Yet another project

Because you know, I didn't have enough of them already.



A couple of days ago, I was mentally ambushed by a project that I've had on the backburner for years. Way, way, way back, I read a poem, of which a single, misquoted line has been rattling around in my brain ever since - kind of like a pebble in a tin can, if the tin can was also filled with all the other stuff I have seen, watched, read and accidentally encountered in my life. That line was begging to be the base of a comic of the short story kind, but I simply didn't have the time, or enough inspiration or any semblance of an actual plot.

... It's not like I've got all that much more time now, but at least I've got an idea of what I want it to look like now, so I guess that means I ought to make time for it.

The poem is People Like Us, by Robert Bly. It's got a beautifully quiet atmosphere, with some really nice imagery, and it's got the sort of feel to it that makes me want to translate it into a comic:

  There are more like us. All over the world
    There are confused people, who can’t remember
    The name of their dog when they wake up, and
         people
    Who love God but can’t remember where

    He was when they went to sleep. It’s
    All right. The world cleanses itself this way.
    A wrong number occurs to you in the middle
    Of the night, you dial it, it rings just in time

    To save the house. And the second-story man
    Gets the wrong address, where the insomniac lives,
    And he’s lonely , and they talk, and the thief
    Goes back to college. Even in graduate school,

    You can wander into the wrong classroom,
    And hear great poems lovingly spoken
    By the wrong professor. And you find your soul
    And greatness has a defender, and even in death
         you’re safe

So I want to tell the story of the insomniac and the thief (whom I've turned into a girl, because), while keeping the atmosphere of the rest of the poem intact without necessarily using that exact imagery. 


I want it to be black, white and grey (possibly screen tone) with one spot colour - I'm thinking orange-red. I want it to be sort of sparse-looking, with both a solid setting and lots of negative space used for mood and atmosphere.


Thus far, all I really have is that colour-theme, the layout of the first page, the mood and maybe an odd panel here or there, but I'm on my way. I'm using my daily warm-ups to explore the idea, so that it doesn't actually steal all the time I'm spending on other projects.


Speaking of other projects - one of the ones currently on the backburner/being worked out through warm-ups, is about the life of fairytale ladies post-fairytale and all grown up. Like the Red Ridinghood:

Sketchdump XVII

Collection of warmups and sketches and stuff. Let's start things off with a healthy dose of Shirtless Russian Mobster:



This is what Ygritte from A Song of Ice and Fire looks like in my head - all messy, wild red hair and the kind of determination you can bend horseshoes around.


Zebraspider. Because.

UppCon-sketches:

Dinosaur-shoes

My friend Linus drew this picture a while back, of a really neat pair of shoes. They had dinosaurs on them.



I demanded he paint them IMMEDIATELY, but alas, he didn't have the time. I did, though. In spades. And my other friend Alek wanted a pair, too. So, the shoes are now dinosaurs.

Progress-shots - mostly of Linus' shoes, to avoid repetition(shots of the finished product down at the bottom of the post):


I bought two pairs of white canvas shoes, one each for Alek and Linus. Took off the laces while painting, but kept the cardboard-thing in the toes to make sure they stayed the proper shape.


Linus wanted his to be red, so I base-coated them in yellow acrylic to cover up all the white spots. 


... I then went over the yellow with red fabric paint; a thick coat over toes and heels, but drybrushing it over the sides of the shoe so that the yellow still shows through a bit.

Alek's shoes, which were base-coated in a lighter blue-green fabric paint, and then painted over with a mix of dark blue mixed out with white, to take the edge off the extreme saturation.



Some close-up shots of the basic lines: sketched out with coloured pencils, painted in acrylics; Naples Yellow for the eyes, regular black for the lines. And it's already starting to look kind of neat, but it's not quite there yet.


Added yellow acrylic highlights, and some shadows with the red fabric paint, to bring out the lines. Looks a lot better now!

And here they are - the finished dinosaur-shoes!

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: