going on hiatus. I’ll be out for four weeks. The good news is that I’ve got a start date as well, and it’s possible that they may have work during that time that I can help out on. Still, not looking forward to it. The bills are hitting us pretty bad.
ART
Last week I wrote about putting up some Simpsons comics pages. Well here they are. This was one of my favorite projects I got to work on. It was a Simpsons Bible stories comic. At first I thought I might refuse it but since it was just Bart’s crazy versions of Bible stories and since I was doing the art, I went out of my way to make sure through some of the ways I drew things, that the audience knew it was all a big lie.
I had a blast doing this. I did a lot of research for this. In fact, I actually got help with some of the research from the art director of Dreamworks‘ Prince of Egypt, Richie Chavez. He loaned me the books he used when researching the look of Prince of Egypt. It helped a TON.
I’ll give a little commentary of the pages as I go. The comic was 22 pages long and was broken up into three stories. The pages I put up last week were from the Abraham story. The ones below are obviously the story of Noah:
The look of the jungles in the page above was inspired by Disney’s Tarzan. The costumes the characters are wearing was tricky to find reference for. I mean, what did people wear before the flood? I ended up basing their costumes off of what the people of Ur are thought to have worn. God makes an appearance in both the Abraham story and in this one. Strange thing is, I forgot that the Simpsons had established God as being a guy with a white robe and a white beard. You’d think I’d remember right? But I didn’t, so my version of God in this comic is represented by “lines of light”. Panel 4 in the page above is an example. Noah Flanders is speaking to God in that panel.
I like my version better.
In the page above, I specifically picked a saw design that was older than the modern ones we have today.
My original design for the Ark was much more square looking and far less traditional. Doing research, I found some sites that speculated on what the Ark might actually have looked like and how it must have worked in order to do what it needed to do. The art director had me change it to a more traditional design. I think, in the end, it was a good call on his part. The more angular and rectangular Ark I had originally designed was a bit ugly.
I haven’t drawn rain for a comic before. Not sure I like how it came out now. I had fun drawing the griffins. Too bad they’re only in one panel.
The page above was a pain but fun as well. Very epic.
Lot’s of animals to draw for this one. It really put me to task.
Oops! There goes Maude off the Ark. This is the second time I’ve had to kill Maude Flanders. The first time was on the show. Yeah, I drew the scenes where Maude dies. In the second panel above, I show my love of Japanese comics by doing my version of Manga speed lines.
Well, there you go. This story was originally published on Simpsons comics #62. It’s now been officially republished in Simpsons Comics Barn Burner if you want to read the full story and see not only what everyone is saying but how the story ends.
What do you think?
How much research do you put in your work?
VIDEOS
I found this process video of how Gabe Swarr creates his comic strip fascinating so I thought I’d share.
What’s you opinion of this video?
ART
Participated in some live art with my fellow Cartoonistas this weekend. We were at Geeks comics participating in what was called Salabration. It was the owner Sal’s birthday. The Salabration consisted of us artists drawing something near or ON display at the window to try get people to come in to the store. It was a bit nerve racking to be on display like that. When I went up for my turn, I tried to focus on the drawing as hard as I could. Talk about pressure. Everyone was telling me that there were a lot of people watching me draw but I sure as heck didn’t want to look.
If you want to see pictures of what it all looked like and what my fellow Cartoonistas thought of it all, go to:
