Baby Steps

The top panel took 2 hours. I'll be working on this on my deathbed.

From the Graphic Novel Front

Some process shots from a little bit of The Pearl Wars (working title!) that I was able to squeeze out last week.







Some bug snuggling, right before things start going wrong. :)

And some collages I made on cards.



The inside of this one is a pop-up and is really cool, but my camera cord is currently AWOL so...
edit: found it!

Foxworld...

Whew. That's a little better.

Beetles

Getting there.

The Graphic Novel

So, I am back to work (art work that is) after broad-ranging shenanigans. We have a fairly finished script for Chapter 1, I guess you could call it, and I have been doing storyboarding and even some 'final' style pages ( "" because there are still a lot of kinks to be worked out).
For instance: Page 1

Page 4. I really like this, but it seems unfinished...

...so I inked it in a little more, which I think looks pretty good in general...

...but NOT how I want this book to look. I've definitely been envisioning something clean and foreign-looking, and inked this way it looks so generic to me. grrrr So, a lot more logisticking and drawing and redrawing to figure stuff out.

Graphic Novel: More

Some more sketches and working drawings. Am working on getting sets of nice drawings for each character, but also dong some quick brushy things to figure out stuff works (esp. the problematic anatomy of two-headed things) and get an idea of movement, etc.


frog sketches'n'notes


frog priest


aerial battle


swan princes


two-headed fox sketches


leopard saint

Some Thoughts on Comics

Here are some sketches and workups for a story I have been building slowly over the past few months. It started with this drawing of a firefox from last June

and draws on Asian (mostly) mythology, Watership Down by Richard Adams, Miyazaki's film Princess Mononoke, computer games like Starcraft and DungeonSeige, the Alien trilogy, Chinese landscape paintings and the art of Katsushika Hokusai, battle-epics, and the poem My True Love Has My Heart by the Elizabethan poet Philip Sydney.


St. Trueseam


St. Trueseam


Human form sporting same ornamentation and tattoos


sketches: swallows, rabbit saint, little fox, insect queen with a diadem of stolen pearls, black swan princes, some crappy cats and a little rabbit


fox saint with gems and medals


aeromouse captain


acheivement chart

The main challenge apart from working on the storyline, which will coalesce in time, is omcing up with a drawing style that I can maintain consistently for a long time. I love the line quality of the foxes above, but have concerns about weight once combined with value (ie. in a crowded scene areas of value would be valuable in order to distinguish levels of the plicture plane, etc. - but will such fine lines hold up against areas of darkness, and might too many fine lines become tangled anyway? (But, see this Hokusai print for potential refutation...)
[I know, what a terrible picture - why even bother including it?]
Anyway - did some sketching of frames, which I kind of hated until I worked it up in Photoshop a little:


blank bug hive

Bug hive colored
Now it looks ok, but upon re-examining the work of Hokusai and Chinese landscape painters, am reminded that one of my initial inspirations is the supreme clarity of line evinced by Hokusai, usually with no shading at all - must play to strengths and follow drinking gourd! No doubt recent aquisition of new drawings tools will help. :)

Image Bank

Kitsune


Alien Queen


Watership Down


Okkotonushi from Mononoke Hime


Starcraft


Dungeon Siege inventory panel


Clear Spring by Hong Ren


Hokusai

Comix Research

So in thinking about doing a comic/graphic novel/what-have-you, I've been buying and reading a lot of comics. A selection:


Scott Pilgrim, by Bryan Lee O'Malley. This one is really fun. Compelling story about Canadian indie rockers who are also ninjas. Not the kind of art that I draw, but I like it. No hint of self-imposed-homework-feelings while reading (and rereading :) it.


Skim by Mariko and Jillian Tamaki. Storyline, B- ish; artwork, A. Very different feel than Scott Pilgrim and most comics for that matter. Lots of brush work and fluid use of space.


Best American Comics 2008. This is a fun (and cheap!) hardcover selection. Some are great, some are pretty, some are boring. Overall a really useful survey of what is going on, I thought.

AND, In The Studio
Sanded down some old half-done rabbit paintings that looked AWFUL. Like the result. Painted a lot of things red the other day in preparation for gilding, but had no camera on hand. Am moving out of studio soon (in like 3 days :o ) so I need to finish up with stuff over there.

sanded panels

Foxes

A fox I drew twice over the weekend. 0.3 mechanical pencil.



Foxrankchart



Firefox.