What the....?

I'm not sure what it all means. Just random stuff but I really wanted to test this new Rendr sketchbook with my inks. I'm liking it. The thicker paper holds up against those thick Sharpies and I miss the brighter shade of paper that you don't get with the Moleskines.

Calendar Girls

Happy New Year! I hope everyone had some good holidays. It always goes quick for me, especially that time from Halloween to New Years Day, and it is tough to get any artwork in with all the busy work with cleaning for company and shopping for relatives and friends.

I have some aggressive art goals for 2013. I'm looking to publish a couple comic books, one including the ISHI storyline, which I gave a sample of last month. That is really just a sampler zine that is part of a larger story along with some other Northern California historical themes I hope to get to. 

But between all of that sequential work, I wanted to get back to doing more sketching. I have a sketchbook that I set aside for months that I finally did some damage in. The goal of this sketchbook is to study more artists in the industry that I like and copy their works to learn from. I feel I really haven't done enough of that over the years.

 

So I printed out a bunch of drawings I liked from some of my favorite artists in Terry Dodson, Steve Rude, Mark Schultz, and Adam Hughes and started sketching. Other that the opening image at the very top, all of these were sketched at a small BASA gathering at the end of December.

I didn't want to limit it to copying other artwork either so I had some photographs to study from. All of those drawings are below.

While there are a few male figures in the bunch here, I noticed most of them being women. Being the end of the calendar year and the start of a new one, I'm calling these my calendar girls.

The first three months of a new year tend to be the most productive for me so I was anxious to get back to my art once the holidays were in the rear window. But, as luck would have it, I rang in the new year getting sick with a cold and have been nursing it for a week and a half. But the image at the very top is the start of yet another sketchbook and the first drawing of the year as I try out this new RENDR sketchbook.

And so, 2013 begins! A year of Arting it up!!

Ishi: The Sampler Zine

Ishi Sampler

Progress is being made on the ISHI comic. I still need to draw one page and digitally manip two panels and the cover could use some help but the other 9 out of 12 pages were ready for color. Illustrator is NOT the way to color comics and I'll be switching to Photoshop for the professional book in the Spring but this is for the Illustrator class and just a zine. Due Monday night! Here is a sample page.

Ishi: Early Work

After last October's Alternative Press Expo, I wanted to start my next project and have another book ready for the conventions next spring. I had several ideas in mind but nothing that would fit into a one-shot format. Flipping through a San Francisco History book, I came across the story of ISHI, one of the last "wild" indians found one hundred years ago.

And so I am off and running with it. The script is done and I've been drawing and inking for the past week or two. It is a slow process and normally I'd have plenty of time but I also want to use this project for my Digital Illustration class.

For the class, I need a 12 page zine ready in about a week from now. Full color and using the tools of Illustrator, which will be interesting since I prefer to color in Photoshop (and I think that is the industry standard too).

At the pace I am going, there is no way I will finish. But since my pages are so detailed, and some of that detail gets lost when I reduce it to the zine size, my friend Melina suggested that I break up the pages and use the panels to make my zine. For example, rather than one 11x17 page of original art = 1 page in the comic, I can turn one page with multiple panels into three pages.

I like Melina's idea so I am treating this zine as a sampler to give people a taste of the story while I save the full story for my own printed comic for Spring 2013.