Sketch-dump

Summer has arrived quite suddenly, along with crazy temperatures, which makes me feel lazy. However, I'm doing my best to keep up with my warm-up regimen.

Environment warm-ups - 30-40 mins each:




Other stuff:



New character design for the Masahiro-verse - not final yet, but it's got the basic idea.

Bonus fanart-warmup of Mike Mignola and Christopher Golden's Joe Golem and the Drowning City:

I haven't read all of it yet (in fact, I think I'm still on chapter three), but I simply ADORE the setting; the dystopian, post-apocalyptic, steampunk-y flooded city full of rickety rope-bridges, water-taxis, rust and grit and scary dudes in gasmasks. <3. It's like they sat down and tailored a book entirely for me.

Sketchdump+stuff

Okay, time for a general update on pretty much everything.


Fathoms of the Sky III, excerpt from page 13.

Fathoms III is progressing quite well - 22/24 pages are pencilled, and I'll start inking it soon. I've also plotted out the big picture-stuff on what happens in the rest of the comic. Some of it is still very rough (like, "Gale mopes. Talassa gets lost."), but I've got the final chapter+epilogue pretty much clear in my head. I've done some calculations, and arrived at the conclusion that it'll be 200 pages or less in total.

I've also started thinking about how I'll publish the thing; right now, it's published in pieces by the chapter, but it's really one of those comics that needs to be read as a whole. So I'm thinking of collecting it in one bigger volume once I've published a few more chapters; that is, I'll publish perhaps up to chapter 4 or 5 separately, and then take a break until I've drawn the whole thing and release it in a collected volume.

Of course, this means that people will have to pay at least in part for what they've already bought (the first couple of chapters, that is), but I'm intending to go back and fix things, so that the first half won't just be a re-release of stuff people have already bought. I know there's a mistake in the inking of Gale's gloves in part one, for example, that'll be corrected for the final version. I'm also intending to have some extra material in the volume - concept sketches from me, fanart from friends of mine if they've got the time, etc., etc.

... I'll also be doing smaller print-runs of the separate chapters from now on; 100 copies of each is a bit too much.

Okay, on to the pictures (which is probably why you're here, after all):



New character for the frowny-samurai-story - his name is Tsuda, I think.


Character design for the lead in a short horror comic I want to draw some day - it's full of spooky Edwardian houses and murderous cats.


Costume re-design for Munya, from Golem-verse. I'll be doing minor re-designs of Orme and Auga too; they're being appropriated by Fathoms-verse, which is kind of good for them, because before, I had the characters and a story-theme, but no world to set it in. Now I've got characters, theme and universe; all I need is a solid plot.


Photo-reffed environment practise; really fast, but it felt good to practise the stuff I know I'm not brilliant at.




Mini-sketches that I will be selling att UppCon 2012 for cheap (like, $1 each-cheap), or handing out free to anyone who buys Fathoms I+II as a package. 

New studio-space!

Yup, I've got myself a new studio space!

... Which sounds all fancy, but it's really just my brother's old room with a new coat of paint and a nicer floor. >.> But it's a whole room just for me and my paints and my big, space-demanding projects, which feels really nice, I can tell you.




As you can see, I'm still in the process of moving in - the paints are going in the drawers, I'll probably find some way to fill up the righthand bookshelf, etc., - and it's not quite finished yet (we need to paint the door white - but we're probably going to keep the Black & White-poster, because nostalgia, or something), but it's getting there.

It's only the bigger things that are going in the studio - my acrylic paints and canvases and easels, my Sculpy clay, my seriously sidetracked Make Your Own Mahjong Set-project, and so on. I'm still keeping my lighttable - and thus my comic-projects - in my own room, along with my markers and most of my watercolour-stuff (I tend to tape my watercolour pictures up on my lighttable when I paint) - but there's suddenly a whole lot more space in my bookshelves and most importantly, on the desk around my computer. No more accidentally elbowing sculptures off the desk!

Fathoms+sketchdump

Okay, time for another update!

I've been working on Fathoms III lately, and am making some rather impressive progress (impressive, that is, because I didn't really intend to make so much of it): 12 out of 24 pages are pencilled!

Here's a piece of page two:

I feel as though I'm filling up each panel better in this chapter compared to the previous ones; yes, there are panels where there's just the head/shoulders of a characters and a speech-bubble, but most of them have more stuff going on in the background and a more solid sense of place.

Speaking of character-only panels... Here's one of my favourite panels I've ever drawn of Gale:

It just... seems to capture his whole look somehow.


Here's a few warm-ups from the last few days: